Listen, what follows isn’t about Melania Trump, former first lady, current doyenne of Palm Beach, but also maybe it is, at least a little bit: current first lady Jill Biden will have a role in the reunification of the children separated from their families at the border, CNN reported on Wednesday.
“As the first lady remarked on a ‘Charla’ with young Latinos earlier this week, her chief of staff, Ambassador Julissa Reynoso, will monitor the federal reunification effort given her background as a lawyer,” Biden spokesperson Michael LaRosa confirmed.
President Joe Biden will create a task force to work on reuniting these families and the first lady will have “input”—according to court filings, there are still 611 children without parents. They were removed from their parent’s or family’s care thanks to the Trump administration exploiting an Obama-era policy, which allowed the separation of children from their apparent guardian if they were deemed in danger. The Trump policy ended on Tuesday, when the Justice Department officially repealed the policy via memo to federal prosecutors (the Trump administration had already informally ended it after pressure). The 611 children have now endured up to four years of separation.
As Biden undoes many of Trump’s executive orders, it’s hard not to see this move on Jill’s part in the context of what Melania did and didn’t do. In June 2018, during the former first lady’s tenure, she made a trip to the border to visit the children who had been separated from their families and held in detention facilities, bringing the news media along. But the noise that her visit generated wasn’t at all focused on the humanitarian aspect of the visit, as she may have hoped. It never became her Princess Diana in a minefield moment. The Zara jacket that she wore to board the plane which read, “I really don’t care do u?” became the focus instead—mostly because it confused people.
What did she mean by wearing it? Her spokeswoman released a statement at the time saying that it meant nothing, just another example of the media reading messages where there are none. In a later interview, Melania said it was indeed a message for the “lef-wing media” itself.
In the same interview, Melania clarified that she believed the separation policy was “unacceptable,” but that message was also muddied when her former friend and aide Stephanie Winston Wolkoff leaked a phone call in October. In it, Melania is heard complaining about the media coverage of her trip, saying that she was the only one who went to the border, and echoing a Trumpian talking point that the children are taken better care of at the border facilities than they were wherever they came from.
Anyway, Godspeed to Jill and the task force as they try to undo one of the worst legacies of the Trump administration.
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