Donald Trump’s immigrant child cage scandal takes an even darker turn
Donald Trump asked a federal judge to bypass the Flores Settlement, which provides that children in detention must be released within twenty days. The judge did not agree to extend the deadline. Trump’s request seems ridiculously egregious since Trump is the one who started the problem in the first place and because of the serious nature of the transgression-ripping three thousand children from the arms of their parents and doing a crappy job of caring for them to boot.
Trump has personally displaced thousands of children, thousands of crying, scared and traumatized children. To add insult to injury, the U.S. government is playing self-righteous parental cop to immigrant parents, such as asking questions intended to determine if they are a “good” parent. “Good” according to the person who was doing the asking, one supposes. Maybe a social worker should ask Trump if he put his own children in cages when they were growing up? However, it is doubtful a cutthroat bully like Trump had much to do with his offspring until they became old enough to be viable to his business interests.
Judge Gee basically told Trump, you created this mess and now you have to clean it up. You aren’t going to make this the judicial branch’s problem. She instructed him to release the children (Is this a Grimm’s Fairytale?), and if the parents consent, they may be detained with their family. The Trump Administration has demonstrated a lackadaisical response to a reunification plan. The government has trained for these kinds of scenarios, such as working with large populations of displaced peoples along with those separated from their families. There are many strategies that could be implemented, such as a single staging area for reunification.
In addition, there appears to be a lack of social workers available to help such large numbers of children, and those that are there do not necessarily speak Spanish. When American children enter foster care, they are often appointed an advocate, who is a trained volunteer, to represent the interests of the child in court. The Trump Administration needs to be problem solving oriented, but all Trump can do is create bigger problems. Start a campaign to enlist Spanish-English speaking volunteers, give them background checks and put them to work. No expense should be spared to mitigate the trauma Trump has put into motion with his ridiculous notion of what is leadership.
