The New Year Quote by Janet Reno

Power tries to sound like patience right up until it needs to sound like inevitability. Janet Reno’s line is built to make a coming act of coercion feel like the exhausted endpoint of reason. “We tried our best” and “for the longest time” are not just claims of effort; they’re moral cover, a preemptive rebuttal to the cameras that will soon frame federal force as cruelty. Time becomes an argument: if it dragged on, the state must have been restrained.

The sentence is also a careful act of agency management. Reno uses the passive “we were thwarted” to blur who, exactly, made which choices inside government, while sharpening culpability for the opposition: “those that said, No.” The capital-N “No” (in the spoken cadence) paints the other side as obstinate, almost childish, against a sober, procedural “we.” Then comes the clincher: “turn the boy over to his father.” Not “return,” not “send,” but “turn over” - the language of lawful custody, of rightful possession. “The boy” is a rhetorical de-personalization that keeps the focus on principle (parental rights, court orders) rather than the child’s fear or the spectacle of enforcement.

The context is the Elián González standoff of 2000, when Miami relatives resisted returning a Cuban child to his father in Cuba. Reno’s intent is to align the Justice Department with due process while delegitimizing emotional, exile-politics resistance. It works because it reframes a volatile cultural flashpoint as a simple, thwarted administrative duty - and makes the state’s muscle read as reluctant responsibility.