It’s Not on the Form
So a second grade teacher is taking their class of six year olds to the museum. There are several demonstrations there, and the teacher is unsure what time the kids will come back to the school. The parents fill out the following form:
My child ________________ has permission to go with Ms. Smith to the museum. I am aware that the time schedule is not determined, and I will be available to pick up my child when they return and the teacher calls me.
___________________ (parent) ________ (date).
Most parents when filling out the form will realize the flaw in the system. How will Ms. Smith call, when they haven’t listed a phone number. The United States Department of Homeland Security, Border Patrol division, didn’t.
When children were separated from their parents at the border as part of President Trump’s “zero tolerance” program, the names of the children were entered on a database. Along with their country of origin, gender, age, and other information about the child, the names of the parents, who were being held by BCP, were also entered.
But in the database, there was no place, column or data cell for the location of the parents to be entered. It was a one-way form, a form designed to follow the kids into the Department of Health and Human Services care, but not to return them to their parents. It was a reasonable system for the “last” crisis at the border, when unaccompanied minors were crossing. But,when the San Diego Federal Court judge ordered the children to be returned to their parents, there was no electronic way to find them.
Let’s be charitable. Let’s make the assumption, for the moment, that the US Government under President Trump was not callous and uncaring about the children. And let’s agree that there wasn’t a dark secret plan to kidnap the children. So what happened?
According to the Washington Post, the “zero tolerance” policy had strong support on the ground on the Southern Border with the Customs and Border Protection service. The way they saw it: the border smugglers knew that CBP wouldn’t hold parents with children in custody while awaiting a hearing on a claim of asylum. CBP believed that smugglers were encouraging adults to use children to avoid detention, and CBP wanted to send a message that this strategy wouldn’t work.
That message resonated among senior officials in the Trump Administration, particularly Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Senior Advisor Stephen Miller. They could make a strong statement about illegal immigration (and the need for the “wall”) and then use it as a negotiating chip in the immigration reform law debate. And, when word got back to Central America that children were being taken, it might reduce the number of families that attempted to make the trip.
So the “zero tolerance” policy was implemented. While there isn’t much question about both the immorality and “optics” of taking children from their parents, the Administration didn’t consider those things to be a problem. Their base would be in favor of it, and perhaps they could achieve their immigration goals.
But no one thought the process through. No one was prepared for the wave of children that would need to be cared for. Facilities near the border were already filled with the unaccompanied children, Health and Human Services (who were given custody of the border children) was forced to scatter them throughout the country. It was a “seat of your pants” operation, no one seems to have planned it out.
In the “old days,” parents would pin the name, address and phone number of a child on their jacket. Now in the digital age, we all depend on electronic information to track and trace our lives. From knowing when packages arrive, to depending on our phones for our spouse’s number (me for sure – sorry) we depend on the information being available.
So the absence of a data location in the HHS program meant there was no electronic means of finding a child’s parents. Even now we have hundreds of children that we are unable to return to their parents. It was a one-way system.
We often argue about the morality and ideology driving the Trump Administration. But what we see in this operation, just as we saw in the Puerto Rican hurricane disaster, is an even more devastating charge: incompetency.
