Who is building and managing the database ICE and HHS are using to track all those thousands of immigrants caught at the U.S./Mexico border in Trump’s ‘zero tolerance’ racist crackdown? And did they bother to create a system that tracks the separated children and parents, so they can be reunited?
Buzzfeed tried to figure it out, and the government won’t say much. Nor will the tech companies helping Trump out.
Detaining immigrants sure is profitable.
Trump’s human trafficking partners concentration camp collaborators include tech companies such as Hewlett Packard, Thomson Reuters, Microsoft, Motorola, and Palantir, all of which have open contracts with ICE.
The Verge spotted that Dell also has a number of active contracts with the agency.
That’s how they planned the breaking up families at the border and detaining kids and adults separately part.
But did any thought go into using technology to reconnect the kidnapped kids with parents?
Government officials said this weekend there’s “a database” for that purpose.
But organizations working with undocumented immigrants told Buzzfeed they’re skeptical that any database exists that is designed to help connect parents with children:
The US government agencies in charge of reuniting immigrant families separated at the border claim to have streamlined the process with a central inter-agency database that tracks the location of children and parents. But those agencies are unable, or decline, to describe that process, and aid workers helping families say they’ve seen no evidence of such a database.
In a fact sheet released over the weekend, the Department of Health and Human Services said that it and the Department of Homeland Security “have a process established to ensure that family members know the location of their children and have regular communication.” That process, it said, was aided by “a central database which HHS and DHS can access and update when a parent(s) or minor(s) location information changes.”
But neither agency was willing or able to describe that database, explain when it was created, or say how the information in it was obtained. A spokesperson for DHS declined to comment on the record and referred the question to HHS. A spokesperson for HHS directed BuzzFeed News to its Administration for Children and Families. After repeated questions, an ACF spokesperson said she “did not have all the information readily available.”
A conference call that HHS held Tuesday afternoon, ostensibly to discuss the efforts at reuniting children with family members, didn’t address the database, and only four reporters were allowed to ask questions before the call was abruptly ended. HHS officials on the call did reveal that 2,047 children separated from their parents remain in HHS custody — that’s down six from the number HHS announced it was holding a week ago.