Faced with overlapping controversies over its treatment of undocumented children, the Trump administration attempted this week to walk back previous statements that it had lost track of hundreds of undocumented children formerly in its care. Immigrant rights advocates disagreed about whether the administration should more closely monitor those children's whereabouts—but they were all unified in their outrage regarding the administration's ongoing separation of hundreds of migrant children from their parents.
Brandishing the hashtag #WhereAreTheChildren, a groundswell of Twitter users demanded answers over the whereabouts of nearly 1,500 minors who arrived in the United States formerly in government custody. At a Senate committee hearing last month, Steve Wagner, the acting secretary for the Department of Health and Human Services' Administration for Children and Families, reported that HHS had conducted calls to inquire about the children's whereabouts following their release from custody, often to relatives—many of whom are themselves undocumented—already living in the U.S. Calls to U.S. resident guardians went unanswered in 1,475 cases.
HHS said on Monday that it is not responsible for those children released from its custody and that the calls went beyond the scope of its duty to the children. "This is a classic example of the adage, 'No good deed goes unpunished,'" HHS deputy secretary Eric Hargan said in a statement, adding that, despite media reports to the contrary, the children were not lost; phone calls to ascertain their whereabouts had simply gone unanswered.
[For more on this story by MASSOUD HAYOUN, go to https://psmag.com/social-justi...paration-of-families]
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