Humanity? Thailand, not U.S., where it’s at

So we all watched over these last long days and nights not knowing if 12 children in Thailand from the Wild Boars soccer team would ever get out of a flooded cave and return to their families alive. Now they have. We know that they are safe at a hospital called Chiang Rai and so is their young coach and so this was a moment when the world felt as if it put some points on the board for a change, because a potential tragedy turned into this kind of triumph.

“This was an international story, one that tugged at the world's heartstrings,” Gov. Cuomo was saying Tuesday afternoon. “But the story of the children separated from their parents in Texas is an international story, too.”

The focus goes back on them now, or should, all the children used as pawns and bargaining chips by the government of the United States in a shameful moment in our country's history when people from places like Honduras were not just treated as potential criminals, but painted as potential terrorists by this President.

“I don't believe this is rampant incompetence,” Cuomo said. “I think there was a deliberateness to what they did. They wanted this. They wanted this kind of deterrent. You know what this was? It was a shakedown from the start. (President Trump) wanted a wall. He wanted it for more than a year. He didn't get his wall. ‘OK,' he said. ‘You don't give me my wall, I'm going to take your children away from you. We're going to take your children and some of them are going miles away, and you won't know where they are. And even when we start reunification, it will be long and hard and complicated. So now let me ask you a question: Do you still want to come across the border?' ”

Cuomo, a politician who does speak for the country we should still aspire to be, paused now.

“You look at everything that has happened since (Trump's) zero tolerance policy in April, and it really can only be one of two things,” he said. “It is gross incompetence, or it is purposeful. I am cynical enough to believe it is purposeful.”

Now we see how hard and long and complicated reunification, if you can still even call it that at this point, is going to be. Now our government says it needs more time to reunite these families, who were not the victims of a natural disaster the way the soccer children of Thailand were, just the victims of a Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security and Department of Health and Human Services. And this White House. All of them have not just forgotten what their mission is supposed to be, but have also forgotten why they wanted to serve their country, and how they are supposed to serve their country.

Here is a quote that tells you everything about what a clown college this entire process has become, from The New York Times: “Judge Dana M. Sabraw of the Federal District Court in San Diego had set a deadline of Tuesday for the youngest children to be returned, but government lawyers said Monday that of 102 such children now in government custody, the authorities have been able to identify, locate and vet the parents of only 54. The court order requires all 3,000 children to be returned to their families before the end of the month.”

On Tuesday morning, the feds said they'd even fallen short of the 54 number.

Of course the administration keeps talking about the laws, and how if families want to stay together, they should enter the country legally, as if Trump is just a big-hearted guy standing there at the border for all those playing by the rules, more a symbol of freedom and inclusiveness than Lady Liberty. Even though from what we can see, the President only really likes foreigners when he can put them to work at Mar-a-Lago.

And, as always, he wants the headbangers who have implemented this policy to be the heroes of this story, even as they try to clean up the mess Trump and his tame attorney general, Jeff Sessions, created with their zero tolerance in the first place.

“They wanted to separate these children, even knowing that federal law says that a child can't be in detention,” Cuomo said.

So some of them are still being held in Texas and some of the mothers are in custody, being aided by a nonprofit from Texas, Raices, one that has raised more than $20 million, and says it will spend as much money as it takes to get thousands of mothers and children back together, even as other children have been shipped around the country as if they are on tour.

Maybe we need Navy SEALs here to help rescue these families, the way the SEALs helped rescue those children in Thailand. Or maybe we should go back to using milk cartons, for parents and their children.

“Plan A was the wall,” Cuomo said. “Plan B was, we take your kids.”