On Friday's New Day show, as Texas Democratic Rep. Joaquin Castro appeared as a guest, substitute co-host David Gregory gave him a forum to complain that the Trump administration has lost track of illegal immigrant parents who were deported from the country without noting that many parents chose not to take their children with them when they were deported, while a portion also had criminal records.
At 8:31 a.m .Eastern, Gregory brought up the issue of children who are still separated from illegal immigrant parents:
The administration has made a couple of points -- one, that they're really going to task social service groups, the ACLU with helping to reunite these families, putting the onus on them, and also maybe changing that rule that would allow the government to keep the families together for a longer period of time so that you don't have this forced separation. Where do you come down on the best way forward?
Rep. Castro began his response by complaining about the Trump administration not knowing the locations of every parent who was deported, as if it were possible to easily keep track of people after they have left the country:
I'm astonished because the Trump administration told members of Congress directly and really told the American people that they knew where every parent and every child was located. Now, they're basically outsourcing the task of finding some of these parents over to the ACLU and perhaps other groups. That to me is an astonishing failure by the Trump administration -- by the federal government. Number one, they lied to us. And, second, they were so incredibly sloppy that they didn't keep track of the parents and the children, so that's a big concern.
Instead of pointing out that many parents declined to take their children with them because getting their children into the U.S. to live permanently may have been their primary goal anyway, Gregory followed up:
Five hundred seventy-two kids still separated from their families. The difficulty that the ACLU or others working on the behalf of these children will face without the government's help to reunify them, but is this an admission that the government has simply lost track?
Castro then reiterated his complaints:
Yeah, it pretty much is. That's what it sounds like. It sounds like kind of a de facto admission, 'Hey, we don't know where these people are, and can you help us out?' And the only thing that is missing there is kind of a plea: 'Will you please help us do this because we don't know where they are?' But that seems to be the situation. And that is a horrendous way for the Trump administration to be operating and to be treating human beings.
