And before anybody says “Biden still locks up migrant children,” temporarily holding an unaccompanied minor (for a few days until a relative is located) is not the same as forcibly taking kids from their parents.
Highlights: On Monday, the Biden administration reached a settlement in a lawsuit brought on behalf of families separated at the US-Mexico border due to Donald Trump’s so-called “zero-tolerance” policy, under which immigration agents removed thousands of migrant children from their parents.
The Trump administration knew it couldn’t properly keep track of children and parents after piloting the practice in 2017, an investigation by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General found. But it moved forward with family separations anyway.
Many parents were also deported without their children, which made it extraordinarily difficult to reunite those families.
According to Republican projection I suspect you’ll find them in the basement of a pizzeria.
Have they tried the bathroom at Mar-A-Lardo? /s
Even if this was ultimately started by Trump, it’s still a massive failure of intelligence and management that this still isn’t completely fixed even multiple years later. The kids and families are still all packed together, over a dozen to a room in literal ICE detention facilities and military bases. Biden didn’t start it, but I’m far from willing to give him any passes for this at this point considering a not insignificant percentage of those kids are still in holding and how much time has passed.
It hasn’t been “a few days” for the remaining kids, it’s been literally years now. For the kids that have already been reunited, it certainly wasn’t as quick as a few days, it would have been months at least. And the vast majority of kids wouldn’t have been unaccompanied when they first showed up, but only became so after separation by the government, so using that as justification for them being held against their will doesn’t make any sense. Kids who have yet to be reunited with their families (of which there are still a few hundred) have been in detention since 2018. Some of them aren’t even kids anymore, they’ve been sitting in ICE detention facilities for so long without the ability to leave, receive an education, or anything else. There is no excuse for the outright prison-like conditions these kids are still subject to.
Biden as the president has the duty to make this right even if it wasn’t his idea. He has made some headway, which is good, but I haven’t been impressed by the rate of progress.
There’s one smart sentence that Elon musk said at some point “I believe the president is a captain steering a very large ship with a very small rudder”.
Of course he can be blamed for getting stuff wrong, but intentionally creating chaos is a bit easier than getting things right, and as there is an infinite list of things to get right, usually things take time unfortunately.
Don’t get me wrong Biden is not a saint, most definitely not, but you can’t blame him for not fixing things instantaneously, and even an instant is a fairly long time when it comes to any government.
I never said it should be fixed instantaneously, but we are now getting into the final year of his term and his administration’s lawyers in the DOJ are still actively fighting to prevent those separated families from getting any kind of restitution. Again, it’s been over 5 years now since the multiple hundreds of remaining kids were first separated and are still being kept in squalid, prison-like conditions. Imagine spending 5 years in prison without charge and no end in sight. Burglars regularly get less time than that. Even if these kids can’t simply be released, they can at least be kept in better housing, which should absolutely be within Biden’s power and shouldn’t take years to arrange.
Are we supposed to just shrug all that off? Hell, maybe we are; most seem to not even care, evidenced by the downvotes just for pointing out this failure after someone tried to say it was no big deal. I, however, find this whole situation absolutely unconscionable top to bottom. I don’t care who’s in charge, they just better get it fixed. If whoever’s in charge isn’t getting it done, I’m going to call them out for it, period. In your mind, how long is an acceptable timeframe for this kind of thing? A decade? Longer? Because that’s the direction we’re heading right now. Most of those families that have been fortunate enough to be reunited are still being deported right afterward, too.
Biden can’t be squared with all the blame for causing this situation, but his actions since coming to office, especially in this, among his biggest failures as president IMO, are certainly not above reproach by any means. I also can’t see how Biden is some powerless small fry when he’s the head of government for basically the most powerful country on Earth. There are truly very few people in the world with as much power and influence as Biden wields as president of the US.
