NBC news reports:
The Trump administration said in a court filing that reuniting thousands of migrant children separated from their parents or guardians at the U.S.-Mexico border may not be "within the realm of the possible."
The filing late Friday from Jallyn Sualog, deputy director of the department of Health and Human Services' Office of Refugee Resettlement, was an ordered response in an ACLU lawsuit challenging the government's separation of at least 2,737 children of migrants detained at the border since summer 2017.
…
Lee Gelernt, the ACLU's lead attorney in the suit being heard by U.S. District Court Judge Dana Sabraw in San Diego, called the response "shocking."
“The Trump administration’s response is a shocking concession that it can’t easily find thousands of children it ripped from parents, and doesn’t even think it’s worth the time to locate each of them," he said in a statement. "The administration also doesn’t dispute that separations are ongoing in significant numbers."
The House must immediately begin the process of Impeaching Kirsten Nielsen or risk losing any moral standing it might ever claim to have. The monster running DHS is unfit to run an ice-cream stand, let along ICE. She is an inept, immoral, intentional ignoramus who has refused and rebuffed every attempt at oversight. This latest admission, that DHS is just too sloppy and understaffed to put kids back with their families must be the last straw.
This is a power Congress has, given to it in Article II, Section 4. It is a power the framers clearly articulated during the
Almost two years ago, in The Power to Impeach Executive Officers Keith E. Whittington, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics at Princeton University, states:
Executive-branch officers who have proven to be a problem have generally been removable by the president, avoiding the need for the impeachment power. Executive officers mired in scandal have customarily had the good grace to resign from office rather than forcing the president’s hand. In 1876, President Ulysses Grant’s secretary of war, William Belknap, tendered his resignation when it became apparent that the House would impeach him for corruption. However, with corruption rampant in the Grant administration, the House decided to make an example of Belknap and voted to impeach him anyway. Uncertainty over whether the Senate still had jurisdiction over a private citizen helped secure his acquittal in a close vote.
Whittington actually wrote the article back in 2017 with an eye towards the antics of Jared Kushner. The House might take note and follow up on Nielsen’s ouster with an examination of JarJar:
Unlike Holder or Burford, Jared Kushner works in the White House itself as a senior adviser to the president. The House has not tested its impeachment power against such a presidential aide. There is at least a credible argument that a senior adviser to the president is not a “civil officer of the United States” subject to the impeachment power. But it would seem reasonable that Congress could reach such advisers if needed. The founding generation seemed to generally understand the concept of a “civil officer” quite broadly, and early commentators such as Justice Joseph Story thought the impeachment power extended to anyone holding a civilian post in the federal government. The idea that government officials must be accountable, and that those exercising public power and responsibility can be checked, is central to the constitutional design. Allowing those closest to the president to retain their positions of trust despite having committed high crimes and misdemeanors would be a strange anomaly within the constitutional system.
But first remove that child-abusing monster running DHS.
