Despite the fact that the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance policy” is the reason that migrant parents were forcibly separated from their children at the border, the Department of Justice doesn’t believe that they should be responsible for reuniting the families they tore apart.
On Thursday, the Trump administration told a federal judge that the American Civil Liberties Union, “which represents plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit over family separations,” should use its resources to reconnect the families, Politico reports.
“Plaintiffs’ counsel should use their considerable resources and their network of law firms, NGOs, volunteers and others, together with the information that defendants have provided (or will soon provide), to establish contact with possible class members in foreign countries,” DOJ said in court filings viewed by Politico.
Because the Trump administration ran out here and implemented a policy that even they didn’t fully understand, migrant children have been spread throughout the United States, while parents have been deported back to their home countries. Instead of the Trump administration trying to make this right, they believe that the ACLU should be responsible for finding the parents and reconnecting them with their children. In short, the Trump administration is saying, instead of suing us, why don’t you help us solve this mess that we created?
An administration official told Politico as much Thursday evening noting that the filing “simply asks the court to require the ACLU to determine the wishes of and fulfill their obligations to their clients, as they have repeatedly represented in court that they would.”
DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen claims that every deported parent was given the option to have their children deported with them. “But a Trump administration official told Politico on July 25 that an estimated three-quarters of the parents who left the country alone left no record behind that they ever consented to leave their children in the U.S. “We don’t see it in the documentation,” the official said, Politico reports.
In court filings submitted by the ACLU, they basically told the Trump administration that it isn’t their job to try and reconnect the parents with their children and since the dumb-ass people behind the “zero-tolerance policy” allowed for children to be sent across the U.S., the responsibility falls on the government.
At this point, it’d be shocking if Trump’s White House didn’t expect someone else to clean up its mess.