Anyway, in conclusion, I fully stand by what I said; the fact that hundreds of those kids are still in prison 5 years later is an abomination and a national embarrassment regardless of whoever’s in office. I don’t even know what to say to anyone who could disagree.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_administration_family_separation_policy
This Wikipedia article lists the timeline and a lot of the challenges.
A short timeline:
- April 2018, the harsh policy is adopted
- June 20 2018, Executive Order is signed by Trump to halt family seperation
- June 26 2018, in Sabraw vs Sessions an Injunction is ordered with deadlines for reunification of families
---- Biden Inauguration in January 20 2021 ----
- February 2 2021, Biden signs an Executive Order that creates a plan for reunification
- February 2 2021, a Task Force is established to identify and reunify seperated families
- up to now, the process is still ongoing
Now in the timeline you will see that just 2 weeks after inauguration Biden signed an order and establishes a Task Force to take care of it. As he has a lot of things to do, this is probably the best way to handle the problem.
When you look into the Wikipedia page you will also notice that trump’s policy didn’t include a plan to reunite families. The administration also explained as early as June 2018 that they can only reunite 60 children, because they referred to the “central database”, and there was not enough information in there to reunite the other 666 children with their families.
You might want to argue further that “he should have done more” and “the children are still not reunited under Biden”, but let me talk in academic English for a second. The policy got the families fucked beyond repair. Biden tried his best but holy shit is there a lot of chaos to navigate. Let’s also agree on that fact that reuniting families without any information to base off of is really fucking hard. Also, you are saying the president has a lot of power, which is right. But do you realize how many problems a president has to take care of in a month? That’s a metric fuckton of equally important problems to tackle, half of which need to be formulated through very complicated legal jargon.
I conclude that Biden did everything he can. And I really think there’s topics which he can be blamed for. This is not the one.
Just to clear up some things in your comment:
I do not condone the harsh immigration policies, and I do not condone the separation of families through those. I wish those families and children the best. That said, I also face the harsh reality that I really do think there’s not much more to do for Biden. Sometimes things can be wrong, but there’s no one to blame who can make it right.
Also, the legal proceedings against the families Biden is wholly uninvolved in and there’s a range of factors that influence those proceedings. It’s a fairly lazy argument to fault him for a proceeding that is ongoing in which he has no direct involvement in.
Trump knocked the vase off the table and it shattered into a million tiny pieces
Why hasn’t Biden glued them all back together yet???
It would be more like a few thousand pieces, but it’s not like it’s an absolutely impossible task or anything. Broken vases can be repaired, even in a few thousand pieces, because each piece fits together. Get yourself some vase experts, some glue experts, some puzzle experts, some scientists to microscopically examine the broken edges, etc, and I see no reason why it can’t be done. You can literally ask the kids what their parents’ names are. You can ask them where they used to live. You can contact the government of that country and ask if that person has had an address in the last 5 years, or a job, or been to the hospital, or paid taxes, etc. You can ask the kids if they have any family or former neighbors that might know the whereabouts of their parents. Do the parents not have a phone number or a Facebook page? Not even an email associated with them? Surely a large squad of investigators backed by the government should be able to track people down in a world as filled with surveillance and digital records keeping as it is.
I find it very hard to believe that hundreds of families have simply vanished from the face of the earth, are now entirely impossible to locate, and that it’s unreasonable to expect any progress at all at this point. That’s defeatist thinking for no reason at all. Doxxers online can find out your name, where you live, where you work, and much more without ever even having to meet you, all just from small hints from your online presence. And you’re going to tell me a massive interagency task force assembled for specifically this purpose and has the full backing of the US government is naturally powerless to do anything? It sounds like you should hold the government to a higher standard. Just because the government never meets those standards doesn’t mean we should lower our standards. We shouldn’t be quiet about it when the government isn’t meeting those standards, either.
Yeah, Trump started this, no denial there, but Trump isn’t president anymore and hasn’t been for a few years. Trump almost certainly wouldn’t be capable of reunification of those families and had no plans to, but Biden actually might be able to, so I’m going to push him hard to do so and get it done ASAP.
