Lost Kids

Sometimes I check the news app on my computer before I shut it down, just to see what's been going on.  They feature news and opinion articles from several sources, and I don't remember which sources, but I read several articles the other day about those 1500 "lost" kids.  The consensus was that their parents had brought them into the country illegally and the authorities had to do something with the kids because they couldn't send them to jail with their parents.  The kids were fostered out to relatives and other allegedly reliable people of Mexican extraction.  These guardians were supposed to bring the kids back on a given date for a hearing, and they didn't show up.  The government people attempted to reach them by telephone, but most of them didn't answer their phones or respond to voice mail messages.  Certain people of the Democratic persuasion accused the government of negligently losing those kids, and there might be some truth to that.  Perhaps more care should have been taken in assigning the guardians, as it is now believed that many of them were illegal immigrants themselves.  To be fair, we should note that so many kids have been entering the country illegally the last few years, both with and without parents, that they have overwhelmed the system.

Since a certain amount of memory loss is normal at my age, I looked up the story of that Cuban kid.  I didn't know his name, but I searched Wiki for the name you provided. Here's what I found:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elián_González

The boy may not have been estranged from his father, but his father and mother were estranged from each other, which is what I meant.  I assumed that the mother had custody but, apparently, she took him out of Cuba without consulting with the father, which may have been illegal under Cuban law.  Of course Cuban law is Communist law, which makes it invalid in my book.  The father must have been a Commie himself because he refused an offer of asylum in the US, where there must be more Cubans than there are in Cuba anymore.  It appears that, once the kid was back in Cuba, he was brainwashed into becoming a Commie himself.  Well, at least they didn't just kill him.