How bad does it have to get, really? How much child-stealing and child-trafficking has to happen before somebody decides that crimes against humanity are not a function of the Constitution as amended in the wake of the Civil War?

First came this astounding admission in court documents filed by the administration*. From NBC News:

The filing late Friday from Jallyn Sualog, deputy director of the department of Health and Human Services' Office of Refugee Resettlement, was an ordered response in an ACLU lawsuit challenging the government's separation of thousands of children at the border since the summer of 2017. The estimate of "thousands" comes from the HHS Office of Inspector General's January report and pertains to children separated before the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" policy came into effect in 2018. Sualog said her office doesn't have the resources to track down the children, whose numbers could be thousands more than the official estimate.

"Even if performing the analysis Plaintiffs seek were within the realm of the possible, it would substantially imperil ORR's ability to perform its core functions without significant increases in appropriations from Congress, and a rapid, dramatic expansion of the ORR data team," she said.

So, in a deliberate act of cruelty married to policy, the administration* separates parents from their children, spirits the kids off to god-alone-knows-where, and then tells the court that it can't afford to find out what happened to them. Are they working in the fields? Hey, it's not our problem.

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Some of these purloined kids, of course, were sent off to "sponsor families." Elsewhere in the court filings, these kids find themselves in a serious Catch-22 situation. From the AP:



Jonathan White, who leads the Health and Human Services Department’s efforts to reunite migrant children with their parents, said removing children from “sponsor” homes to rejoin their parents “would present grave child welfare concerns.” He said the government should focus on reuniting children currently in its custody, not those who have already been released to sponsors.

“It would destabilize the permanency of their existing home environment, and could be traumatic to the children,” White said in a court filing late Friday, citing his years of experience working with unaccompanied migrant children and background as a social worker.

So, we're going to tear you away from your parents, stick you in kiddie SuperMax for a while, and then farm you out to Wyoming or somewhere. Once you're there, however, we'll start caring about your welfare again. I'm not sure, but I don't think an employee of this administration* that has made a policy of ripping children away from their actual parents, and that can't be bothered to keep track of thousands of them, has much credibility on the subject of "grave child-welfare concerns." Jesus, these people.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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