Missing

Under Donald Trump the United States government preys on children.

On the Mexican border, government agents seized children and wrested them from the arms of their parents. Then they put them in cages. Neglected to monitor their health sufficiently and so some died needlessly. Failed to keep track, disappeared them into the vast bureaucracy of a huge nation, failed to meet court-ordered deadlines to reunify families. Hauled a two-year-old girl before a federal judge, then deported her. We have become the national equivalent of a child predator.

But it’s even worse than we thought. A report published earlier this month by the office of Inspector General (OIG) of the Department of Health and Human Services revealed that thousands more children than the government had previously reported have been separated from their parents. The full report is available here.

The OIG is the department’s internal watchdog, the entity that guards the guardians. The new report shines light on facts that reveal the true purpose and dimensions of a policy characterized by chaos and cruelty:

“In the summer of 2017, prior to the formal announcement of the zero-tolerance policy, ORR [Office of Refugee Resettlement] staff and officials observed a steep increase in the number of children who had been separated from a parent or guardian by DHS (“separated children”) and subsequently referred to ORR for care. Officials estimated that ORR received and released thousands of separated children prior to a June 26, 2018, court order in Ms. L v. ICE that required ORR to identify and reunify certain separated children in its care as of that date.”

There was, then, as this report shows, a de facto policy of separating families long before the government made it public in announcing its “zero tolerance” policy. The Trump administration knew the policy was illegal and immoral so it kept mum to avoid outrage.

But ORR kept finding additional children after it certified a list of 2,654 children separated:

“ORR determined that an additional 946 children had some indication of separation in one or more data sources used to compile the certified list but did not meet all criteria for inclusion at that time.”

Reading the report makes it clear that the government was woefully but willfully unprepared for the influx and was unable or unwilling to follow court orders. As a result, “additional children of Ms. L v. ICE class members were still being identified more than five months after the original court order to do so.”

For example, “between July and December 2018, ORR staff received new information indicating that some children who had been in ORR’s care as of June 26, 2018, and whom ORR had not included on the certified list had, in fact, been separated from a parent. In October and December 2018, ORR conducted formal reviews that resulted in adding 162 children to the list reported to the Ms. L v. ICE court.”

Finally and most shocking, the OIG concluded:

“The total number of children separated from a parent or guardian by immigration authorities is unknown.”

This is not fake news. It is the findings of an official U.S. government investigation. These results don’t reflect merely the sheer incompetence of this administration nor the disaster bound to happen when those who don’t believe in government are in charge of governing. It was a result of a priority which made stopping the “brown hordes” more important than any consideration of decency, law, or respect for lives and dignity.  It was the consequence of a deliberate, planned policy.

The objective of the policy was deterring immigrants and refugees from coming here—at any cost. The means employed were to separate parents from their children in order to punish them and dissuade others from coming. It is a breathtakingly cruel strategy associated with unmentionable regimes.

In a January 19 editorial, The Washington Post said:

“IN THE early months of Donald Trump’s presidency, administration officials were in the habit of feigning indignation when questioned about cases involving family separations. No such policy existed, the officials declared. And in instances when children were taken away, they insisted, it was simply to protect them from traffickers who might be posing as parents, or from unfit or criminal parents.

“That turns out to have been untrue, as a report from the Department of Health and Human Services’ inspector general makes clear. In fact, starting just months after President Trump took office, the administration undertook family separation in earnest, as an experiment in which the guinea pigs were thousands of toddlers, children and teenagers.”

Lying to the American people and to the media is the default for Trump administration officials. It is awful but lawful. Lying to the U.S. Congress, as Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen apparently did in denying the existence of a policy of family separation, is a whole different story. It’s a crime. Thus, as the Post reports, a Democratic Senator is asking the FBI to begin a perjury inquiry:

‘”Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) released a previously undisclosed memo Thursday from high-level officials at the Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department in 2017 that outlined policy options to deal with illegal immigration at the border. The second item on the list is a policy to “separate family units.” The memo also notes that an upshot of such policies will be the “substantial deterrent effect.””

How did we get to a point in the twenty-first century in which our government becomes a predator of children and an agent of family separation?

Racial hatred and fear never dies. It just lies dormant until awakened by the clarion call of a demagogue.