What is #WhereAreTheChildren

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Re: What is #WhereAreTheChildren

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Jun 18, 2018 7:39 am

After Traveling 2,000 Miles For Asylum, This Family's Journey Halts At A Bridge

By JOHN BURNETT, NPR • JUN 15, 2018

The Berduo family speaks with authorities as they try to cross the international bridge between Matamoros, Mexico, and Brownsville, Texas. VIEW SLIDESHOW 1 of 4
The Berduo family speaks with authorities as they try to cross the international bridge between Matamoros, Mexico, and Brownsville, Texas.
JOHN BURNETT / NPR
Listen Listening...0:00
Originally published on June 16, 2018 11:40 am
The Berduo family traveled nearly 2,000 miles from Guatemala to the international bridge between Matamoros, Mexico, and Brownsville, Texas, but they could go no further.

Under a new policy, federal border agents stationed in the middle of international bridges are turning away asylum seekers like the Berduos, telling them there is no room in U.S. Customs and Border Protection stations for them.

Since arriving on Monday, the family said they had tried three times to cross into the U.S., and three times border agents turned them back. On Tuesday, the nine family members, who range in age from 58 years to nine months, sat glumly at a picnic table on the Mexican side of the bridge.

"We've been here on the border for two days asking for asylum, but the U.S. government won't pay attention to us," said Victor Samuel Berduo, the family patriarch, with an expression of resigned exasperation. "They tell us to wait or go to a different bridge. But we don't know any other bridges."

Immigrant advocates say these are the latest victims of White House policies meant to discourage asylum seekers from coming to the nation's borders to ask for protection.

Up and down the southwest border, courtrooms are packed with immigrants arrested for unlawful entry. Youth shelters are filling up with immigrant children. Migrants are worried because Attorney General Jeff Sessions has sharply curtailed which cases qualify for asylum.

And now, border agents have begun turning away asylum seekers at ports of entry, telling them to come back another time. That leaves some immigrants, like the Berduos, in limbo.

"If we go back home," Berduo said, "they will kill us."

Then, in a gruesome show and tell, he presented his 23-year-old son, Wayner. He removed sunglasses to reveal a left eye socket mangled by a bullet, and he pulled away a towel to show an ugly scar that zigzags up the length of his right arm, the result of four more bullets.

His father said a drug lord sent two assassins to kill his sons one day last December. As Victor explained it, his boys made a living taking tourists to a place called the Blue Waterfall in the Peten province of northern Guatemala. But the narco owns the property and doesn't like visitors.

Berduo's wife, Estafania, opens a plastic bag containing a stack of papers, the documentation they will use to back up their plea for asylum.

One document, that bears an official-looking stamp and a signature from a local judge, affirms the family is a victim of "real threats" and urges any "civil, military or diplomatic" authority in a receiving country to allow them "to live peacefully."

Customs and Border Protection, which is in charge of the nation's border crossings, says it is overwhelmed with asylum seekers fleeing domestic abuse and gang violence in Central America. Statistics show a 58 percent jump in families and a 14 percent increase in unaccompanied children asking for protection at ports of entry this year compared to last year.

Agents have been posted in the middle of pedestrian bridges across the U.S.-Mexico border to check documents and turn away applicants.

"No one is being denied the opportunity to make a claim of credible fear or seek asylum. CBP officers allow more people into our facilities for processing once space becomes available," the agency says in a statement.

Immigrant advocates say this is just the latest obstacle for asylum seekers under the Trump administration.

Under a new "zero tolerance" policy announced last month, immigrants who cross the border illegally will be prosecuted, even if they are seeking asylum, and they may have their children taken away and sent to government-contracted shelters.

Then, earlier this week, Sessions narrowed the path to asylum and said domestic abuse would no longer be accepted as a valid claim.

Christina Patiño Houle, director of the Rio Grande Valley Equal Voice Network, says the administration is giving a mixed message. Federal officials are telling asylum applicants to stop wading across the river and entering unlawfully. Rather, they should come through an official port of entry.

"A message is being broadcast across the nation that migrants should be seeking asylum through official channels, and it's just not possible," Patiño Houle says. "What we're seeing on the ground is that people are being turned away. They're being told that either there's no room or they cannot enter the bridge."

U.S. officials say there may be a holdup at some bridges but that, ultimately, immigrants who wait a matter of hours or days are permitted to enter.

"Port of Entry facilities were not designed to hold hundreds of people at a time who may be seeking asylum," CBP says in its statement.

But there are not hundreds of migrants a day trying to cross the Matamoros/Brownsville bridge, according to Mexican officials interviewed on the Matamoros side. They estimate only 10 to 15 asylum seekers show up a day, and they're surprised that U.S. agents are saying there's no room in their station.

Late Tuesday, the Berduo family decided to try again. They pick up their bags and troop up the concrete walkway that spans the murky, sluggish Rio Grande.

Two immigration agents sweating in dark blue uniforms await them at the top of the bridge.

"Did you bring documents to enter?" one of them asks.

Victor Berduo answers, "We are asking for asylum because we cannot return to Guatemala."

The officers frown and call a supervisor when they see a reporter with a microphone accompanying the Guatemalan family. The supervisor is bald and wears sunglasses. He examines their papers and passports. He tells the reporter to stop recording.

"You can either stop or we won't do anything," he says.

The reporter answers that he is on the Mexican side of the international boundary.

"It doesn't matter," the supervisor replies. "I'm actually trying to help them."

Another agent gets a call on his radio: "We have room for one family."

The agent tells the Berduos family they will only accept three people: their daughter-in-law, Yeni Johary Leal Cruz, and her two small children. The six remaining family members will have to return to Mexico and wait.

On this sweltering afternoon, American tourists are passing by on the bridge walkway, carrying bottles of tequila and pictures of Pancho Villa, and looking on quizzically as an anxious family conversation ensues.

"We can't do it. We're one family. She always goes with us," says an anguished Estefania.

The agents are adamant: They will only take three.

Finally, the family relents. The 20-year-old daughter-in-law, her eyes brimming with tears, collects her children, a nine-month-old and a two-year-old. The agent shoulders her pink backpack and escorts her into America.

The rest of the family walks back down the concrete bridge to the picnic area on the south side of the river to wait some more.

"Tomorrow I hope they'll attend us and our family can be complete again," says Victor Berduo, hopefully. "This is what we want."
http://kut.org/post/after-traveling-200 ... lts-bridge
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Re: What is #WhereAreTheChildren

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Jun 18, 2018 7:45 am

David Begnaud

These images were just released by border patrol @CBP showing the McAllen, Texas detention facility that we were allowed to tour today. For now, we can only rely on what they give us. They will not allow us inside to film on our own. Why? “Privacy”; they don’t want faces shown

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Hundreds of children wait in Border Patrol facility in Texas

McALLEN, Texas (AP) — Inside an old warehouse in South Texas, hundreds of children wait in a series of cages created by metal fencing. One cage had 20 children inside. Scattered about are bottles of water, bags of chips and large foil sheets intended to serve as blankets.

One teenager told an advocate who visited that she was helping care for a young child she didn’t know because the child’s aunt was somewhere else in the facility. She said she had to show others in her cell how to change the girl’s diaper.

The U.S. Border Patrol on Sunday allowed reporters to briefly visit the facility where it holds families arrested at the southern U.S. border, responding to new criticism and protests over the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy and resulting separation of families.

More than 1,100 people were inside the large, dark facility that’s divided into separate wings for unaccompanied children, adults on their own, and mothers and fathers with children. The cages in each wing open out into common areas to use portable restrooms. The overhead lighting in the warehouse stays on around the clock.

The Border Patrol said close to 200 people inside the facility were minors unaccompanied by a parent. Another 500 were “family units,” parents and children. Many adults who crossed the border without legal permission could be charged with illegal entry and placed in jail, away from their children.

Reporters were not allowed by agents to interview any of the detainees or take photos.

Nearly 2,000 children have been taken from their parents since Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the policy, which directs Homeland Security officials to refer all cases of illegal entry into the United States for prosecution. Church groups and human rights advocates have sharply criticized the policy, calling it inhumane.

Stories have spread of children being torn from their parents’ arms, and parents not being able to find where their kids have gone. A group of congressional lawmakers visited the same facility Sunday and were set to visit a longer-term shelter holding around 1,500 children — many of whom were separated from their parents.

“Those kids inside who have been separated from their parents are already being traumatized,” said Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon, who was denied entry earlier this month to children’s shelter. “It doesn’t matter whether the floor is swept and the bedsheets tucked in tight.”

In Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, the busiest corridor for people trying to enter the U.S., Border Patrol officials argue that they have to crack down on migrants and separate adults from children as a deterrent to others.

“When you exempt a group of people from the law ... that creates a draw,” said Manuel Padilla, the Border Patrol’s chief agent here. “That creates the trends right here.”

Agents running the holding facility — generally known as “Ursula” for the name of the street it’s on — said everyone detained is given adequate food, access to showers and laundered clothes, and medical care. People are supposed to move through the facility quickly. Under U.S. law, children are required to be turned over within three days to shelters funded by the Department of Health and Human Services.

Padilla said agents in the Rio Grande Valley have allowed families with children under the age of 5 to stay together in most cases.

An advocate who spent several hours in the facility Friday said she was deeply troubled by what she found.

Michelle Brane, director of migrant rights at the Women’s Refugee Commission, met with a 16-year-old girl who had been taking care of a young girl for three days. The teen and others in their cage thought the girl was 2 years old.

