And before anybody says “Biden still locks up migrant children,” temporarily holding an unaccompanied minor (for a few days until a relative is located) is not the same as forcibly taking kids from their parents.
Highlights: On Monday, the Biden administration reached a settlement in a lawsuit brought on behalf of families separated at the US-Mexico border due to Donald Trump’s so-called “zero-tolerance” policy, under which immigration agents removed thousands of migrant children from their parents.
The Trump administration knew it couldn’t properly keep track of children and parents after piloting the practice in 2017, an investigation by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General found. But it moved forward with family separations anyway.
Many parents were also deported without their children, which made it extraordinarily difficult to reunite those families.
There’s one smart sentence that Elon musk said at some point “I believe the president is a captain steering a very large ship with a very small rudder”.
Of course he can be blamed for getting stuff wrong, but intentionally creating chaos is a bit easier than getting things right, and as there is an infinite list of things to get right, usually things take time unfortunately.
Don’t get me wrong Biden is not a saint, most definitely not, but you can’t blame him for not fixing things instantaneously, and even an instant is a fairly long time when it comes to any government.
I never said it should be fixed instantaneously, but we are now getting into the final year of his term and his administration’s lawyers in the DOJ are still actively fighting to prevent those separated families from getting any kind of restitution. Again, it’s been over 5 years now since the multiple hundreds of remaining kids were first separated and are still being kept in squalid, prison-like conditions. Imagine spending 5 years in prison without charge and no end in sight. Burglars regularly get less time than that. Even if these kids can’t simply be released, they can at least be kept in better housing, which should absolutely be within Biden’s power and shouldn’t take years to arrange.
Are we supposed to just shrug all that off? Hell, maybe we are; most seem to not even care, evidenced by the downvotes just for pointing out this failure after someone tried to say it was no big deal. I, however, find this whole situation absolutely unconscionable top to bottom. I don’t care who’s in charge, they just better get it fixed. If whoever’s in charge isn’t getting it done, I’m going to call them out for it, period. In your mind, how long is an acceptable timeframe for this kind of thing? A decade? Longer? Because that’s the direction we’re heading right now. Most of those families that have been fortunate enough to be reunited are still being deported right afterward, too.
Biden can’t be squared with all the blame for causing this situation, but his actions since coming to office, especially in this, among his biggest failures as president IMO, are certainly not above reproach by any means. I also can’t see how Biden is some powerless small fry when he’s the head of government for basically the most powerful country on Earth. There are truly very few people in the world with as much power and influence as Biden wields as president of the US.
Anyway, in conclusion, I fully stand by what I said; the fact that hundreds of those kids are still in prison 5 years later is an abomination and a national embarrassment regardless of whoever’s in office. I don’t even know what to say to anyone who could disagree.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_administration_family_separation_policy
This Wikipedia article lists the timeline and a lot of the challenges.
A short timeline:
---- Biden Inauguration in January 20 2021 ----
Now in the timeline you will see that just 2 weeks after inauguration Biden signed an order and establishes a Task Force to take care of it. As he has a lot of things to do, this is probably the best way to handle the problem.
When you look into the Wikipedia page you will also notice that trump’s policy didn’t include a plan to reunite families. The administration also explained as early as June 2018 that they can only reunite 60 children, because they referred to the “central database”, and there was not enough information in there to reunite the other 666 children with their families.
You might want to argue further that “he should have done more” and “the children are still not reunited under Biden”, but let me talk in academic English for a second. The policy got the families fucked beyond repair. Biden tried his best but holy shit is there a lot of chaos to navigate. Let’s also agree on that fact that reuniting families without any information to base off of is really fucking hard. Also, you are saying the president has a lot of power, which is right. But do you realize how many problems a president has to take care of in a month? That’s a metric fuckton of equally important problems to tackle, half of which need to be formulated through very complicated legal jargon.
I conclude that Biden did everything he can. And I really think there’s topics which he can be blamed for. This is not the one.
Just to clear up some things in your comment:
I do not condone the harsh immigration policies, and I do not condone the separation of families through those. I wish those families and children the best. That said, I also face the harsh reality that I really do think there’s not much more to do for Biden. Sometimes things can be wrong, but there’s no one to blame who can make it right.
Also, the legal proceedings against the families Biden is wholly uninvolved in and there’s a range of factors that influence those proceedings. It’s a fairly lazy argument to fault him for a proceeding that is ongoing in which he has no direct involvement in.