Trump and GOP Congress Reveal Ineptitude to Match Moral Disgrace
The Trump administration created the family separation crisis and is now dragging their feet in resolving it. More than 2,000 children have been seized by our government and ripped from the arms of their parents. Now that public outrage has forced Trump to beat a tactical retreat on the underlying policy, his team wants to distract us from the moral scandal they caused, and his bureaucrats offer bland reassurances that all will be fine.
According to Frank Sharry, Executive Director of America’s Voice:
All is not fine. The Trump administration did the unthinkable when it took kids, including infants and toddlers, from their parents. It then sent them to secretive locations around the country and refuses to open these ‘shelters’ to scrutiny. Acts of cruelty are now compounded by the cruelty of indifference. Who’s in charge of reuniting babies with their parents? What’s the emergency plan? What’s the timeline? Where are the daily briefings? Where are the emergency congressional oversight hearings? How can parents be given the information and the help they need? How can Americans pitch in? And where is the transparency and accountability regarding what is happening behind the closed doors and blackened windows where infants and toddlers are in custody? None of this is being addressed because this administration couldn’t care less. All we get are reassurances, fact sheets and black sites. Meanwhile, kids are experiencing toxic stress, parents are desperate and distraught, and no one with the power to deal with this emergency is stepping up.
Yesterday’s developments make clear that the Trump administration see this more as a public relations debacle than as a scandal of of historic proportions.
Rachel Maddow Show captures shelter employee threatening separated kids if they talk to the press.
Last night, Rachel Maddow featured the release of audio surreptitiously recorded at a New York-based facility housing children hoping to reunify with their parents. In the recording, an employee at the facility explicitly warns the minors to not share their stories publicly and with media, as it could hurt efforts to reunify them with their parents:
If for whatever reason you tell a reporter – you know what’s going to happen to your case? It is going to be on the news – and then one doesn’t know what is going to happen – if you are going to last here for a long time … You have to be careful not to talk. Because while you are here, you guys are ok. We are trying to help you so you guys can reunify with your family…
Republican Rep. Will Hurd of Texas (R-TX) doubts Trump administration is serious about reuniting kids and parents.
I think one of the concerns I have is HHS’s ability to do this. We were supposed to have a conference call yesterday with members of Congress and their staff to talk about this process and the phone number didn’t work … So if they can’t do that with us I’m concerned with the ability of connecting kids.
Senator Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) was blocked from a detention facility in Brownsville, TX housing young children separated from parents.
What is this admin hiding? When will these children be reunited with their families? We need answers!
I was scheduled to visit this children’s detention facility in Brownsville, Texas but was asked to leave immediately. Something is happening here that they don’t want the public to know.
BuzzFeed uncovers an additional 100 children who have been separated from families.
A previously unreported 100 minors who were separated from their families when they crossed the US southern border since the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy went into effect in early April are now with “sponsors,” an administration official told BuzzFeed News on Monday.
Added Sharry:
Trump and his administration want to keep these kids and their stories from the public. They want us all to move on so that their cruelty and their indifference get normalized. There is nothing normal about this. Kids are suffering. Parents are desperate. Windows are blackened. Kids are threatened. History is watching, and it will not be kind to the officials who ordered up this crisis, the officials who are doing so little to solve it, and to the Republicans in Congress who refuse to exercise their oversight responsibilities to resolve it. It’s up to those of us who are outraged by what is happening in our name and with our tax dollars to demand and compel urgent action.
