Hey Melania - Your Husband Has No Plan for Reuniting the Immigrant Families HE Is Tearing Apart

[kpete]

The Government Has No Plan for Reuniting the Immigrant Families It Is Tearing Apart


https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5b27197a5b78022e20384085/master/w_649,c_limit/Blitzer-FamilySeparation.jpg
Several months ago, immigrant-rights groups began calling for the Department of Homeland 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.


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.”

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Late last week, Kephart heard that the Guatemalan family had at last learned where the young girl was. A month after they’d been separated, though, it still wasn’t clear that the father had been informed in detention of his daughter’s location. “I hope that she’s spoken to her father,” Kephart told me. “But I haven't gotten confirmation yet.” Even if father and daughter have spoken, getting reunited is far from assured. There is no formal process in place to insure that a family that’s been separated at the border gets deported back to their home country together. For now, just knowing the whereabouts of a child is a start. “I have a master’s degree, and I’m fluent in English,” Kephart said. “And it takes me days to figure one of these cases out.”


MORE:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-government-has-no-plan-for-reuniting-the-immigrant-families-it-is-tearing-apart

[lunasun]

1. That's true too who is to say the haters entering the info are putting correct names and dates in a

database . Thier own personal jiggles entering wrong info. I have seen this in the business world against POC

[The Blue Flower]

2. These families will not be reunited

The only orderly part of the process is separation. Destroying lives is the goal. I just want to cry all the time thinking about this.