US sees limitations on reuniting migrant families
Source: Associated Press
By ELLIOT SPAGAT
51 minutes ago
SAN DIEGO (AP) The Trump administration says it would require extraordinary effort to reunite what may be thousands of migrant children who have been separated from their parents and, even if it could, the children would likely be emotionally harmed.
Jonathan White, who leads the Health and Human Services Departments efforts to reunite migrant children with their parents, said removing children from sponsor homes to rejoin their parents would present grave child welfare concerns. He said the government should focus on reuniting children currently in its custody, not those who have already been released to sponsors.
It would destabilize the permanency of their existing home environment, and could be traumatic to the children, White said in a court filing late Friday, citing his years of experience working with unaccompanied migrant children and background as a social worker.
The administration outlined its position in a court-ordered response to a government watchdog report last month that found many more migrant children may have been split from their families than previously reported. The government didnt adequately track separated children before a federal judge in San Diego ruled in June that children in its custody be reunited with their parents.
-snip-
Read more: https://apnews.com/48210bbf243e423ea151ff04e4878ce6
SHRED
(28,136 posts)Honeycombe8
(37,648 posts)pazzyanne
(6,560 posts)but that should not stop us from indicting Stephen Miller, Jeff Sessions, and anyone else involved in the planning and implementation of this debacle. This is the true emergency on our southern border! The tRump administration broke this and they need to fix it - yesterday!
DeminPennswoods
(15,292 posts)in all this. Every day when Dems are asked about another pending shutdown or progress by the conference committee or any question about immigration, they should say in the loudest and strongest language possible that Miller needs to resign or be fired.
Start the drum beat and keep it up. Miller is a genuine nazi and certainly should not be drawing a taxpayer funded salary and working in the WH.
pazzyanne
(6,560 posts)I've been beating the anti Miller and anti Bannon from the gitgo. Two dangerous men who are pushing government reform changes that do not reflect America, in my opinion.
Phoenix61
(17,023 posts)I will never, ever understand it. I was a child abuse investigator and thought I had seen it all but this!?!? A truly special kind of evil.
Igel
(35,383 posts)You cross the board illegally with a small child.
You can be detained with the child in something like a cell for only so long. Then either you must be released, moved to family housing, or the child put with a sponsor.
They didn't want to release them--the numbers for who shows up for court dates are confused as advocates for one side or the other play loose and free with definitions and categories, so I'm agnostic on that point.
There wasn't family housing.
So they put the kids with sponsors.
The kids put with sponsors fall into several groups. (It's always best to remember this can be made very simplistic, and usually is).
One group of kids is composed of minors who came across with an adult that has some problem. Perhaps prior conviction, perhaps there's DNA match or sufficient evidence to say that the kid's actually properly associated with the adult.
Another group of kids are those where the parent or guardian honestly would rather the kid stay in the US rather than return home when the parent's deported. These usually are sponsored by relatives who reside in the US, not just random strangers.
The third group is the group that we assume all the kids fall into: They're removed from the parents and placed with strangers and the parents want them back.
Given that the first group's existence was denied, at least by my 'wake up in the morning' news source until the reporter accidentally cited the wrong numbers and indicated that there were hundreds of adults in this category, I think that group exists. The third group, from what I've heard reported, consists of at least a handful of kids whose stories are reported over and over. I've seen reporting in which the second group exists, because when the parents call (with the call recorded for broadcast) the kid's with an uncle or aunt, and while the parent would like to be reunited with the child that reunification happens either in the US or not at all.
Phoenix61
(17,023 posts)I'm sure you don't mean to sound like you're ok with children being scattered to the wind but...there is no excuse for what happened and is continuing to happen. That they can track a car better than they can track a child is nothing less than obscene.
cab67
(3,010 posts)the answer is to not establish a zero-tolerance policy before making sure the resources (family housing) exist to support it.
This has been the problem with "git tuff on crahm" policies since the 1980's. We git tuff. But only so many people can fit in a cell. So we want to build another prison.
But there's a problem - no one wants a prison near them. Property values nosedive. Local commercial districts become even more overrun by pawn shops, bail bondsmen, and payday loan sharks than they already were. Some of the people who visit prisoners are themselves involved in crime. Some even decide to move to the community. Local taxes thus go up to support the additional police and first responders needed to deal with the situation.
So new prisons aren't built, and we have to release prisoners, some of whom probably shouldn't be on the streets. These commit atrocities, prompting calls to git tuff.
That we might instead want to reexamine mandatory minimum sentences (especially for nonviolent offenders), imprisoning people for minor drug offenses, or better addiction and mental health treatment rarely seems to come up - we gotta git tuff on crim'nuls.
If one plans to boost the number of families taken into custody, one should first make sure the families can be handled as families.
KT2000
(20,601 posts)and human trafficking. This is nothing but covering their asses for breaking the law and not having any idea what they are doing. They need their parents. Put trump, Neilson, and everyone else involved in this in prison.
enough
(13,268 posts)2naSalit
(86,897 posts)The children would be harmed by being reunited with their parents? WTF?