“She had to teach other kids in the cell to change her diaper,” Brane said.

Brane said that after an attorney started to ask questions, agents found the girl’s aunt and reunited the two. It turned out that the girl was actually 4 years old. Part of the problem was that she didn’t speak Spanish, but K’iche, a language indigenous to Guatemala.

“She was so traumatized that she wasn’t talking,” Brane said. “She was just curled up in a little ball.”

Brane said she also saw officials at the facility scold a group of 5-year-olds for playing around in their cage, telling them to settle down. There are no toys or books.

But one boy nearby wasn’t playing with the rest. According to Brane, he was quiet, clutching a piece of paper that was a photocopy of his mother’s ID card.

“The government is literally taking kids away from their parents and leaving them in inappropriate conditions,” Brane said. “If a parent left a child in a cage with no supervision with other 5-year-olds, they’d be held accountable.”

Dr. Colleen Kraft, the head of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said that she visited a small shelter in Texas recently, which she declined to identity. A toddler inside the 60-bed facility caught her eye — she was crying uncontrollably and pounding her little fists on mat.

Staff members tried to console the child, who looked to be about 2 years old, Kraft said. She had been taken from her mother the night before and brought to the shelter.

The staff gave her books and toys — but they weren’t allowed to pick her up, to hold her or hug her to try to calm her. As a rule, staff aren’t allowed to touch the children there, she said.

“The stress is overwhelming,” she said. “The focus needs to be on the welfare of these children, absent of politics.”
https://www.apnews.com/9794de32d39d4c6f ... P_Politics



‘I Can’t Go Without My Son,’ a Mother Pleaded as She Was Deported to Guatemala

As a growing number of families are separated as part of the Trump administration’s attempt to control illegal immigration, some parents are being deported before recovering their children.

June 17, 2018

Elsa Ortiz, 25, was deported to Guatemala from the United States on June 5 without her son Anthony, 8.Marian Carrasquero/The New York Times
Elsa Ortiz, 25, was deported to Guatemala from the United States on June 5 without her son Anthony, 8.Marian Carrasquero/The New York Times

They’d had a plan: Elsa Johana Ortiz Enriquez packed up what little she had in Guatemala and traveled across Mexico with her 8-year-old son, Anthony. In a group, they rafted across the Rio Grande into Texas. From there they intended to join her boyfriend, Edgar, who had found a construction job in the United States.

Except it all went wrong. The Border Patrol was waiting as they made their way from the border on May 26, and soon mother and son were in a teeming detention center in southern Texas. The next part unfolded so swiftly that, even now, Ms. Ortiz cannot grasp it: Anthony was sent to a shelter for migrant children. And she was put on a plane back to Guatemala.

“I am completely devastated,” Ms. Ortiz, 25, said in one of a series of video interviews last week from her family home in Guatemala. Her eyes swollen from weeping and her voice subdued, she said she had no idea when or how she would see her son again.

As the federal government continues to separate families as part of a stepped-up enforcement program against those who cross the border illegally, the authorities say that parents are not supposed to be deported without their children. But immigration lawyers say that has happened in several cases. And the separations can be traumatic for parents who now have no clear path to recovering their children.

“From our work on the border, we have seen a significant increase in the number of moms separated from their children, and many of them have reported they didn’t even have a chance to say goodbye before the separation, “ said Laura Tuell, the global pro bono counsel at Jones Day, an international law firm providing assistance to refugees in Texas, whose lawyers spoke with Ms. Ortiz.


Elsa Ortiz had a photograph of her and Anthony on her phone.Marian Carrasquero/The New York Times
“Some of the women we have encountered in detention at the border have reported facing pressure to deport voluntarily in order to be reunified with their children,” she said.

Critics say that Ms. Ortiz’s saga is the latest indication that the administration’s new enforcement strategy was rolled out without adequate planning. The processing and detention of migrant families can involve three Homeland Security agencies — Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Citizenship and Immigration Services — as well as the departments of Justice and Health and Human Services. Poor coordination among them has made it hard to track children and parents once their paths diverge in the labyrinthine system.

“I cannot convey enough how much utter chaos there is,” said Michelle Brané, director of migrant rights and justice at the Women’s Refugee Commission, a research and advocacy organization that monitors immigration issues. “The government does not have a proper system in place to track families and coordinate.”

In some cases, parents and children have gone weeks without being able to communicate with one another and without knowing one anothers’ whereabouts. From April 19 to May 31, a total of 1,995 children who arrived with 1,940 adults were separated from their parents, according to administration officials.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the “zero tolerance” policy officially in early May to stanch the flow of migrants, mainly from Central American countries like Guatemala. It calls for prosecuting nearly all of those who are found to have entered the United States illegally. Previously, most border-crossers who were caught would have faced deportation but not criminal charges, and would not have been separated from their children.

Children whose parents have been arrested are transferred to the custody of the Health and Human Services Department, whose staff screens them, finds housing and remains responsible for them.

From that point, migrant parents and children become separate legal cases in the maze of government bureaucracy, and keeping them linked has proved challenging. Different legal protections are afforded to juveniles and adults in the immigration system, and as a result, reuniting families can take months or longer, several legal experts said.

Elsa Ortiz spoke to a social worker in the United States from her home in Guatemala.Marian Carrasquero/The New York Times
In federal court, parents typically plead guilty to the misdemeanor offense of illegal entry. Many are then likely to accept “expedited removal” from the country, in the hope of being reunited quickly with their children. But children cannot be subject to expedited removal; they are automatically entitled to a full hearing before an immigration judge, and their cases take longer to resolve.

“Once the parent and child are apart, they are on separate legal tracks,” said John Sandweg, who was acting director of ICE during the Obama administration.

Reunification becomes particularly difficult when a parent is deported without the child and is no longer on American soil, Mr. Sandweg said; in those cases, “there is a very high risk that parents and children will be permanently separated.”

Federal immigration officials say parents are not supposed to be deported without their children, and if this occurs, parents have two options: They can have a family member who is living in the United States take sponsorship and custody of the child, or the child can be flown home and delivered into the custody of the authorities in the parent’s home country — and from there to the parent.

Normally, an ICE spokeswoman said, the agency works with the Health and Human Services department “to reunite the parent and child at the time of removal, and with the consulate to assist the parent with obtaining a travel document for the child.” In any case, she said, the agency has procedures in place to make sure detained parents have either telephone or in-person contact with proceedings related to their child. A government hotline has been set up to help parents locate their children.

A spokesman for Health and Human Services said that the department does not discuss individual cases of minors in its facilities.

Ms. Ortiz’s greatest fear is that she won’t be able to return to the United States to claim custody of her son, and that without her intervention, he won’t be returned to her.

Ms. Ortiz provided detailed accounts and documents that attest to her detention, criminal prosecution and separation from her son. The story of how the two of them came to be in the United States involves years of difficult single parenthood in Guatemala, with both economic setbacks and threats of violence from the rising lawlessness in her community.

A few years ago, Ms. Ortiz fell in love with a “good man,” she said, who treated her son as his own child. The man, named Edgar, moved to the United States to work in construction and had been sending money to help support them. He asked that his last name not be disclosed because he fears repercussions from federal authorities.

This year, Ms. Ortiz, fearful of the thugs who were increasingly preying on people in her neighborhood, decided it would be best to take her son and join Edgar in the United States.

They made it to Texas safely, but shortly afterward, as they walked along a road, they were intercepted by border agents, arrested and taken to a station. Ms. Ortiz said she was interviewed the next day by border officials, and that is when she was told her son would be separated from her. “I begged, please don’t do this, don’t take him,” she said.

About an hour later, her son’s name was called. Mother and son stood up, and over Ms. Ortiz’s loud protests, Anthony was led away. A 12-year-old girl went with him.

Elsa Ortiz is back in the small rural village in Guatemala where her family lives.Marian Carrasquero/The New York Times
Ms. Ortiz worries that her son, who was detained in the United States while she was deported, will not be returned to her.Marian Carrasquero/The New York Times
A few days later, Ms. Ortiz said, she boarded a bus filled with migrants and was taken to a federal court in South Texas, where she pleaded guilty to illegal entry. Ms. Ortiz was later transferred to another facility, in Laredo, Tex., where she was finally able to make telephone calls.

She contacted Edgar to tell him that their plan had gone awry, and that she and her son had been arrested and then separated.

“She was crying desperately,” Edgar recalled in a telephone interview.

An officer at a detention center gave Elsa Ortiz a phone number to get in contact with her son, but said she was deported before she could use it.Marian Carrasquero/The New York Times
By this time, it had been more than a week since she had seen Anthony, and she still had no idea where he was.

At one point, an immigration officer handed her a handwritten note on a pink slip of paper with the words, “Call Shelter Son” and a telephone number. But before Ms. Ortiz could get access to a phone to make the call, she said, another officer summoned her and several other women to inform them that they were booked on a deportation flight that was leaving shortly.

What about Anthony? No one would listen, she said.

Ms. Ortiz recalled sobbing heavily as she reluctantly climbed the steps to the plane that would take her and dozens of other deported migrants back to Guatemala early in June. She said she was the last to board.

“Please don’t put me on the plane,” she remembered pleading over and over in Spanish. “I can’t go without my son.”

