It was just more than a year ago that then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions (remember him?) ordered up a zero-tolerance policy for migrants apprehended crossing the U.S-Mexico border, a group of people then, as now, comprising mostly families seeking asylum.
Under the order, adults were charged, at a minimum, with a misdemeanor count of entering the country without permission and sent to jail while the case proceeded.
And the children were trundled off to live, in many cases, with strangers.
Two months later, and amid a furious backlash even from some of his supporters, President Trump issued an edict ending the practice. Six days after that, in a legal challenge brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, U.S. District Court Judge Dana M. Sabraw ordered the government to reunite the children with their parents within 30 days (14 days for children under age 5).
Not only has that order not been fully complied with, the government still doesn’t know how many children were removed from their parents, nor where they all are. (In fact, there are allegations that the feds continue to separate some families).
And then we learned that the Trump administration had separated thousands more families than previously known, and that the practice predated the Sessions order. Sabraw on Thursday gave the government six months to reunite all the separated families.
In an administration that seems bent on setting records for heartlessness, that separation policy ranks among the worst.
And in an administration that seems to be redefining governmental incompetence, it set out on this inhumane and deplorable strategy of traumatizing children without a plan or even a vision of how the policy would play out.
It’s as though the government had no intention of ever reuniting the families, and gave no thought to the costs involved in incarcerating parents who did not need to be incarcerated or providing for the care and well-being of the children.
All in service of the theory that jailing parents and stealing their children away would deter other Central American families from making the same northward trip to seek asylum in the U.S.
And no, the policy didn’t serve that end either; border apprehensions while the policy was in place and shortly after it ended were unaffected, and have since skyrocketed.
So looking back, the administration had a policy that was poorly conceived, inhumane in practice, ineffective in achieving its stated and ugly purpose, costly to taxpayers (at least $80 million and counting), and traumatic to people who came here asking for help.
So are we “sick and tired of winning” yet, as Trump pledged during his campaign?
Or just sick and tired?