They intended to sell those children and probably have sold many already, probably in/through those "sponsor" homes. They didn't think anyone would care about these kids so they didn't keep track of them. It might just be me but I think this is blatant and in plain sight human trafficking. And look at the heartless expression on that HHS woman, I despise her so much I can't recall her name,she has no empathy for these people at all. She doesn't see them as human.
Wellstone ruled
(34,661 posts)Something tells me this was the game plan from the get go by John Kelly and his crowd of bigots.
barbtries
(28,817 posts)how dare they.
procon
(15,805 posts)That monster deliberately created THOUSANDS of orphan kids who will probably never get returned to their families. The govt made this mess, but Trump ordered it and should be charged with crimes against humanity.
Before Trump gets a penny for his vanity monument no costs should be spared in trying to identify the families so the kids can be reunited. The govt should also compensate every person involved, and send the sick, twisted bastards who designed such horrors to trial.
hedda_foil
(16,376 posts)I say that as an old Jewish lady who was incredibly lucky that my grandparents and great grandparents emigrated to the United States instead of staying in Germany, Russia, Poland and Lithuania where their relatives were murdered by the Nazis.
JudyM
(29,294 posts)elleng
(131,292 posts)DO IT, extraordinary effort!
cstanleytech
(26,347 posts)RockRaven
(15,062 posts)and, of course, unstated in all this is that the Trump admin thinks raising them "right" means raised by white, Evangelical Christian, heterosexual, Republican couples.
If you think I'm just being snarky and hyperbolic, note that just last week it was reported that Trump's HHS is allowing a South Carolina adoption agency to reject Jewish and LGBTQ couples because reasons.
cannabis_flower
(3,769 posts)English speaking.
white, Evangelical Christian, heterosexual, English speaking Republican couples.
haele
(12,688 posts)English-speaking White heterosexual Evangelical Christian property-owning households that need more live-in household help to support their taxpayer-funded secondary "fostering" income.
Too many of the child-collecting foster homes seem to that their charges as a revenue stream.
Haele
Dem2theMax
(9,658 posts)nt.
Berlin Expat
(950 posts)that people were hanged for this kind of shit at the conclusion of the Nuremberg Trials.
It fell under the heading of "crimes against humanity".
duforsure
(11,885 posts)For this for years , including civil lawsuits, and trump will pay , and others involved in doing this to them will also pay for this.
no_hypocrisy
(46,267 posts)the five children of my client from being returned to her from their foster family. In other words, Child Protection created a harmful situation by unlawfully removing the children from my client, used every excuse not to reunite them, and then claimed to the Court that it was a fait accompli/a done deal. They dragged their feet for 3-1/2 years.
My law partner and I were pro bono attorneys (free service) and dedicated ourselves to our mission. We got the kids back. And they are thriving with their mother and grandmother and they are together.
So memo to the Trump Administration: you'd better start using some "extraordinary effort" to reunite those kids with their families. You broke it; you own it.
lark
(23,182 posts)The homes they first said they had no knowledge about they now say they know who these people are and can't remove the children. Is it because they "sold" them to begin with? If not, then why did they lie and say they couldn't locate the children and there was no tracking or follow up by the government. EVerything that comes from this administration is a total lie and a big fuck you to the people.I don't care about the cost, this administration made the choice, not the families, not the children. They wanted to steal brown children and give them to who???? onn a permanent basis and why did they do this? The thing that makes the most sense is that they sold them to begin with and now are covering that up. Dems need to stop this immediately,, bring the truth to light and take the child killers and torturers and stealers to court ASAP.
Soxfan58
(3,479 posts)NCjack
(10,279 posts)with the same amount of money to perform reunification of the children and bring to justice the administration managers responsible for the separations.
gopiscrap
(23,766 posts)this admin sold these children to fundamentalist adoption agencies who then made money off of these poor kids
scarytomcat
(1,706 posts)They can't play that card now since it was their plan all along. They need to reunite these kids no matter what it takes and STOP DOING IT. I want to see people go to jail for this outrage. Those kids and parents are going to need years of therapy and we should pay for it. Give them a place to live and let's begin.
geretogo
(1,281 posts)MurrayDelph
(5,302 posts)complains about the extraordinary effort to undo his crimes.
Here's an option: seize all remaining assets of ALL Trump businesses, liquidate them*, turn them over to a new organization run by RAICES, Amnesty International, and other appropriate groups, and let THEM work to help undo their shot.
* They won need those assets in The Hague.
duforsure
(11,885 posts)trump wants billions for a wall , (and to skim from) yet he says nothing about spending to return children he stole from immigrants back to their parents. He separated them to intentionally hurt these children and the parents. he courts will not be kind to trump and those involved for doing this to them. He goes from one thing to another creating chaos so he can claim and emergency , or a dire situation based on his lies and nonsense, only to later claim he fixed the problem he created.
Vinca
(50,323 posts)kidnapping. If there is any fair thing to be done about this mess, the children snatched from their parents should be given automatic and immediate citizenship as well as a monetary settlement in the hopes their lives can somehow be rebuilt.