“I was shaking, I could barely walk,” Ms. Ortiz recalled. She said that an American immigration officer escorting her across the tarmac was also in tears. “She told me to talk to the boss when I got inside the plane,” Ms. Ortiz said.

But he did not listen.

“I cried the entire flight,” she said. “When I arrived at the airport in Guatemala, I was almost fainting. They gave me a tranquilizer.”

She phoned Edgar from Guatemala the next day, and he reached out to a lawyer at Jones Day, who provided him with the government hotline number.

After several attempts, Edgar got a woman on the line who asked for the boy’s name and date of birth. “She told me he is fine — he has clothes, shoes and his own bed, we are taking good care of him,” Edgar recalled.

Later that day, a caseworker from the shelter called the cellphone number of the boy’s grandfather, José Ortiz, in Guatemala — the only telephone number the boy had memorized. She put Anthony on the phone, and his grandfather said he seemed cheerful.

“He shared how he was learning English, playing games and being well treated,” Ms. Ortiz said.

Finally, on Thursday, she got to speak to Anthony herself. She told him to be good. They joked about an imaginary character — “the clown” — who they always pretended slept between them in the bed they shared. But she said Anthony seemed worried — about her.

“Mammy, are they treating you well in the house where you are at? Anthony asked.

“Yes,” she said, knowing that he would not know — not until the shelter workers told him, and she dreaded how he’d respond when they did — that the house was in Guatemala.

Elsa Ortiz now lives with her father, stepmother and siblings outside Guatemala City.Marian Carrasquero/The New York Times
Marian Carrasquero contributed reporting from Guatemala.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/17/us/i ... ss&emc=rss
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Re: What is #WhereAreTheChildren

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Jun 18, 2018 9:30 am

WHO TAUGHT TRUMP ABOUT WEAPONIZED MIGRATION?

June 18, 2018/4 Comments/in emptywheel, Indefinite Detention, Racism /by emptywheel


Amid the ongoing family separation crisis, I want to look back at something that raised a few eyebrows among the more generalized nausea at Trump’s behavior at the G-7. The WSJ reported this comment Trump made to Shinzo Abe in the context of the horror it elicited from European leaders and along with a related comment he made to Emmanuel Macron.

At one point, Mr. Trump brought up migration as a big problem for Europe and then told Mr. Abe, “Shinzo, you don’t have this problem, but I can send you 25 million Mexicans and you’ll be out of office very soon,” according to the senior EU official who was in the room. A sense of irritation with Mr. Trump could be felt, “but everyone tried to be rational and calm,” the person said.


The EU official said at another point, in a discussion over Iran and terrorism, Mr. Trump verbally jabbed at Mr. Macron, “You must know about this, Emmanuel, because all the terrorists are in Paris,’” the senior official said.

What Trump is talking about when he suggests he could send 25 million Mexicans to Japan is weaponized migration, as envisioned here, the deliberate creation of migration influxes to take out a political leader. In spite of the salience of racism in our politics, it’s not a common concept here. But in Europe, where migration from a destabilized Northern Africa and Middle East poses (as I heard a few MEPs say just before the election in 2016) the single biggest threat to the EU project, it’s a very real concern. For some time, the political cost of her human rights approach to migration has been the key weakness Angela Merkel’s opponents exploit. And in the days since the G-7, the topic of migration has threatened, for the second time this year, to collapse Merkel’s governing coalition.

For some time, there have been signs that the migration from (especially) Syria had been weaponized in two ways: first, by the seeming release of waves of migration that in their intensity would overwhelm Europe’s ability to respond. And more importantly, by the inclusion of terrorists, including returning European Arabs, among the waves of migrations. Most notably, four of the men who attacked the Stade de France on November 13, 2015 came in with a wave of other migrants. While Europeans respond more rationally to terrorist attacks than Americans do, by tying this one to migration, it made the waves of migrants in Europe far more politically toxic than they would otherwise be.

And while it was clear that the migration from Libya and Syria was being orchestrated for maximum damage, at the time (and still) it wasn’t clear who was behind it. Turkey (as the host of many of the Syrian refugees), Saudi Arabia (which maximized the instability of Syria to support ousting Assad), and Syria itself were all possibilities. On February 25, 2016 testimony viewed as particularly inflammatory, then NATO Commander Phillip Breedlove placed the blame squarely on Russia and Syria.

To the South from the Levant through North Africa, Europe faces a complicated mix of mass migration spurred by state instability and state collapse.

And masking the movement of criminals, terrorists and foreign fighters. Within this mix, Daesh — ISIL or Daesh, as I called them, is spreading like a cancer, taking advantage of paths of least resistance, threatening European nations and our own with terrorist attacks. Its brutality is driving millions to flee from Syria and Iraq, creating an almost unprecedented humanitarian challenge.

Russia’s enter into the fight in Syria has wildly exacerbated the problem, changing the dynamic in the air and on the ground. Despite public pronounces (sic) to the contrary, Russia (inaudible) has done little to counter Daesh but a great deal to bolster the Assad regime and its allies. Together, Russia and the Assad regime are deliberately weaponizing migration from Syria. In an attempt to overwhelm European structures and break European resolve.


Around the time Breedlove gave this testimony, GRU hackers would hack Breedlove as a key focus of the DC Leaks campaign that paralleled — but should in my opinion be considered a separate campaign from — the hack and leak of the DNC.

So Trump’s comment, while addressed to Abe, was instead intended for the benefit of Macron and, even more specifically, Merkel, and subsequent events have only borne out the salience of the comment.

I want to know who prepped the fantastically unprepared Trump to deliver this line. Trump knows virtually no policy well enough to deliver a zinger like this, and yet he knew how best to deliver a line to exploit the real vulnerabilities of all the European members of the G-7. And while, from the comments kicking off his campaign by inventing rapist immigrations from Mexico, Trump is perhaps at his best when he’s mobilizing racism, this comment had a more sophisticated vector than his usual bombast. Further, Trump public comments are, so often, just a regurgitation of the last person he engaged closely with. Which makes me acutely interested in who has both the access and the ability to direct his interests such that he managed this line.

There are certainly candidates in his orbit. Obviously, Stephen Miller is all too happy to politicize immigration. But in truth, it’s not clear (though the jury may still be out) that he’s any good at it. The Muslim ban has serially backfired (though we’ll see what SCOTUS says in a few hours), and unified centrists and even conservative supporters of America’s wonderful diversity against Trump in early days of his regime. The family separation policy, thus far, has provided Democrats an effective way to humanize Trump’s vicious policies, and the White House’s failure to manage the messaging of Miller’s hostage-taking has only made things worse. The other key policy effort to politicize immigration, Jeff Sessions’ focus on MS-13, has largely been a laughable dud, both because those who actually comment on the policy recognize that MS-13 is an American phenomenon, and because MS-13 has never done anything as spectacular as ISIS and Al Qaeda with which to generate visceral fear or even much press attention on the policy.

Steve Bannon, who has hob-nobbed with the European far right and is far more sophisticated than Miller, is another likely source for Trump’s remarkably sophisticated understanding of weaponized migration.

I think neither John Bolton nor John Kelly would be the culprit, the former because he’s a different kind of asshole than the racists Miller and Bannon, the latter because his racism has always lagged Trump’s and he seems to have lost much of the control he has over Trump in recent days. Mike Pompeo is also a racist, and a savvy one at that, but I’m not sure even he is cynical enough to prep this line from Trump.

Whoever it was, that line is not just horrifying on its face, but horrifying because whoever explained how weaponized migration works when wielded by competent actors seems to have privileged access to Trump right now.

Update: I first posted this at 8:27. At , Trump tweeted this:

Image

https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/06/18/w ... migration/
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Re: What is #WhereAreTheChildren

Postby liminalOyster » Mon Jun 18, 2018 10:53 am

Good piece SLAD. It has to be Bannon right? It seems like the piece of Trump-ism which is most clearly drawn from White Nationalist movements in Europe. And it's a mindfuck to watch it playing out right now.

I'm not so sure about the MS-13 dismissal though:

MS-13 has never done anything as spectacular as ISIS and Al Qaeda with which to generate visceral fear or even much press attention on the policy.


They've not done anything so spectacular at a national level but they have at a local level. Ironically, though, because their victims are often Latin American immigrants, the crimes don't make national press when they clearly would if they were white victims. From last year on the East Coast:

Police: MS-13 members in Maryland stab man more than 100 times and decapitate him

As many as 10 members of the MS-13 street gang lured a man into a park in Wheaton, Md., spoke with one another over walkie-talkies as he arrived, stabbed him more than 100 times, decapitated him and then cut out his heart, according to police documents made public Wednesday in Montgomery County District Court.

The first alleged attacker to be arrested, Miguel "Timido" Angel Lopez-Abrego, 19, was charged with first-degree murder and held in jail after a brief hearing Wednesday.

"He is noted as being the first individual to thrust a knife into the chest of the decedent," Assistant State's Attorney Kelly McGann said in court. Police continue to search for other suspects.

Police found the body buried in a grave, deep in the woods of Wheaton Regional Park, that the attackers dug before the slaying, according to court records. Authorities have not been able to identify the victim, who they believe may have been from Annapolis. He was wearing a sweatshirt, and those who knew him would have noticed he was missing a lower tooth near the front of his mouth, police said.

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The investigation began in early September, when detectives spoke to an informant who said he knew of an MS-13 murder that occurred in the spring of this year in the park. The informant led detectives to the gravesite, according to court records. The remains were exhumed and examined by the Maryland Medical Examiner's Office.

