With the partial federal government shutdown closing in on a month, failed 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is offering up some really innovative ideas for fixing the crisis at the border.
Clinton sounded off on Twitter Thursday over a recent report in The New York Times that alleges the government may have separated more children from illegal immigrants posing as their parents than previously reported.
“The Trump administration likely separated thousands more children from their parents at the Southern border than was previously believed.”
This is an outrage! We need hearings, answers, and solutions immediately. https://t.co/AJI0NBGQn9
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) January 17, 2019
The child separation policy started under a different administration and continued under the Trump administration, but Clinton’s apparently not interested in those details. Instead, she’s offering up the same solution that government bureaucrats have turned to for decades to avoid any real action to address the immigration crisis.
“’The Trump administration likely separated thousands more children from their parents at the Southern border than was previously believed,’” Clinton quoted in her tweet.
“This is an outrage!” she wrote. “We need hearings, answers, and solutions immediately.”
Because government hearings are exactly the type of thing that always leads to productive solutions.
The Times report focuses on a recently released report by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Inspector General that found that the number of children separated from adults at the border is higher than the 2,737 figure released by the agency in December.
“ … (T)hat 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 (in June 2018),” the Times reports.
“Thus, the total number of children separated from a parent or guardian by immigrant 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 care of children, and the Department of Homeland Security, which separated them from their parents.”
What’s also unclear is the total number of human traffickers who pose as the parents of guardians of children to smuggle them into the United States.
Regardless, DHS officials told the Times they’re simply following the laws enacted by Clinton and other politicians years ago.
“The report vindicates what DHS has long been saying,” spokeswoman Katie Waldman said. “For more than a decade it was, and continues to be, standard for apprehended minors to be separated when the adult is not the parent or legal guardian, the child’s safety is at risk, or serious criminal activity by the adult.
“We are required under the law that Congress passed to send all unaccompanied alien children to HHS,” she said.
How, exactly, more government hearings will change that situation is unclear.
As Hillary herself once said when testifying before Congress: “At this point, what difference does it make?”
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