Necessary steps in resolving the fate of thousands of children being held captive by the U.S. will be delayed at least another couple of days because a government attorney has dog-sitting responsibilities out of state and can’t attend a weekend court status conference.

U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw of the Southern District of California, Julia Ainsley of NBC News reported, “said he would agree to delay the [July 10] deadline for reunifying the youngest children if the government could provide a master list of all children and the status of their parents by 10 a.m. Pacific time on Monday. A government lawyer said she could not attend a status conference over the weekend because she had out-of-town dog-sitting responsibilities.” Daily Beast reports that “Sabraw initially asked the government to provide her with a list on the status of all the young children and their parents by 5 p.m Saturday” until the dog-sitting intervened.

As Reason‘s Jesse Walker tweeted: “You have to understand that dogs get really upset when they’re separated from the most important people in their lives.”

That bitterly ironic details isn’t the worst of what’s going on with the adjudication of the child-separation situation on the border. The government admitted today in court that “they cannot locate the parents of 38 migrant children under the age of 5.” For half of those 38 kids, the parents were already deported; half the parents are no longer in government custody but the government doesn’t know how to find them.

Government officials feel aggrieved in general at the stress caused by their practice, now halted, of separating parents and children in enforcing misdemeanor border-crossing crimes. Yesterday Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar complained of the rush to review the cases of the almost 3,000 child detainees to meet the court-imposed deadline. As reported also by Julia Ainsley of NBC, Azar said “It’s important to remember that information from children can at times be unreliable.” The method they are trying to use is cheek-swab DNA tests from all the captive children.

Judge Sabraw’s original deadlines for reunification were July 10 for kids under 5, and July 26 for those 5-17. Azar laments some of their traditional vetting processes may have to be abandoned in the fact of what he calls such “extreme” deadlines.

Reason’s past coverage on this issue.