"The victim had been stabbed over one-hundred times, decapitated, dismembered, and his heart had been excised from his chest and thrown into the grave," detectives wrote in court papers.


Police have arrested and charged Miguel A. Lopez-Abrego, 19, with first-degree murder in connection with a MS-13 gang killing. (Courtesy of Montgomery County Police/Courtesy of Montgomery County Police)
[Police: A man whose body was found in a Wheaton park died of a homicide]

Although the victim's identity was unknown, Montgomery detectives developed Lopez-Abrego as a suspect.

On Sept. 29, patrol officers stopped a car driven by another MS-13 member in which Lopez-Abrego was a passenger. Detectives interviewed Lopez-Abrego, but he denied any involvement in the park murder, the court records state.

Montgomery police tried to find Lopez-Abrego after that interview but couldn't find him.

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Law enforcement agents, looking for a different MS-13 suspect from Maryland — Milton Portillo-
Rodriguez, accused of a murder in Anne Arundel County — tracked that man to Avery County, N.C.

1:49
What is MS-13?
Here is what you need to know about MS-13, a street gang with an international reach. (Claritza Jimenez/The Washington Post)

On Nov. 4, a group of about 10 agents from the U.S. Marshals Service and the local sheriff's office arrived at a condominium, Avery County Sheriff Kevin Frye said in a telephone interview Wednesday.

A person — but not the suspect — answered the door. The deputies and agents found Portillo-
Rodriguez, Lopez-Abrego and a third MS-13 member from Maryland attempting to hide inside, Frye said.

The third suspect is accused in a different attack in another secluded part of the same Wheaton park.

In that incident, as many as 15 assailants surrounded two victims, punching them, kicking them and striking them with large tree limbs, according to arrest records.

The victims were hospitalized but survived.

Police identified the suspect in that assault as Edwin Ruiz-
Urrutia, 19. He is being held on no-bond status in Montgomery County on charges including ­attempted second-degree murder and first-degree assault.

[MS-13 gains recruits and power in U.S. as teens surge across border]

Frye, the Avery County sheriff, said the three alleged gang members found in the apartment hadn't made much of an impact. "They were new arrivals, and no one really knew who they were," he said.

Lopez-Abrego is a citizen of El Salvador, is in the United States illegally and is currently in immigration proceedings, officials from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said Wednesday.

They also said they had lodged a detainer against one of the other suspects arrested in North Carolina, an indication he may also be in the country illegally.

[Behind the rise in seemingly chaotic MS-13 violence: A structured hierarchy.]

The charging documents do not cite a motive in the slaying in the park, but investigators believe that the suspects had planned to carry it out for about two weeks.

They also alleged that Lopez-Abrego helped dig the grave and "waited near the edge of the wood line with a handheld ­walkie-talkie radio to alert the other suspects of the victim's arrival." He also used a 15-inch knife in the attack, according to police.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/pu ... story.html
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Re: What is #WhereAreTheChildren

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Jun 18, 2018 10:58 am

there is no excuse on earth for trump to kidnap babies and put them in jail.....oh I should say wire rooms
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: What is #WhereAreTheChildren

Postby liminalOyster » Mon Jun 18, 2018 11:28 am

seemslikeadream » Mon Jun 18, 2018 10:58 am wrote:there is no excuse on earth for trump to kidnap babies and put them in jail.....oh I should say wire rooms


SLAD, are you responding to me? I don't follow.

Yes, there is definitely no excuse in the world for Trump or anyone else on earth even in human history on this planet or any other or no planet at all to put babies in jails or wire rooms.
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Re: What is #WhereAreTheChildren

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Jun 18, 2018 11:44 am

sorry no I wasn't responding to you ....just what is happening ....the excuses the trump administration is making are the worst of the worst lies they have told



CBS/AP June 18, 2018, 10:00 AM
U.N. rights chief: Migrant family separations "unconscionable"
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GENEVA -- The U.N. human rights chief is blasting the Trump administration over its new policies separating migrant children from their parents after entering the United States from Mexico, saying they've affected nearly 2,000 kids in the last six weeks and put them at risk of "serious health consequences." The High Commissioner for Human Rights is calling for an immediate end to the practice.

Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein, the high commissioner, says it's "unconscionable" that any country would seek to deter parents from migrating "by inflicting such abuse on children."

He spoke at Monday's opening of a regular Human Rights Council session, his last before his term ends in August.

Thousands protest Trump admin's family separation policy
GOP proposal would ban family separations at border
Trump falsely claims law behind family separations, blames Dems
Al-Hussein quoted the American Academy of Pediatrics, which he said had called the practice of forcing parents to part with their children "government-sanctioned child abuse" which may cause "irreparable harm," with "'lifelong consequences."


"The thought that any state would seek to deter parents by inflicting such abuse on children is unconscionable. I call on the United States to immediately end the practice of forcible separation of these children," al-Hussein said.

"People do not lose their human rights by virtue of crossing a border without a visa," he said, adding, "I deplore the adoption by many countries of policies intended to make themselves as inhospitable as possible by increasing the suffering of many already vulnerable people."

The American Academy of Pediatrics, cited by al-Hussein, has been one of the most vocal groups to criticize the U.S. government policy of separating parents from their children.


In an op-ed published over the weekend in the Los Angeles Times, the group's President, Dr. Colleen A. Kraft, spoke of touring a facility where children are being held, where she saw a little girl, "her face splotched red from crying, her fists balled up in frustration, pounding on a play mat in the shelter. No parent was there to scoop her up, no known and trusted adult to rub her back and soothe her sobbing."

Speaking Monday morning to "CBS This Morning," Dr. Kraft did say that separating children from their parents by forces was a "form of child abuse," and called for an end to the policy.


The AAP said in an article published last week that its, "opposition to family separation stems from the serious health consequences this practice has on children. Its 2017 policy statement Detention of Immigrant Children urges that separation of a parent or primary caregiver from his or her children should never occur, unless there are concerns for the child's safety at the hand of the parent. Highly stressful experiences, including family separation, can cause irreparable harm to lifelong development by disrupting a child's brain architecture. Toxic stress, which is caused by prolonged exposure to heightened stress, has detrimental short- and long-term health effects."

Zeid, a Jordanian prince, also raised concerns about countries including Syria, Myanmar, Hungary, Nicaragua, Israel, North Korea, and India- and Pakistan-controlled parts of Kashmir.

Zeid outgoing UN High Commissioner for Human Rights attends the Human Rights Council in Geneva
Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein, outgoing United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights attends the Human Rights Council at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, June 18, 2018. REUTERS
He denounced the lack of access provided by U.N. member states to rights investigators, noting China has accumulated 15 pending requests in the last five years.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-poli ... e-un-says/



12,000 immigrant children in our care ----- health official
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: What is #WhereAreTheChildren

Postby liminalOyster » Mon Jun 18, 2018 11:50 am

seemslikeadream » Mon Jun 18, 2018 11:44 am wrote:sorry no I wasn't responding to you ....just what is happening ....the excuses the trump administration is making are the worst of the worst lies they have told


yes yes and yes. There has been so much Trump hysteria (IMO of course) but this is different. This is bad and it looks like the realization of a fantasy even Jared Taylor would've known better than to speak in public.
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Re: What is #WhereAreTheChildren

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Jun 18, 2018 11:57 am

to tell the truth even I didn't think trump would do this ....he is kidnapping children and holding them hostage until he gets the money for his wall


the lights are being keep on 24 hours a day

is that torture for children?
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: What is #WhereAreTheChildren

Postby liminalOyster » Mon Jun 18, 2018 12:18 pm

seemslikeadream » Mon Jun 18, 2018 11:57 am wrote:the lights are being keep on 24 hours a day

is that torture for children?


Where did you read that?
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Re: What is #WhereAreTheChildren

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Jun 18, 2018 12:26 pm


[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoncXfYBAVI[/youtube]

Listen to Children Who’ve Just Been Separated From Their Parents at the Border

ProPublica has obtained audio from inside a U.S. Customs and Border Protection facility, in which children can be heard wailing as an agent jokes, “We have an orchestra here.”

by Ginger Thompson June 18, 3:51 p.m. EDT
THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION
The 45th President and His Administration

Este artículo pronto estará disponible en español.

The desperate sobbing of 10 Central American children, separated from their parents one day last week by immigration authorities at the border, makes for excruciating listening. Many of them sound like they’re crying so hard, they can barely breathe. They scream “Mami” and “Papá” over and over again, as if those are the only words they know.


The baritone voice of a Border Patrol agent booms above the crying. “Well, we have an orchestra here,” he jokes. “What’s missing is a conductor.”

Then a distraught but determined 6-year-old Salvadoran girl pleads repeatedly for someone to call her aunt. Just one call, she begs anyone who will listen. She says she’s memorized the phone number, and at one point, rattles it off to a consular representative. “My mommy says that I’ll go with my aunt,” she whimpers, “and that she’ll come to pick me up there as quickly as possible.”

An audio recording obtained by ProPublica adds real-life sounds of suffering to a contentious policy debate that has so far been short on input from those with the most at stake: immigrant children. More than 2,300 of them have been separated from their parents since April, when the Trump administration launched its “zero tolerance” immigration policy, which calls for prosecuting all people who attempt to illegally enter the country and taking away the children they brought with them. More than 100 of those children are under the age of 4. The children are initially held in warehouses, tents or big box stores that have been converted into Border Patrol detention facilities.

