Trump Administration Admits that More than 400 Immigrant Parents Separated from Their Kids May Have Been Deported
While national attention has drifted away from the family separation crisis President Donald Trump and his administration created when they began their unnecessary "zero tolerance" and began prosecuting large swaths of immigrants at the U.S.-Mexico border, the government has yet to find an adequate solution to the problem.
But on Monday, the government finally revealed some data in a court filing about its progress. What it revealed is not encouraging.
The government said that 463 parents of immigrants children are no longer in the United States — which presumably means that most or all of these parents have been deported.
In other words, the parents had their children taken from them, and then they were forced to leave the country without their kids.
And the 463 figure may not even be accurate, as the government says the cases are still "under review."
The filing does say that 879 parents have been reunited with their kids, and another 538 have been scheduled to be reunited and are awaiting transport.
The government also says that the 917 parents may be ineligible to be reunited with their parents at all.
While it's a step forward that the government has finally been able to provide this information, the efforts to reunite the families have been rife with logistical difficulties that have only compounded the irreparable harm of tearing families apart.
And the filing simply raises many more questions: Will the parents no longer in the U.S. ever be reunited with their children? How seriously can we take the government's claim that some parents are "ineligible" to be reunited? And what happens to the families that are reunited but still face the daunting U.S. immigration system that is clearly hostile to their wellbeings?
Thus far, the Trump administration has not been eager to provide answers.
