Trump immigrant family separation policy

Aridas said:
That would be a firm vote for it being primarily a cynical political ploy when it comes to Trump, I think.
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I really don't think there is ever anything deep or multi-layered to what Trump does, nothing has shown he has a political strategy or even understand the concept of tactics. Everything I know about him points to him being at the absolute best of average intelligence and willfully ignorant.

He wanted this for the reasons given - to punish and frighten the people trying to immigrate to the USA from South America, that some of them were young children simply didn't matter to him. He wanted to be "tough on immigration", this was him being tough on immigration.
 
Oh, and... Attorneys say ICE is intentionally prolonging detention of asylum seekers by denying them bond.

Officials have made family reunification a near financial impossibility for some U.S. sponsors, forcing them to pay hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars in airfare to fly the migrant children they’re sponsoring from Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) facilities to their new U.S. homes. In the case of other detained migrants, they’re being denied the chance to reunite, period. “The Trump administration is denying bond to some parents who have been separated from their children and are eligible to apply for asylum,” Texas immigration lawyers have told Mother Jones.
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Oh, and...

What is just about certain, according to the attorneys, is that denying bond (which can be appealed, but this process can take weeks) will conflict with a federal judge’s recent order that migrant kids must be reunited with parents by the end of July. ICE, Lincoln-Goldfinch said, is “completely disobeying the judge’s order—intentionally.”
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Of course, there's still "'He was full of dirt and lice': Court documents describe cruel treatment of migrant kids, families"

Hundreds of pages of sworn affidavits and court documents from forcibly separated migrant parents, immigration attorneys, immigrant rights groups and others reveal intentional cruelty, neglect and chaos behind the Trump administration’s barbaric “zero tolerance” policy that has torn thousands of children from families at the U.S./Mexico border.
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Darat said:
He wanted to be "tough on immigration", this was him being tough on immigration.
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That's what we call a political ploy, after all. He is very showily being tough on immigration, even if he happily profits from imported labor.
 
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A former ICE official, a career guy who is retired, said in a news interview last month that he feared many of these kids will never be reunited with their parents. He described the behind-the-scenes process as chaotic. May have been right. This is in today's New York Times:

The family separations, part of an aggressive effort by the Trump administration to deter illegal immigration, have produced a chaotic scramble as officials now face political and judicial pressure to reunite families.

In fact, the Health and Human Services agency charged with overseeing the care of migrant children, the Office of Refugee Resettlement, established such procedures, which included identification bracelets, the issuance of registration numbers and careful logs to keep the records of parents and children linked...But those precautions were undermined in some cases by the other federal agency that has initial custody of apprehended migrants in the first 72 hours after they cross the border — Customs and Border Protection. In hundreds of cases, Customs agents deleted the initial records in which parents and children were listed together as a family with a “family identification number,” according to two officials at the Department of Homeland Security, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the process. Link
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The Health and Human Services administration needs to go through up to 12,000 records manually to determine, for starters, which children were separated from family members and which children arrived unaccompanied. To do this HHS has sent a plea to federal public health workers for help with an exhaustive manual search of records. The whole thing is insane, but exactly what you'd expect from an administration headed up by someone like The Dunce.
 
newyorkguy said:
A former ICE official, a career guy who is retired, said in a news interview last month that he feared many of these kids will never be reunited with their parents. He described the behind-the-scenes process as chaotic. May have been right. This is in today's New York Times:



The Health and Human Services administration needs to go through up to 12,000 records manually to determine, for starters, which children were separated from family members and which children arrived unaccompanied. To do this HHS has sent a plea to federal public health workers for help with an exhaustive manual search of records. The whole thing is insane, but exactly what you'd expect from an administration headed up by someone like The Dunce.
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Maybe they can ask Amazon for help. I just bought a pair of boots from them and they could tell me exactly where those boots were from warehouse to my door, every step of the way. Their tracking software is top notch.
 
Craig4 said:
Maybe they can ask Amazon for help. I just bought a pair of boots from them and they could tell me exactly where those boots were from warehouse to my door, every step of the way. Their tracking software is top notch.
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I think tattooing the children and their parents with numbers and/or barcodes would go down pretty badly....
 
Why in the world did Customs agents do this?
In hundreds of cases, Customs agents deleted the initial records in which parents and children were listed together as a family with a “family identification number.”
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They need to explain their thinking to the American people. In a Quinnipiac poll, that showed two-thirds of Americans opposed separating children from parents, again and again people commented that the images of the crying children -- and knowing it was the actions of our own government that was causing it -- was very painful. There needs to be some accounting.
 
newyorkguy said:
Why in the world did Customs agents do this?


They need to explain their thinking to the American people. In a Quinnipiac poll, that showed two-thirds of Americans opposed separating children from parents, again and again people commented that the images of the crying children -- and knowing it was the actions of our own government that was causing it -- was very painful. There needs to be some accounting.
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I have a feeling we are going to see little or no accounting.
 
Darat said:
I don't think you can really separate the two. If the kids had been shown being settled into nice accomodation, with plenty of comfortable furnishings, toys, and so on I think the public "outrage" wouldn't have been as strong.
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Maybe for Fox News fans, but not for the rest of us. Laura Ingram's "it's like summer camp" did not go over well in the normal 2/3 of the country.
 
Babbylonian said:
Because they didn't care. I believe it really is that simple.
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Sessions and others said they wanted to create a disincentive for people to come to the U.S. More than not caring, they chose to deliberately hurt these people and lie about it; nothing in the laws required them to separate kids and parents. (That's in addition to arresting and prosecuting people who were lawfully seeking asylum.)
 
Aridas said:
You're too kind. There's plenty of reason to think that nastier emotions were in play, after all.
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They wanted family separation to be a deterrent, so they're perfectly OK with mentally torturing kids to achieve their ends. And justifying it biblically.

ETA: I guess Bob and I were thinking the same thing.
 
Bob001 said:
Sessions and others said they wanted to create a disincentive for people to come to the U.S. More than not caring, they chose to deliberately hurt these people and lie about it; nothing in the laws required them to separate kids and parents. (That's in addition to arresting and prosecuting people who were lawfully seeking asylum.)
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I understand that the policy was actively malevolent. I'd still say that the lack of even marginally adequate recordkeeping on the ground is about people not caring.
 
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