Condemnations of the policy have been swift and sharp, including from some of the administration’s most reliable supporters. It has united religious conservatives and immigrant rights activists, who have said that “zero tolerance” amounts to “zero humanity.” Democratic and Republican members of Congress spoke out against the administration’s enforcement efforts over the weekend. Former first lady Laura Bush called the administration’s practices “cruel” and “immoral,” and likened images of immigrant children being held in kennels to those that came out of Japanese internment camps during World War II. And the American Association of Pediatricians has said the practice of separating children from their parents can cause the children “irreparable harm.”

Still, the administration had stood by it. President Trump blames Democrats and says his administration is only enforcing laws already on the books, although that’s not true. There are no laws that require children to be separated from their parents, or that call for criminal prosecutions of all undocumented border crossers. Those practices were established by the Trump administration.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions has cited passages from the Bible in an attempt to establish religious justification. On Monday, he defended it again saying it was a matter of rule of law, “We cannot and will not encourage people to bring children by giving them blanket immunity from our laws.” A Border Patrol spokesman echoed that thought in a written statement.

In recent days, authorities on the border have begun allowing tightly controlled tours of the facilities that are meant to put a humane face on the policy. But cameras are heavily restricted. And the children being held are not allowed to speak to journalists.

The audio obtained by ProPublica breaks that silence. It was recorded last week inside a U.S. Customs and Border Protection detention facility. The person who made the recording asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation. That person gave the audio to Jennifer Harbury, a well-known civil rights attorney who has lived and worked for four decades in the Rio Grande Valley along the Texas border with Mexico. Harbury provided it to ProPublica. She said the person who recorded it was a client who “heard the children’s weeping and crying, and was devastated by it.”

The person estimated that the children on the recording are between 4 and 10 years old. It appeared that they had been at the detention center for less than 24 hours, so their distress at having been separated from their parents was still raw. Consulate officials tried to comfort them with snacks and toys. But the children were inconsolable.

Read More

He Was About To Pick Up His Newborn Son After Surgery When He Was Arrested By ICE
The case of Oscar Millan shows ICE’s renewed focus on strict immigration enforcement. Under the Obama administration, agents had discretion in cases of immigrants with gravely sick children.
The child who stood out the most was the 6-year-old Salvadoran girl with a phone number stuck in her head. At the end of the audio, a consular official offers to call the girl’s aunt. ProPublica dialed the number she recited in the audio, and spoke with the aunt about the call.

“It was the hardest moment in my life,” she said. “Imagine getting a call from your 6-year-old niece. She’s crying and begging me to go get her. She says, ‘I promise I’ll behave, but please get me out of here. I’m all alone.’”

The aunt said what made the call even more painful was that there was nothing she could do. She and her 9-year-old daughter are seeking asylum in the United States after immigrating here two years ago for the exact same reasons and on the exact same route as her sister and her niece. They are from a small town called Armenia, about an hour’s drive northwest of the Salvadoran capital, but well within reach of its crippling crime waves. She said gangs were everywhere in El Salvador: “They’re on the buses. They’re in the banks. They’re in schools. They’re in the police. There’s nowhere for normal people to feel safe.”

She said her niece and sister set out for the United States over a month ago. They paid a smuggler $7,000 to guide them through Guatemala, and Mexico and across the border into the United States. Now, she said, all the risk and investment seem lost.

The aunt said she worried that any attempt to intervene in her niece’s situation would put hers and her daughter’s asylum case at risk, particularly since the Trump administration overturned asylum protections for victims of gang and domestic violence. She said she’s managed to speak to her sister, who has been moved to an immigration detention facility near Port Isabel, Texas. And she keeps in touch with her niece, Alison Jimena Valencia Madrid, by telephone. Mother and daughter, however, have not been able to speak to one another.

The aunt said that Alison has been moved out of the Border Patrol facility to a shelter where she has a real bed. But she said that authorities at the shelter have warned the girl that her mother, 29-year-old Cindy Madrid, might be deported without her.

“I know she’s not an American citizen,” the aunt said of her niece. “But she’s a human being. She’s a child. How can they treat her this way?”
https://www.propublica.org/article/chil ... ion-policy



Listen to Children Who’ve Just Been Separated From Their Parents at the Border

ProPublica has obtained audio from inside a U.S. Customs and Border Protection facility, in which children can be heard wailing as an agent jokes, “We have an orchestra here.”

by Ginger Thompson June 18, 3:51 p.m. EDT
THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION
The 45th President and His Administration

Este artículo pronto estará disponible en español.

The desperate sobbing of 10 Central American children, separated from their parents one day last week by immigration authorities at the border, makes for excruciating listening. Many of them sound like they’re crying so hard, they can barely breathe. They scream “Mami” and “Papá” over and over again, as if those are the only words they know.


The baritone voice of a Border Patrol agent booms above the crying. “Well, we have an orchestra here,” he jokes. “What’s missing is a conductor.”

Then a distraught but determined 6-year-old Salvadoran girl pleads repeatedly for someone to call her aunt. Just one call, she begs anyone who will listen. She says she’s memorized the phone number, and at one point, rattles it off to a consular representative. “My mommy says that I’ll go with my aunt,” she whimpers, “and that she’ll come to pick me up there as quickly as possible.”

An audio recording obtained by ProPublica adds real-life sounds of suffering to a contentious policy debate that has so far been short on input from those with the most at stake: immigrant children. More than 2,300 of them have been separated from their parents since April, when the Trump administration launched its “zero tolerance” immigration policy, which calls for prosecuting all people who attempt to illegally enter the country and taking away the children they brought with them. More than 100 of those children are under the age of 4. The children are initially held in warehouses, tents or big box stores that have been converted into Border Patrol detention facilities.

Condemnations of the policy have been swift and sharp, including from some of the administration’s most reliable supporters. It has united religious conservatives and immigrant rights activists, who have said that “zero tolerance” amounts to “zero humanity.” Democratic and Republican members of Congress spoke out against the administration’s enforcement efforts over the weekend. Former first lady Laura Bush called the administration’s practices “cruel” and “immoral,” and likened images of immigrant children being held in kennels to those that came out of Japanese internment camps during World War II. And the American Association of Pediatricians has said the practice of separating children from their parents can cause the children “irreparable harm.”

Still, the administration had stood by it. President Trump blames Democrats and says his administration is only enforcing laws already on the books, although that’s not true. There are no laws that require children to be separated from their parents, or that call for criminal prosecutions of all undocumented border crossers. Those practices were established by the Trump administration.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions has cited passages from the Bible in an attempt to establish religious justification. On Monday, he defended it again saying it was a matter of rule of law, “We cannot and will not encourage people to bring children by giving them blanket immunity from our laws.” A Border Patrol spokesman echoed that thought in a written statement.

In recent days, authorities on the border have begun allowing tightly controlled tours of the facilities that are meant to put a humane face on the policy. But cameras are heavily restricted. And the children being held are not allowed to speak to journalists.

The audio obtained by ProPublica breaks that silence. It was recorded last week inside a U.S. Customs and Border Protection detention facility. The person who made the recording asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation. That person gave the audio to Jennifer Harbury, a well-known civil rights attorney who has lived and worked for four decades in the Rio Grande Valley along the Texas border with Mexico. Harbury provided it to ProPublica. She said the person who recorded it was a client who “heard the children’s weeping and crying, and was devastated by it.”

The person estimated that the children on the recording are between 4 and 10 years old. It appeared that they had been at the detention center for less than 24 hours, so their distress at having been separated from their parents was still raw. Consulate officials tried to comfort them with snacks and toys. But the children were inconsolable.

Read More

He Was About To Pick Up His Newborn Son After Surgery When He Was Arrested By ICE
The case of Oscar Millan shows ICE’s renewed focus on strict immigration enforcement. Under the Obama administration, agents had discretion in cases of immigrants with gravely sick children.
The child who stood out the most was the 6-year-old Salvadoran girl with a phone number stuck in her head. At the end of the audio, a consular official offers to call the girl’s aunt. ProPublica dialed the number she recited in the audio, and spoke with the aunt about the call.

“It was the hardest moment in my life,” she said. “Imagine getting a call from your 6-year-old niece. She’s crying and begging me to go get her. She says, ‘I promise I’ll behave, but please get me out of here. I’m all alone.’”

The aunt said what made the call even more painful was that there was nothing she could do. She and her 9-year-old daughter are seeking asylum in the United States after immigrating here two years ago for the exact same reasons and on the exact same route as her sister and her niece. They are from a small town called Armenia, about an hour’s drive northwest of the Salvadoran capital, but well within reach of its crippling crime waves. She said gangs were everywhere in El Salvador: “They’re on the buses. They’re in the banks. They’re in schools. They’re in the police. There’s nowhere for normal people to feel safe.”

She said her niece and sister set out for the United States over a month ago. They paid a smuggler $7,000 to guide them through Guatemala, and Mexico and across the border into the United States. Now, she said, all the risk and investment seem lost.

The aunt said she worried that any attempt to intervene in her niece’s situation would put hers and her daughter’s asylum case at risk, particularly since the Trump administration overturned asylum protections for victims of gang and domestic violence. She said she’s managed to speak to her sister, who has been moved to an immigration detention facility near Port Isabel, Texas. And she keeps in touch with her niece, Alison Jimena Valencia Madrid, by telephone. Mother and daughter, however, have not been able to speak to one another.

