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There is also an issue of scale. Finding hotels for thousands of people spreads resources even further. It’s not impossible, but logistically it would be really complicated.
It's already complicated logistically. That's what federal agencies are supposed to do. Coordinate complicated logistics across the entire country and beyond.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
Yeah seems about right. I know if a couple of folks on federal government official travel that were overseas when that Iceland volcano exploded. With all the flights shutting down there were only first class seats left, but they weren't authorized to take those as that's "wasteful". Instead the government paid their hotel, per diem, and salary for the week of doing nothing (they were done with the reason they were there in the first place) which was way more than the cost of a first class ticket.
Pennywise pound foolish comes up a lot.
People keep saying the current system is unfortunately the best we can do for these kids. I strongly disagree and I've yet to hear any convincing arguments, just a lot of hand-wringing.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
If your point is that ideally, the hotel solution would be better, you won't hear me say otherwise. In fact, I've said repeatedly I'd love that.
It's just not something that can be done right now for a number of reasons already hashed out.
This is what can be done right now, with the resources available right now, and the logistical support set up right now, so it's being done right now because not doing something right now would be worse.
EDIT:
You won't hear me say anything about that either! Unfortunately, we have less than a 2/3rds majority of the Senate, and two Democratic Senators who are doubtlessly going to want to sacrifice kids to the altar of bipartisanship rather than dump the filibuster so we can get shit done on this.
Believe you me, I'd love to have a full overhaul of our frankly inhumane and appalling immigration system done and signed tomorrow, but that frankly isn't realistic.
My take, with regards to the hotel plan, is that they are the better solution from a comfort standpoint only.
Hotels are hard to secure, typically located inside cities and thus more vulnerable to people looking to hurt/traffic unaccompanied children, may not have a kitchen, and then you need multiple resources on each floor to monitor the children.
A large campus, like these facilities, allow for the children to be monitored, cared for, fed, and receive medical attention in a more organized and efficient way.
I don’t think the current approach is perfect and I hope the resources are out in place to improve things as much as possible.
I understand putting programs into motion take time. I want the start of that motion to be right now, so that they can be up and running as soon as possible.
How much time do we allow the Biden administration to "get into gear" or whatever, if one month after inauguration is not enough?
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
I mean, you can certainly decry the things they're doing as quickly as they can to reduce the suffering left by years of Trump's policies as awful, unacceptable, inhumane and whatnot, but the alternative of "Do what we can right now and try to keep things moving in the right direction" is "do nothing until we can somehow make everything better alkl at once", which is worse.
EDIT: If it helps any, it took until April of 2018, over a year past Inauguration 2017 for them to finally enact the zero tolerance policy that they were planning two weeks after Inauguration 2017.
And that was to START just separating kids from parents. Biden has the backlog of a literally unknown number of kids to take care of because they didn't fucking keep count.
It has been 35 days since Inauguration. A proper fix for this that isn't "emergency band-aid" is going to take months, plural, at the very least. It fucking sucks, but the scale of this particular atrocity is... Yeah.
Big.
This is for unaccompanied minors specifically.
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Okay, why. Why does it "just seem like the worse solution?" Why does it "seem sketchy?"
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
But when I am proposing what I perceive to be better solutions and am told that they aren't better than the current situation actually, the current situation is the best we can do for them, it sucks but it's the best, and no different alternatives are proposed...
If you really want things to improve, can you at least try and imagine a better solution, and articulate it in this thread? Convince me you're putting more thought into it than just... taking the administration at its word that things will improve so everybody just grit your teeth and endure this for an indeterminate amount of time.
Because that's how we get to several years later and we look back and go, holy shit, we basically just swapped which alphabet agency was ostensibly in charge of these places and nothing else happened.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
Next best option is to allocate a bunch more resources to the problem, but we've spent the last 40 years actively destroying the government's ability to solve a problem other than:
1) Bombing it
2) Fiddling with the tax code
Climate change means that the numbers of refugees is only going to be increasing in the coming years. If the government does not take big steps for big changes to how we handle refugees, migrants, and others, our current system of concentration camps and private prisons - sorry, detention facilities - are only going to grow and grow, until even our ability to maintain those is stretched to the breaking point.
Historically speaking, that's when more final solutions get explored.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
Based on experience, I don't think I can say anything that will "convince" you I've "put thought into it."
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Actually explaining the reasons as to why you feel about something, rather than just saying how you feel about something, would be a good start. Elucidate your thought process, not just the conclusion.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
I'm sure someone from the logistics or security side of things more directly could probably weigh in if you needed additional perspectives on why moving unaccompanied minors to hotels is untenable.
Right now, due to the scope of the problem in that we actually don't know the full scope of the problem, trying to mitigate things from "legitimately an atrocity" to "this is still bad, but at least they aren't in cages and we're working on getting them in touch with legal representation" is step 1 until we can get more information so we can start figuring out what to do from there.
I legit don't have a better solution than "Let's try and get this spread out during the worst pandemic in a literal century and keep the kids safe; once we have a better handle on how big this actually is, we can probably start thinking of other options" right now, because as indicated, the depth and breadth of this clusterfuck is just that bad.
Correct. My larger point is that the micro problem of how to treat undocumented minors cannot be solved without a solution to the macro problem of the default ideology of the United States since 1980 being that government action is in and of itself a problem. Until you solve that problem (and the attendant larger fix to American democracy), all "solutions" to the undocumented minor issue are going to be stopgap bandaids that are under resourced and inhumane.
I now understand and appreciate your stance on the matter. Thank you for taking the time to articulate this.
Perhaps getting the legal representation and guardianship process ramped up to minimize the time they have to be in these places is a more realistic ask for the immediate future. I just don't want stop-gap measures to become an excuse for anyone to avoid pursuing larger long-term solutions.
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Past a certain point it is gonna be a matter of getting Congress on board, but I'm pretty heartened by fact that we're already seeing this much movement in this short a time from the Executive. With, of course the caveat that while in real actual person time is way too fucking goddamn long.
Governments that are designed to be slow to do anything are slow to do anything. It sucks ass.
Don't believe me? Check literally any psychiatric hospital. There are some absolute horror shows in there, but also some really good ones. The common element is the people you interact with the most will be the techs. They maybe have a bachelor's degree, but honestly it isn't really needed. They just sit there and keep everyone safe as they can while keeping everything calm. Scaling it up would take some work, but it is not impossible. I worked at a place that when fully staffed could take on hundreds of kids with the ability to add more if needed. Where I work now runs usually at about 15 kids or so with no social worker on the unit most of the time. Just isn't really needed.
The only delays I would be comfortable with is building shit up, and hiring non-ICE people to staff the places. Everything else should take a lot less time.
506 kids still without their parents, and even those who’ve been reunited are likely traumatized for the rest of their lives, but at least progress is being made.
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I know it's hard, and it's good that they've made this progress in what was probably a complete absence of any records at all, but 15% just feels bad
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