Thursday's entry in executive inhumanity was a rich, full one. First, the Washington Post informed us that the president*'s concern for the hurricane victims in Puerto Rico was pretty much limited to airborne rolls of paper towels.

Last fall, Patenaude expressed concern over the Trump administration’s intervention in disaster-recovery money that Congress had appropriated for Puerto Rico and states hit by hurricanes. President Trump in late September grew incensed after hearing, erroneously, that Puerto Rico was using the emergency money to pay off its debt, according to two people with direct knowledge of Trump’s thinking.

Trump told then-White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly and then-Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney that he did not want a single dollar going to Puerto Rico, because he thought the island was misusing the money and taking advantage of the government, according to a person with direct knowledge of the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive internal deliberations. Instead, he wanted more of the money to go to Texas and Florida, the person said.

The only mystery is on which Fox News show the president* heard this nonsense.

MANDEL NGAN Getty Images

Meanwhile, The New York Times reports that the child-separation policy at the southern border was even worse of a humanitarian disaster than we thought.



But that number does not represent the full scope of family separations. Thousands of children may have been separated during an influx that began in 2017, before the accounting required by the court, the report said. Thus, the total number of children separated from a parent or guardian by immigration authorities is “unknown,” because of the lack of a coordinated formal tracking system between the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the arm of Health and Human Services that takes in the children, and the Department of Homeland Security, which separated them from their parents.

After a review of internal government tallies, The New York Times found that more than 700 migrant children had been separated from their families in the months before the government officially announced the zero-tolerance policy. On June 26, 2018, a federal judge in San Diego directed the federal government to halt the separations at the border and to reunite children with their parents. President Trump rescinded the policy that same month. However, the federal inspectors found that separations have continued to occur: As of November, the report found, Health and Human Services had received at least 118 children who had been separated from their families since the court order.



There is a court order. The president* has killed the policy. And it's still going on. Which reminds me that, as part of her newly launched presidential campaign, Kirsten Gillibrand makes a point of telling people she's the only senator to vote against all of the president*'s appointees. Between Ben Carson at HUD, and Kirstjen Nielsen at Homeland Security, that argument becomes more compelling by the day.

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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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