The aunt said that Alison has been moved out of the Border Patrol facility to a shelter where she has a real bed. But she said that authorities at the shelter have warned the girl that her mother, 29-year-old Cindy Madrid, might be deported without her.

“I know she’s not an American citizen,” the aunt said of her niece. “But she’s a human being. She’s a child. How can they treat her this way?”
https://www.propublica.org/article/chil ... ion-policy



What It’s Like Inside a Border Patrol Facility Where Families Are Being Separated

The Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy has overwhelmed Ursula, where children sleep in cages, the lights never go off, and detainees are brought in 24 hours a day.

By Zoë CarpenterTwitter Today 8:46 am

Inside the McAllen Border Patrol facility where more than 1,000 immigrants are being detained.
McAllen, Texas

The dog kennel: That’s how the Border Patrol processing facility in McAllen is known, because of the chain-link fencing penning more than a thousand migrants inside. The 77,000-square-foot facility—often called “Ursula,” because of the street it’s on—lies just a few miles north of the US-Mexico border in the Rio Grande Valley, the busiest corridor for unauthorized migrants. Ursula is one of the first places immigrants are taken to after being apprehended by Border Patrol—and now, the facility is the epicenter for the family separations that are occurring because of the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy towards border crossers.

A large cage inside held dozens of young boys and teenagers without their families, some of whom looked as young as 5. A few slept on green mats with silver Mylar blankets pulled tightly around them. A few water bottles and bags of chips lay strewn around. Otherwise, the cages were bare, without toys or books. Separate areas held groups of girls; men and women alone; and mothers and fathers with their children. The overhead lights never go off. In one pen, a woman named Valesca sat on the ground, holding her 1-year-old son. She cried as she recounted leaving another child behind in Guatemala. She’d been inside the processing center for four days.

Under normal circumstances, adults confined in the facility are supposed to stay only 12 hours before being sent to court hearings or other detention centers. But across the border region, detention facilities, children’s shelters, and the legal system are overwhelmed. In May, the Trump administration issued a directive to prosecute all unauthorized border crossers in federal court, rather than to process them through immigration courts. The criminal charges mean extra paperwork, and a flood of cases into the legal system. The Border Patrol’s Rio Grande Valley office is now charging more than a 1,000 adults each week with illegal entry, a misdemeanor.

In one area of the Ursula facility, computers have been set up for “virtual processing,” so that Border Patrol agents in other cities can process the paperwork of detainees being held here. Ursula has only 10 agents permanently stationed there, plus hundreds of temporarily assigned agents, and they can’t handle the volume on their own. Detainees are brought in and out of the facility 24 hours a day. As of noon on Sunday, Ursula held 1,129 people, including 528 families and nearly 200 children who’d crossed the border without their parents. The facility has only four social workers onsite.

Zero Tolerance Immigration Policy
The shift to criminal prosecutions is also causing the systematic separation of parents and children. According to Border Patrol officials who gave reporters a brief tour of the Ursula facility on Sunday, children are automatically taken away from anyone being criminally prosecuted. The Rio Grande Valley sector does not separate parents from children younger than 4—though that policy doesn’t apply to anyone with a prior criminal conviction, including misdemeanor offenses, according to Border Patrol agent Carmen Qualia. More than 1,100 children in the Rio Grande Valley sector alone have been taken from their parents in the last six weeks, according to Border Patrol sector chief Manuel Padilla, and more than 2,000 nationwide since early April—an average of 45 children a day.

Parents and children are then cast into separate channels of the federal bureaucracy. Parents are sent into ICE custody and to federal court, where many are sentenced to “time served,” and put into deportation proceedings. Children go into the custody of the Department of Health and Human Service’s Office of Refugee Resettlement. That transfer is supposed to take place within 72 hours. According to John Lopez, the acting deputy Border Patrol agent at Ursula, it’s possible that a parent could go to court and come back to Ursula the same day, only to find that their child has already been moved to another facility.

Current Issue

It’s not clear what the government’s process is for reunifying these families. Officials at the Ursula processing center showed a handout that they are giving to parents that instructs them to call an ICE or ORR hotline. “We are told inside here, ‘Oh, it’s just a very short period—they go to a judge and then they’re reunified.’ That’s not what we’re hearing,” said Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley, who toured the Ursula facility and others in the Rio Grande Valley region on Sunday with other Democratic members of Congress. Some parents have been deported while their children remain in US custody. “The reality is it’s very hard for the parents to know where there kids are and be able to connect with them,” Merkley said.

For the group of lawmakers, the most distressing visit occurred at the end of day, at the Port Isabel Detention Center, a remote facility surrounded by a swampland near the Gulf of Mexico. There, Merkley and several others met with 10 women, most from Honduras, who’d been separated from their children, one as young as 3. Only some of them know where their children were taken: to shelters elsewhere in Texas, but also as far as Miami and New York. One woman worried about her child’s health, because no one collected information about her child’s medical condition when they were separated. Another had been told that her child would be put up for adoption. “It was the most disturbing thing I heard all day,” said Rhode Island Representative David Cicilline. “They were sobbing, sobbing uncontrollably.” None of the women has been able to talk to a lawyer.

The legislators said they are particularly concerned about the treatment of asylum seekers. One woman at Port Isabel said she’d turned herself in at a legal port of entry, only to be criminally prosecuted for illegal entry. “It’s perfectly legal to, at a checkpoint, ask for asylum,” Merkley said. Earlier in the day, his group visited the border crossing in Hidalgo, where there have been reports of Border Patrol officers turning away people before they can get into the United States to ask for asylum. “What they’re doing is making it very difficult for those seeking asylum to cross at the legal border points,” Merkley said. “It’s part of a coordinated strategy to stop asylum seekers from ever being able to make their case.” Two weeks ago, he said, he saw dozens of families camped out on the bridge, waiting for a chance to ask for asylum.

In Brownsville, the congressional group toured a former Walmart that has been converted into a shelter, called Casa Padre, for teenage boys who crossed the border alone or who have been separated from their parents. Southwest Key, the company that runs Casa Padre and many other shelters for migrant children, has hired more than 800 workers just in the past week in order to keep up with rising numbers of kids being sent to shelters because of the “zero-tolerance” policy. The organization is still trying to hire 90 more mental-health-care providers for Casa Padre alone. The legislators asked for, but were not given, the locations of other Southwest Key shelters where younger children and girls are being held. “They are in some of these facilities, but they won’t tell us where they are,” said Wisconsin Representative Mark Pocan.

Border Patrol agents at the Ursula facility emphasized that detainees had access to showers, clean clothes, and three hot meals a day, as well as snacks, water, and bathroom access whenever they requested it. At Casa Padre, lawmakers acknowledged that staff were doing their best to care for the children. But no matter how nice the facilities are, parental separation may be doing irreparable harm, particularly to younger children, pediatricians have warned. “Those kids inside who have been separated from their parents are already being traumatized,” said Merkley. “It doesn’t matter whether the floor is swept, and the bedsheets tucked in tight.”

The impression left by the various site visits was of agencies scrambling to catch up with a policy decision made far away from the realities of the border. “They don’t quite know how to deal with this policy because it’s so new. You’ve got these big numbers of people coming in…. it’s just a real mess,” said Representative Pocan. Border Patrol agents at the McAllen facility sometimes gave conflicting answers to reporters about policy, such as when children under 4 could or couldn’t be separated from their parents. At one point in McAllen, a Border Patrol agent moved to block the window of an individual cell, after realizing that it contained a woman who stood with her back against the wall, an arm covering her face. “Do not use cell 18,” read a sign taped above the door.

Meanwhile, further west in Tornillo, Texas, government contractors are hastily building a tent encampment to house 4,000 teen boys, including some who were removed from their parents after crossing the border. The Border Patrol is trying to escalate separations: In the Rio Grande region, only about 40 percent of those eligible are currently being criminally charged; the goal is 100 percent. President Trump has said he will not change the policy unless Democrats capitulate to various demands to tighten immigration enforcement, including funding a border wall. “The president of the United States is literally holding these kids separated from their parents as hostages to try to pass his version of some kind of immigration legislation that’s not related to the need to separate parents from their families,” said Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen, outside the Casa Padre shelter in Brownsville. “It is a cynical, evil policy.”

https://www.thenation.com/article/like- ... -facility/



Image


Trump admin discussed separating moms, kids to deter asylum-seekers in Feb. 2017

WASHINGTON — The idea of separating migrant children from their mothers was discussed during the earliest days of the Trump administration as a way to deter asylum-seekers, according to notes from a closed-door DHS meeting.

Notes from a town hall held for Citizenship and Immigration Services asylum officers on Feb. 2, 2017, show that the agency's asylum chief, John Lafferty, told the officers they might have to "hold mothers longer" and "hold children in HHR/ORR," an acronym for facilities for children run by HHS.

Notes from the meeting were first obtained by MSNBC.

The Trump administration has repeatedly maintained that the increasing number of children being separated from their mothers at the U.S. southern border is not a policy of its own making but just a tragic byproduct of enforcing the law against illegal border crossers.


Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said on Twitter Sunday: "We do not have a policy of separating families at the border. Period."

She added that asylum-seekers would be protected from separations as they always had been: "For those seeking asylum at ports of entry, we have continued the policy from previous administrations and will only separate if the child is in danger, there is no custodial relationship between 'family' members, or if the adult has broken a law."

