WHEN THE head of U.S. Customs and Border Protection appeared at a Washington forum the other day to discuss his agency - which was instrumental in the Trump administration's family separation debacle - the toughest moments he faced came from hecklers, one of whom shouted, "You're orphaning children! You're kidnapping children!" Setting aside those interruptions, Commissioner Kevin K. McAleenan fielded one gentle question after another, never challenged to explain CBP's role in what a federal judge has characterized as a breakdown in coordination among government agencies that has left hundreds of migrant children stripped from their parents.
The statistical fallout from that fiasco is roughly 700 children, about a third of those who were removed from their parents this spring, who remain even now in the custody of the U.S. government rather than with their families.
In most of those cases, the parents were deported before they could be reunited with their children.
As The Post's Nick Miroff, Amy Goldstein and Maria Sacchetti reported, Border Patrol agents who removed children from their parents provided files to the Department of Health and Human Services, in whose custody children were entrusted, that were "a mess." Some of the children's files included their parents' names and government-assigned numbers; others didn't.
Often the files made no mention of where the parents had been sent.
At HHS, whose Office of Refugee Resettlement bears direct responsibility for migrant children, the agency database includes no means to indicate which of them might have been snatched from their parents.
In the case of family separations, the hecklers who berated Mr. McAleenan were out of line, but their questions - specifically, about whether the U.S. government had made orphans of hundreds of children - were not.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/families-destroyed-children-orphaned-if-only-we-had-a-congress/2018/07/30/f77579a4-9423-11e8-a679-b09212fb69c2_story.html?utm_term=.b4c104ed5079
The statistical fallout from that fiasco is roughly 700 children, about a third of those who were removed from their parents this spring, who remain even now in the custody of the U.S. government rather than with their families.
In most of those cases, the parents were deported before they could be reunited with their children.
As The Post's Nick Miroff, Amy Goldstein and Maria Sacchetti reported, Border Patrol agents who removed children from their parents provided files to the Department of Health and Human Services, in whose custody children were entrusted, that were "a mess." Some of the children's files included their parents' names and government-assigned numbers; others didn't.
Often the files made no mention of where the parents had been sent.
At HHS, whose Office of Refugee Resettlement bears direct responsibility for migrant children, the agency database includes no means to indicate which of them might have been snatched from their parents.
In the case of family separations, the hecklers who berated Mr. McAleenan were out of line, but their questions - specifically, about whether the U.S. government had made orphans of hundreds of children - were not.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/families-destroyed-children-orphaned-if-only-we-had-a-congress/2018/07/30/f77579a4-9423-11e8-a679-b09212fb69c2_story.html?utm_term=.b4c104ed5079
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