Good morning, everyone! I’m seeing a lot of tweets about how 1,475 children “taken from their parents” were lost by HHS. That’s wrong. Most children sent to HHS—before last fall, ALL children sent to HHS—arrived in the US as unaccompanied minors.
The original story published by @nixonron in April—which some of us have been citing/talking about since then—makes clear we’re talking about 1475 of 7K kids HHS tried to contact from Oct-Dec 2017, ie who’d been placed w/sponsors before then. nytimes.com/2018/04/26/us/…
Is this relevant to their newly expanded duties to care for kids separated from parents? You bet it is. But that’s bc it’s the agency failing at its TRADITIONAL function, and now being asked to perform a new one.
Anyway, hi from Saturday.
BTW if you are interested in all of this, you might be interested in my article from earlier this week on the legacy that Jeff Sessions is building for Trump on immigration! vox.com/2018/5/23/1722…
FYI, another point about this: we do not know how many of these children weren’t located because they and their relatives in the US (who might even be their parents!) made the decision to go off the grid to reduce deportation risk.
