Friday's Morning Joe show on MSNBC spent five minutes highlighting the case of a possible MS-13 gang member from El Salvador -- referred to as Raquel -- who was separated from her children at the border as correspondent Mariana Atencio and fill-in co-host Willie Geist fretted that the government is not returning her children to her quickly enough.
Atencio introduced "the story of one mother still separated from her two sons" as she noted that MSNBC is trying to look into "what are these red flags keeping these reunifications from happening."
The MSNBC reporter informed viewers that the government had reason to believe that she had connections to MS-13, but then raised doubts about whether this was, in fact, the case, noting that the government allowed her to go free after posting bail as she awaits her court date.
Without noting that Raquel's case was actually not part of the zero-tolerance policy of the Trump administration because she was believed to be a gang member, meaning she would have still been separated from her children under the old policy, Atencio suggested that the administration was not adhering to the court deadline to reunify families as she recalled that "she's one of the hundreds of parents who remain separated from their kids three weeks after a court-mandated deadline set for the Trump administration."
Atencio further complained that "this government's reunification plan seems to have failed."
And, as with other cases that MSNBC and CNN have given attention to, Atencio did not ask Raquel whether she tried applying for asylum in Mexico first before illegally crossing into the U.S.
