MSNBC’s Jacob Soborrof who has been reporting on site in Texas on this for the better part of the past week repeats the question over and over:
Where are the girls?
Where are the toddlers?
We have asked for access and will continue to.
— Jacob Soboroff (@jacobsoboroff) June 17, 2018
Still asking. https://t.co/WvxifbkPcn
— Jacob Soboroff (@jacobsoboroff) June 18, 2018
And again:
Just asked @HHSGov about seeing girls and toddlers again. https://t.co/8POk4JfHzI
— Jacob Soboroff (@jacobsoboroff) June 19, 2018
He has reported on air on MSNBC today that he’s been informed that the news media will be provided by the government with pictures and videos of separated girls and toddlers being held in detention in two days. In the meantime they offered him:
Update on toddlers and girls: @HHSGov just offered me photos of facilities with girls and toddlers from 2016, long before zero tolerance was enacted.
I said no thanks.
Still trying to get in.
— Jacob Soboroff (@jacobsoboroff) June 19, 2018
The only reason that the government can’t or won’t provide photographic and documentary evidence immediately and will not allow journalists to take those pictures and make those videos themselves is to control the narrative. They need time to make sure everything looks presentable in the materials they are going to present to the public via the news media. They do not want and cannot afford to have another audiotape like yesterday’s, let alone a videotape, leak out and get published again. It is also why they will not allow Senators and Congressman to tour the facilities without advanced notice. Such as Senator Nelson (D-FL) this morning down at the facility in Homestead, FL.
?BREAKING: After being denied access to detention facility in Homestead Florida housing children separated from their families, Florida Sr. Senator @SenBillNelson accuses @DHSgov of “hiding something” & engaged in a “coverup” in video below. pic.twitter.com/c7IF1YyYwF
— Fernand R. Amandi (@AmandiOnAir) June 19, 2018
John Sandweg, fmr. acting Dir. of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said in some cases the children and parents separated at the border may never reunite.https://t.co/7ROz8T6yJO
— MSNBC (@MSNBC) June 19, 2018
MSNBC’s Julia Ainsely has reported that not only will it take years to reunite these children with their families, some will never be reunited at all. (emphasis mine)
The former head of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement told NBC News that migrant parents separated from their children at the border are sometimes unable to relocate their child and remain permanently separated.
“Permanent separation. It happens,” said John Sandweg, who served as acting director of ICE under the Obama administration from 2013-2014.
Sandweg’s warning contradicts White House messaging that the separation of women and children migrants under the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy is only temporary.
While a parent can quickly move from detention to deportation, a child’s case for asylum or deportation may not be heard by a judge for several years because deporting a child is a lower priority for the courts, Sandweg explained.
“You could easily end up in a situation where the gap between a parent’s deportation and a child’s deportation is years,” Sandweg said.
As a result, parents may find themselves back in their home countries struggling to find their children. Many do not have access to legal counsel or understand the U.S. immigration or judicial systems.
Children who stay in the foster system for lengthy periods of time may become wards of the state and finally adopted.
“You could be creating thousands of immigrant orphans in the U.S. that one day could become eligible for citizenship when they are adopted,” Sandweg explained.
Sandweg says he has seen permanent separation happen when a parent is deported without his or her child.
“This is why family unity was critical for us. With the numbers of families crossing ticking up, [the] Obama administration was concerned about children being left behind,” said Sandweg.
Speaking on Fox News Tuesday, White House Director of Strategic Communications Mercedes Schlapp insisted the separations were short term.
“We have come to understand that these families who are separated, it is for a limited period of time between five to ten days,” Schlapp said.
Much more at the link.
Mercedes Schlapp, the daughter of Cubans who sought refuge and asylum in the US after her father was imprisoned and tortured for six years by the Castro government, is a liar and a hypocrite, but we already knew that.
I’ve spent a lot of time working with internally displaced Iraqis, on issues dealing with internally displaced people (IDPs) and refugees in the Levant, and with USAID’s Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM) officers. No one, not Mercedes Schlapp’s father in fleeing Cuba, nor people fleeing the collapse of the state and society in Guatemala, Honduras, and Venezuela, as well as other places, leaves everything behind, grabs their children, and walks hundreds and thousands of miles overland or traverses the same distances on the ocean, just because they want a chance to earn a few more dollars. The people that take these most desperate of measures, do so because as dangerous as it is, it is less dangerous than staying where they are. And they do so with only these thoughts in mind: at the end of the journey is safety, at the end of the journey is hope, at the end of the journey is the United States!
This was the belief that drove Stephen Miller’s maternal grandparents as related by his maternal uncle (emphasis mine):
“The Glosser family escaped Europe as dirt poor immigrants, joined the community, built businesses, and honestly sold goods to their fellow Johnstowners,” Glosser wrote. “My nephew and I must both reflect long and hard on one awful truth. If in the early 20th century the USA had built a wall against poor desperate ignorant immigrants of a different religion, like the Glossers, all of us would have gone up the crematoria chimneys with the other six million kinsmen whom we can never know.“
I’m sure Stephen Miller’s maternal grandparents would be so proud that their grandson grew up to be exactly the kind of person they fled to the United States to get away from!
It was this same belief behind Senator Cruz’s father’s flight to safety from Castro’s Cuba. All so that Senator Cruz, a Latino-Canadian, could grow up to be a white supremacist from Texas! America truly is the land of opportunity…
Leaving the hypocrisy aside, the more important takeaway here is that a significant number of these children will never see their parents again as a result of a decision made by a Republican president. That not a single Republican senator or congressperson will do anything significant to stop. You know, the Republican Party – the party of family values! And given the size and scale of this new policy put in place by the President and Attorney General Sessions at the urging of Stephen Miller, as well as the haste and lack of planning that went into it’s implementation, we should expect that this number will be far, far higher than the failures that former Acting Director Sandweg related.
At least HHS employee being honest – on briefing call, HHS’ Steven Wagner says “***This policy is relatively new***, we’re still working through the experience of reunifying parents with their kids after adjudication.”
— Erin Burnett (@ErinBurnett) June 19, 2018
The simple truth here is that because of the size and scope of the President’s policy of separating children from their parents, significantly more children will never see their parents again. Moreover, because DHS and HHS know they can’t afford to let Americans, including US senators and representatives, see what is actually happening in real time, they are doing everything they can to control access and the flow of information; especially pictures, video, and audio. It reeks not just of covering their asses, but of Theresienstadt. And it should because the size and scope of implementing this policy is way beyond the ability of HHS to implement safely and effectively.
The more children they separate, the more they’re going to rely on contract solutions. I know a lot about contract solutions – I am one. And I can tell you that as they rush to do this in a hurry HHS is going to wind up defaulting to the lowest bidder who can argue effectively that they can provide the contract solution required. Or they’ll award a no bid to one of their existing omnibus contractors. Even if those companies have no idea how to do any of this work. Those companies will then quickly move to hire whoever is willing to do the work, regardless of actual/real qualifications. Instead of hiring a large cohort of social workers and licensed child care professionals and pediatric nurses and kindergarten, primary, and secondary teachers, you’re going to get whatever bodies they can hire, for the minimum amount of pay they can possibly offer, thrown at the problem. Children are going to suffer as a result of this. Beyond just the trauma of being forcibly separated from their parents. Children will suffer from neglect, from negligence. Some of these children will die. All in the name of putting America First in order to Make America Great Again. And so that Stephen Miller can own the libs…
This is going to get much, much worse before it get’s better.
Stay informed. Stay angry.
Open thread.