Trump team about to blow another deadline for reuniting families

The Trump administration seems utterly incapable of reuniting all the families they’ve ripped apart at the border this year.

With a court-ordered deadline of Thursday, the government still has nearly 1,000 families to reunite.

“We already know as many as 914 parents won’t be reunited with their children by Thursday,” CNN reports. “In some cases, the parents can’t be found or have serious criminal records. In other cases, they’ve already been deported without their children. A small number still haven’t been linked to children, let alone tracked down.”

CNN suggests the numbers break down this way: 463 parents have left the country without their children; 260 parents require further investigation, according to the government; 217 have already been released from federal custody and are in the U.S. and are now difficult to locate; and 191 parents either declined to be unified or have criminal records.

This is the second deadline to reunite families this month that the Trump administration missed, after implementing Trump’s “zero tolerance” border policy earlier this year. The new ploy meant any undocumented person trying to cross the border was arrested, including people seeking asylum in the U.S., which is not against the law.

Because “zero tolerance” meant sending migrants into federal detention, where children cannot be held, the Trump administration took children away from their parents — nearly 3,000 in total — and held them in separate facilities, often hundreds of miles away.

At a hearing this week, U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw, who issued the Thursday deadline to reunite all eligible families, admonished the government for not thinking through what “zero tolerance” would mean in real terms.

“It’s the reality of a policy that was in place that resulted in large numbers of families being separated without forethought as to reunification and keeping track of people,” she said.

Meanwhile, confusion continues to be the hallmark of the entire, anti-family process sanctioned by Trump.

“In a court filing on Wednesday, the ACLU laid out 27 examples of parents who unknowingly signed away their rights to reunify with their children,” NBC News reported.

The administration’s heartless treatment prompted Elizabeth Holtzman to resign her position this week as adviser to the Department of Homeland Security.

The former Congresswoman from New York wrote in her resignation letter that forced family separations represent “child kidnapping, plain and simple,” and described Trump’s racist immigration policies as “ultimately self-destructive.”

For now, hundreds of families await reunification.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.