BORDER/CHILDREN/DHS/HHS/IMMIGRATION/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “For months, federal immigration officials along the 268-mile stretch of border that separates New Mexico and West Texas from Mexico had been testing a policy of separating migrant parents from their children. What they didn’t plan for was how to reunite them. When a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to reconnect more than 2,600 children separated from their families after a national outcry, the two government agencies in charge—the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services—didn’t have a firm grip on the number of children involved or exactly where they were. There was no unified tracking system to follow the location of parents and children. Computer systems couldn’t communicate. Children as young as a few months old were sent sometimes thousands of miles away from parents in federal custody with no means to get in touch. Health and Human Services, which was already caring for thousands of other migrant children apprehended crossing the border on their own, had to manually sort through nearly 12,000 case records to figure out which were covered by the court order…The chaos surrounding the mammoth reunification task, which had little precedent and no single playbook, shows what happens on the ground when an administration makes or reverses policy on the fly. Immigration lawyers and social workers who have long interacted with the government said they have rarely before seen such disorder among federal agencies.”
-Nour Malas and Alicia A. Caldwell, “Inside the Trump Administration’s Chaotic Effort to Reunite Migrant Families,” The Wall Street Journal, July 27, 2018 12:38 pm