But in the town hall two weeks after President Donald Trump's inauguration, Lafferty laid out a number of policies specifically intended to lower the number of immigrants claiming asylum. According to the notes, he provided attendees with the latest asylum numbers, which were at their highest point in 20 years in 2016, and then said the administration was "in the process of reviewing" a number of policies, including separation of parents and children, to try to curb those numbers.

Some of the proposals, like raising the bar for passing the initial interview for claiming asylum, have already been implemented. Other policies, like detaining "almost everyone coming over," have run into logistical difficulties.

"Deep humanitarian issues"

Nielsen and Attorney General Jeff Sessions say women and children will only be separated when they are caught crossing the border "illegally," which they define as crossing between designated ports of entry.

NBC News has found that some women are separated from their children even if they are legally claiming asylum and not being referred for prosecution. In those cases, the children are kept in the same facility, but they are still separated for days without being told whether they will be reunited.


Former USCIS Director Leon Rodriguez, who served under the Obama administration, said families who presented themselves for asylum between ports of entry were not previously prosecuted.

"We understood that the border had to have integrity," Rodriguez said. "But we also had a pretty deep awareness of why people were coming. There were deep humanitarian issues that were driving them here."

DHS did not respond to a request for comment.

There is no evidence to date that the new policy has deterred families from crossing between points of entry. The monthly totals decreased from 9,653 in April to 9,485 in May, the month the policy was enacted.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigr ... eb-n884371
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Re: What is #WhereAreTheChildren

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Jun 20, 2018 8:24 am

Michigan’s department of civil rights reports babies as young as three months old are arriving in the state after being taken from their parents.

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Racist Demagogue
By Josh Marshall | June 19, 2018 11:50 am
This requires an explicit mention.

Democrats are the problem. They don’t care about crime and want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our Country, like MS-13. They can’t win on their terrible policies, so they view them as potential voters!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 19, 2018

The use of the word “infest” to talk about people is literally out of the Nazi/anti-Semites’ playbook for talking about the Jewish threat. It was also a standard for talking about Chinese in the western United States and it remains part of the vocabulary for talking about Romani (Gypsies) in parts of Europe. This is the most hard-boiled kind of racist demagogic language, the kind that in other parts of the world has often preceded and signaled the onset of exterminationist violence. The verb “to infest” is one generally used to describe insects or vermin (rats), creatures which are literally exterminated when they become present in a house or building or neighborhood.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog




Corey Lewandowski, who said "womp womp" on national TV today regarding a 10-year old immigrant girl with Down Syndrome being taken from her mother, works for a PAC that gets donations from a company that owns private immigration detention facilities.
Image


Michael Avenatti

We are discovering that most of our clients have had their children shipped away across many states (1,000 miles is not unusual). Some are facing deportation without their children and do not know if they will ever see them again. This is permanently destroying families. #Basta




trump just said the media is helping smugglers and traffickers

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Re: What is #WhereAreTheChildren

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Jun 20, 2018 2:07 pm

Image
Torn from immigrant parents, 8-month-old baby lands in Michigan

Tresa BaldasUpdated 9:34 a.m. ET June 20, 2018
The president of the American Academy of Pediatrics says migrant children being separated from their parents at the border are suffering from child abuse. Veuer's Elizabeth Keatinge has more. Buzz60

Four days ago, a Homeland Security official proclaimed: “We are not separating babies from parents.”

Yet in the middle of the night, two baby boys arrived in Grand Rapids after being separated from their immigrant parents at the southern border weeks ago.

One child is 8 months old; the other is 11 months old. Both children have become part of a bigger group of 50 immigrant children who have landed in foster care in western Michigan under the Trump administration's zero-tolerance border policy.

The average age of these children is 8, a number that has alarmed foster care employees who are struggling to comfort the growing group of kids who are turning up in Michigan at nighttime, when it's pitch-dark outside. They're younger than ever, they say. And they are petrified.

"These kids are arriving between 11 p.m. and 5 a.m. Not only are they being separated from their family, they are being transported to a place that they don't know in the middle of the night," said Hannah Mills, program supervisor for the transitional foster care program at Bethany Christian Services, which is currently assisting the displaced children. "We have found on many occasions that no one has explained to these children where they are going."

According to Mills, some of these displaced children got picked up right at the airport by a foster family, while others wound up at a foster care center, begging to talk to their parents. Many have gone 30 days or more without talking to their parents because their parents can't be located, she said.


Bianey Reyes, center, and others protest the separation of children from their parents in front of the El Paso Processing Center, an immigration detention facility, at the Mexican border on June 19, 2018, in El Paso, Texas. (Photo: Joe Raedle, Getty Images)

“These kids are hysterical. They’re screaming out for mom and dad,” said Mills, who speaks Spanish and can converse with the children, noting only a handful have learned some English.

Mills, who has worked with displaced, immigrant children for six years, said the foster agency is dealing with a new, troubling element: Getting unaccompanied children on the phone with their parents. Typically, this takes about three days, she said. But now it's taking up to a month or more because the parents are detained and the agency can't locate them.

"That's probably one of the most detrimental things," Mills said. "At least if we can get a kid to speak with their parent, they can feel safe."

Equally upsetting, Mills said, is watching children when they do finally get on the phone with a parent. For example, she recalled, a tearful 7-year-old on the phone with her mother asking her, 'Are you OK? Are you hurt? Is someone hurting you?' "

"All of it is incredibly upsetting," Mills said, stressing: "The difference is, we're seeing so many more younger kids."

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has steadfastly maintained that its goal is to protect the nation's borders, enforce immigration laws and send a strong message to immigrants that if they cross the border unlawfully, they will be prosecuted and their kids taken away.

There is no federal law that mandates children and parents be separated at the border, though the practice has led to nearly 2,000 kids being misplaced in the past six weeks — a phenomenon that has triggered a firestorm of controversy. Many religious groups, social activists and immigrant-sympathizers are calling for an end to the practice while Trump supporters are saying let him do his job.

On Tuesday, the Michigan Department of Civil Rights announced that it's assessing the impact of Trump’s zero-tolerance policy on the state of Michigan and the detained immigrant children, stating it "has a duty to make sure their civil rights are protected."

“We have received reports and are very concerned that the children arriving here are much younger than those who have been transported here in the past. Some of the children are infants as young as 3 months of age and are completely unable to advocate for themselves," Agustin V. Arbulu, Executive Director of Michigan Department of Civil Rights said in a statement.

The American Association for Justice also condemned the family separation policy on Tuesday, stating: “These actions are risking the safety and well-being of innocent children. We call on the administration to immediately halt this practice and to reunite these traumatized families. This is not who we are as a nation. We can and must do better.”

Opinion:

But the Trump administration is not backing down, stressing the policy is about preserving and protecting America's borders and upholding the law. Moreover, it insists, the policy is not new, claiming children have long been placed in foster care when their parents were criminally charged with an immigration violation.

"What has changed is that we no longer exempt entire classes of people who break the law," Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said in a White House briefing Monday. "Here is the bottom line: DHS is no longer ignoring the law."

She later added: "We are a country of compassion. We are a country of heart. ... We must fix the system so that those who truly need asylum can in fact receive it."

President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans desperately searched Tuesday for an end game to the administration's contentious zero-tolerance immigration policy that has drawn fire from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.

Trump said Tuesday he wants the legal authority to detain the children along with the adults and "promptly remove families together as a unit."

Contact Tresa Baldas: tbaldas@freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter @Tbaldas. John Bacon of USA Today contributed to this report.
https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/ ... 714527002/





Lawsuit Alleges Immigrant Children Were Forcibly Injected with Psychiatric Drugs
The practice is being compared to the "old Soviet Union."
By Chris Sosa / AlterNet June 20, 2018, 7:53 AM GMT


A new lawsuit claims that children held at Shiloh Treatment Center, a government contractor in Texas that houses undocumented minors, are being held down and injected with psychiatric drugs.

Children were reportedly told that they wouldn't be released to relatives until they submitted to the drugs. The lawsuit also alleges that children were told lies about the content of the drugs by being told they were "vitamins."

Tulsa World reports the analysis of a psychiatric expert:

“You don’t have to be a rocket scientist here; it looks like they’re trying to control agitation and aggressive behavior with antipsychotic drugs,” said Mills, who practices in Washington, D.C. and was an expert witness for a lawsuit that in 2008 stopped the federal government from forcibly administering antipsychotic drugs to deportees. “You don’t need to administer these kinds of drugs unless someone is plucking out their eyeball or some such. The facility should not use these drugs to control behavior. That’s not what antipsychotics should be used for. That’s like the old Soviet Union used to do.”

According to affidavits, "Parents and the children themselves told attorneys the drugs rendered them unable to walk, afraid of people and wanting to sleep constantly."

The allegations in the lawsuit add to a larger picture of the administration of President Donald Trump facilitating human rights abuses in defiance of both domestic and international law.
https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-polit ... tric-drugs
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Re: What is #WhereAreTheChildren

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Jun 21, 2018 5:23 pm

FLOTUS spox confirms Mrs. Trump wore a jacket to visit border kids that reads: "I really don't care. Do you?" Spox says: "It's a jacket. There was no hidden message. After today's important visit to Texas, I hope the media isn't going to choose to focus on her wardrobe."

