A few posts here reporting what was planned and then starting to happen didn't get attention, even here.
But when "Colbert. Kimmel, Fallon, Meyers, Cordon" weighed in, joining their big voices with reports from the fourth estate, people learned they should be outraged, and began being outraged.
No accident that this coincided with a big upswing in the numbers of atrocities. Timing is a huge factor, and eventually everything came together for mass dissemination. Before then, people trying to alert were mostly just crying into the void.
The Government Has No Plan for Reuniting the Immigrant Families It Is Tearing Apart
A few days ago, Emily Kephart, a program coördinator at an immigrant-rights group called Kids in Need of Defense, set out to try to find a six-year-old Guatemalan girl who had been separated from her father after arriving in the United States, in May. The pair had been split up as a consequence of the Trump Administration’s zero-tolerance policy at the border, which calls for the criminal prosecution of all migrants, including asylum seekers, who cross the border without turning themselves in to officials at so-called ports of entry. Now the father was in an immigration-detention facility in Arizona awaiting deportation. He had no idea where his child was. Kephart was put on the case after the father called his family back in a small town outside of Huehuetenango City, in Guatemala’s western highlands, and then his family, in turn, contacted a local nonprofit that works with Kids in Need of Defense.
Every undocumented immigrant who enters government custody is assigned what’s called an alien number. But the girl’s family didn’t know hers. Armed only with the girl’s name and birth date, Kephart dialed a 1-800 hotline set up by the Office of Refugee Resettlement (O.R.R.), the federal body in charge of handling unaccompanied immigrant children. This hotline, Kephart told me, is difficult to access for parents who are in a detention facility (hold times can last half an hour; it’s impossible to leave a call-back number) or who have been deported (international calls are expensive, and 1-800 numbers don’t often work from abroad). “We hit a dead end,” Kephart said. “The person I spoke with just made a note in the file of the girl they thought it might be. But we didn’t get confirmation that we were talking about the same child. They were looking at the record of someone whose first name was spelled differently, and whose date of birth was a month off.” ... Eventually, Kephart tracked down a case manager at the second facility. “I told her, ‘Look, I have this situation. I think you have a girl there,’ ” Kephart told me. ‘“The case manager said, ‘Oh, my God, yes!’ The case manager had a kid whose parents she couldn’t find. She was trying to help, but she’d had nothing to go on.”
In the past two months, the government has taken some two thousand immigrant children away from their parents. Under the zero-tolerance policy, border crossers are arrested and charged with a crime before being placed in immigration detention. If they came with their children, the children are turned over to O.R.R. and treated as though they travelled to the U.S. alone.
No protocols have been put in place for keeping track of parents and children concurrently, for keeping parents and children in contact with each other while they are separated, or for eventually reuniting them. Immigration lawyers, public defenders, and advocates along the border have been trying to fill the void.
Although the zero-tolerance policy was officially announced last month, it has been in effect, in more limited form, since at least last summer. Several months ago, as cases of family separation started surfacing across the country, immigrant-rights groups began calling for the Department of Homeland Security (D.H.S.), which is in charge of immigration enforcement and border security, to create procedures for tracking families after they are split up. At the time, D.H.S. said that it would address the problem, but there is no evidence that it actually did so. ...
https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5b27197a5b78022e20384085/master/w_727,c_limit/Blitzer-FamilySeparation.jpg
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