It’s been 6 days. Trump still won’t say how many kids remain separated.
The Trump administration obviously has no plan to reunite children with their parents after ripping them apart.
As Americans prepare to celebrate Independence Day, the Trump administration has fallen silent for nearly a week about the thousands of children it ripped away from their parents — and time is running out to obey a court order to reunite families.
On Wednesday of last week, Judge Dana Sabraw ordered that all detained children must be reunited with their parents within 30 days, and children younger than five years old within two weeks.
But for six days now, the Trump administration has refused to provide updates on how many of the children it confiscated have been returned to their parents.
As recently as Monday morning, CNN correspondent Dianne Gallagher reported that despite constant requests for comment on the confiscated kids, officials haven’t offered any new information since before the order.
“I wish I could tell you how the government is going in there, what the process is … but we don’t have any updated numbers,” Gallagher said. “We’ve literally not received any update on how many children are in the custody of HHS [Department of Health and Human Services], who were separated under that policy, since Tuesday.”
That Tuesday update, Gallagher said, was that HHS currently has custody of 2,047 migrant children. As the Washington Post reported, that number revealed that only six children had been released since the previous week.
Gallagher added that the chaos seems to be intentional on the Trump administration’s part, and that a Department of Justice attorney had testified as much in front of a judge.
“This sort of scrambling process for parents who were in custody, looking for their kids across the country, is how the process was designed to be,” Gallagher reported.
Trump signed a sham executive order almost two weeks ago in an attempt to quash the bad headlines — but his media stunt failed miserably.
Trump’s order did nothing to end the “zero tolerance” policy that caused the children to be ripped from their families in the first place. Instead, he sought to allow the government to imprison families together indefinitely.
Gallagher’s reporting shows that the suffering of these children and parents has continued — and so have protests across the country.
Trump and his administration can run, but they can’t hide from the people forever.
Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.
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