Well, first things first. Via NBC News:
The Trump administration said in a court filing that reuniting thousands of migrant children separated from their parents or guardians at the U.S.-Mexico border may not be “within the realm of the possible.”
The filing late Friday from Jallyn Sualog, deputy director of the department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement, was an ordered response in an ACLU lawsuit challenging the government’s separation of at least 2,737 children of migrants detained at the border since summer 2017.
Sualog said her office doesn’t have the resources to track down the children, whose numbers could be thousands more than the official estimate.
“Even if performing the analysis Plaintiffs seek were within the realm of the possible, it would substantially imperil ORR’s ability to perform its core functions without significant increases in appropriations from Congress, and a rapid, dramatic expansion of the ORR data team,” she said.
Perhaps the Democrats could appropriate $5.7B to expand the data team and fund the analysis. Then, every time Trump or his minions bleat about WALL money, they could reply, “Oops, sorry — the very sum you requested had to be diverted to fund family reunification activities because your administration’s inhumane family separation policy was enacted by incompetents who took less care tracking human beings than an Ace Hardware store uses to track $.01 nails.
Then, file articles of impeachment on Nielsen and hold hearings to dig into the details of this horror, including the depraved indifference, the incompetence and the profiteering. I’m not a Constitutional scholar, but I’m pretty sure lying to Congress in sworn testimony (perjury) is an impeachable offense and that cabinet members are subject to removal via that mechanism.
Although nothing can atone for the trauma wrought in our name by the racist policies of these heartless liars, impeaching Nielsen would focus attention on the thousands of families who’ve been destroyed. It would force Republicans to go on record in support of the whole putrid Trump administration approach to immigration at the southern border — the cruel, ineffective policies, the rank carelessness, the repeated lies, etc. It would also serve as dress rehearsal for impeaching Nielsen’s boss.