This a thoughtful article from The New Yorker. BBM
The Case of the Missing Immigrant Children
"The confusion about which children were among that fifteen hundred has obscured a basic truth:
it is a bad thing when children are legally lost in America, with no one clearly accountable. Some immigration advocates may find that the government’s approach—call it vagueness, indifference, negligence, or contempt—has, in the past, worked for individual families who might otherwise be deported. (And the detention centers in which children are otherwise held, as my colleague
Jonathan Blitzer has written, are deeply troubled places.) But disappearing—not showing up for immigration hearings, avoiding all authorities, including those designed to protect or to educate—
still leaves the long-term outlook for the children highly uncertain. And that is when the sponsors, whom the government has, again, given power over these children, are acting with good will, which may not always be the case."
"His [Sessions'] definition of “smuggling” included travelling with a child of one’s own.
That accompanied child would be reclassified as unaccompanied."
"But, even in the months before the Sessions policy formally went into place, there were reports that
a hundred children under the age of four had been taken from their parents, in what amounted to a test run of the new policy, and reclassified as 'unaccompanied.'
"
"Kelly’s “whatever” defines a space where children are lost track of."