Image


LOCKED THEM UP
Trump’s New Plan for Immigrants: Jail Them on Military Bases
Family separation may be over, but mass detention will continue with the help of the Pentagon. And the administration wants to loosen regulations on how it can treat children.

JUSTIN GLAWE
SPENCER ACKERMAN
06.21.18 4:09 PM ET
EL PASO, Texas — The Trump administration’s plan for immigrant families on the southern border involves holding them together on military bases for a prolonged, uncertain period of time.

President Trump’s executive order issued Wednesday seeks to keep families together in detention while both parents and children await decisions on their immigration and criminal court cases. With Immigrations and Customs Enforcement facilities already at or near capacity, the order requires the Secretary of Defense to make “any existing facilities available for the housing and care of alien families” and to ”construct such facilities if necessary.”

Among the likely facilities are three in Texas, the Army’s Fort Bliss and Dyess and Goodfellow Air Force Bases. The Department of Health and Human Services visited those sites before Trump’s order to determine their fitness for operating on-base facilities. Little Rock Air Force Base in Arkansas is also under consideration.

Unaccompanied children include those the government separated from their families. The executive order appeared to halt those separations.

Trump’s order “provides for the possibility that children will be locked up in a family unit in a jail or prison or former military base (internment camps). It places enforcement of border laws ahead of decency and is no solution to the current situation,” said Maureen Franco, head of the federal public defender’s office in El Paso, in an email to The Daily Beast.

Many of the immigrants being tried under zero tolerance are crossing for the first time and have no criminal histories, said Franco, who scoffed at Trump’s insistence that criminals and MS-13 gang members are “pouring” over the border. Many are fleeing violence in Guatemala, Honduras, and elsewhere in Central and South America.


“Terror overcomes deterrence,” Franco said. “When you’re coming from Guatemala and you have lawlessness in your country and the government isn’t doing anything to stop it, they’re going to do the thing that any person would do: get your child out of there.”

A soldier stationed at Fort Bliss told the Daily Beast he was uncomfortable with the proposal, saying the base had resources to house immigrants “but in terms of caring for them in a humanitarian way, I’m not too sure.”

“Terror overcomes deterrence. When you’re coming from Guatemala and you have lawlessness in your country and the government isn’t doing anything to stop it, they’re going to do the thing that any person would do: get your child out of there.”
— Maureen Franco, federal public defender
On Thursday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions filed a motion in federal court to modify the “Flores settlement,” a 1997 federal court case that requires facilities where child immigrants are held to meet certain standards of care and prohibits detaining them for more than 20 days.

Claiming a border “crisis” compels detention of misdemeanor border crossings, lest the government “permit such illegality by releasing all aliens after apprehension,” the Justice Department requested the court modify Flores to permit families to be detained together for a prolonged, uncertain period until they can have their case heard by an immigration judge. The department also asked the court to release ICE “family residential” facilities from a state licensure requirements.

The Flores settlement said child-care facilities must meet standards for mental and physical health care, counseling, educational opportunities, and privacy.

Immigration lawyers and advocates said they feared this would happen.

Michelle Brané, director of the Women’s Refugee Commission Migrant Rights and Justice program, said the Flores settlement requires facilities be licensed to care for children and secure.

“There’s no way the current family detention facilities qualify. They are not licensed and they certainly not secure,” Brané said. “You are not exempt because you are on a base.”

A Senate Democratic aide told The Daily Beast the administration is “effectively trying to get around regulations that protect child welfare they are trying to put these new facilities on federal property what that has the effect of doing—they are on federal property they are able to get out of the state regulations.”

Military bases don’t meet Flores standards of care “simply because they're not therapeutic settings,” said Cristina Parker of Grassroots Leadership, an anti-private prison and immigrant advocacy group in Austin, Texas.

The Pentagon and HHS did not respond to questions. CNN, citing a Defense Department official, reported Thursday that HHS has requested the Pentagon prepare to house up to 20,000 unaccompanied migrant children on military bases. Before Trump signed the executive order, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis indicated to reporters he considered it appropriate.

“We have housed refugees. We have house people thrown out of their homes by earthquakes and hurricanes. We do whatever is in the best interest of the country,” Mattis said Wednesday.

After members of Congress reported difficulties accessing civilian detention facilities, the top Democrats on the House and Senate armed-services requested Mattis assure them that legislators will be permitted to conduct oversight on any bases HHS selects.

“It is essential that members of Congress have access to these facilities even in circumstances where short notice is provided,” Rep. Adam Smith and Sen. Jack Reed wrote Mattis on Wednesday.

Continuing chaos
Trump’s order doesn’t address the chaos ensuing in federal courtrooms in Texas and elsewhere that are clogged with thousands of non-violent border crossers being unnecessarily prosecuted, two federal public defenders said.

Since the day it was implemented, zero tolerance has caused chaos in the federal court system—and Wednesday’s executive order is expected to cause even more, lawyers and advocates say.

The order came with slightly more forewarning than the zero tolerance policy itself, thanks to an announcement by the president early Wednesday. Federal public defenders, court staff, the U.S. Marshals and immigration authorities working the front lines of the border were given no advance notice of the policy’s implementation, according to Franco.

“It’s not as if anyone was calling up the judges, clerks, federal public defenders to tell them this was coming,” Franco said. “None of that happened. On the human side of this, no thought was given to the fact that all the shelters for unaccompanied minors were already full. And now that (many parents will soon be deported), what process or procedure is in place to make sure that these children are reunified with their parents? The answer is none.”

The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.

As a result of the lack of forewarning, federal courts have been inundated with first-time border crossers with no criminal histories, many of them mothers fleeing violence in Central and South America with their children. Those immigrants are being tried en masse in federal courtrooms.

On Friday, more than a dozen immigrants were tried in El Paso federal court at once for the misdemeanor crime of illegal entry. Dozens more will be tried every day for the foreseeable future as long as zero tolerance remains in place, with many of them pleading guilty in a desperate attempt to have their children returned to them.

“The order does not address the fundamental question of how to keep a child in the care of (their) parent while the parent is simultaneously in criminal custody undergoing prosecution for illegal entry,” said Chris Carlin, head of the federal public defender’s office in Alpine, Texas, about 200 miles from El Paso. “The order calls for both things to happen. It doesn’t match the reality of criminal court procedure.”

“I can’t even begin to address the logistical implications,” Carlin added. “How do you create an entirely new type of hybrid criminal/immigration detention system without congressional funding or oversight, overnight? The mind boggles, then explodes.”

Zero tolerance, zero warning
When zero tolerance was put in place, border agents began referring everyone who crossed the border illegally to the Justice Department for prosecution. Prior to the policy, many of those immigrants would have simply been sent back to Mexico at the point of arrest or immediately processed by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement for expedited deportation instead of being prosecuted in federal court.

“Before zero tolerance, prosecutors would look at cases and evaluate them based on their resources, like how many beds were available,” said Carlin. “They had to decide, do you want to allocate those resources to low priority cases like these zero tolerance ones or do you want to focus on high priority cases, as in people who are actually violent?”

Without any advance notice of zero tolerance, the U.S. Marshals Service has scrambled to find places to house immigrants once they come into their custody to be tried in federal court, Franco said. In some cases, children don’t have relatives in the United States to be released to so they’re placed in foster care facilities run by companies contracted by the Office of Refugee Resettlement. In the case of one Guatemalan woman whose case is being handled by Carlin’s office, her three children couldn’t stay in one such facility in El Paso so they were sent to Manhattan.

She remains in El Paso. It took Carlin’s office nearly a month to locate the children. Once his office reached workers at the facility in Manhattan, they said they had no idea the children’s mother was in custody in El Paso because ICE classified them only as “unaccompanied minors,” a “legal fiction” necessitated by zero tolerance because children must be classified as such once their parents are charged and detained in the federal criminal court system.


GETTY
Without adequate space in holding cells to account for the influx of adult immigrants being prosecuted under zero tolerance, the Marshals have tried to find ways around holding immigrants for very long. One tactic U.S. attorneys have taken to: arrest, prosecute, sentence and discharge immigrants to ICE in a single day, according to Franco.

From a legal perspective, those rushed cases are problematic for immigrant parents who often have little education, have been flung into a justice system they may have trouble understanding, and who are distraught over the loss of their child, Franco said.

“We’re still spending an inordinate amount of time not on the client’s immigration case but consoling the client.”

With little in the way of a system to reunite parents and children, both Franco and Carlin said immigrants are and will be deported without their children, creating significant difficulties of finding them in the interior of the U.S. once they’ve returned to their home country.

“When they arrest someone, they will inventory their property,” Franco explained. “They’ll give you a receipt for your belt, but the most valuable thing in your life—that you’ve probably spent the last 30 days travelling here and protecting with your life, your child—they won’t give you a piece of paper to get them back.”

— With reporting from Jackie Kucinich
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-ne ... ary-bases/
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Re: What is #WhereAreTheChildren

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Jun 21, 2018 8:24 pm

Why Americans Should Closely Watch Unfolding Events in Guatemala, Part 2

A Trail of Bodies Leads Back to the USA

Image
United Fruit Company Building. Photo credit: Michael Bentley / Flickr (CC BY 2.0)


ESSAY

Guatemala’s current situation and tragic history can be traced back to the CIA-led coup in 1954 that ousted the democratically elected government of President Jacobo Arbenz and installed the military dictator Carlos Armas. Arbenz was an advocate for land reform and was loved by the poor. The wealthy hated him. And when the CIA couldn’t bribe him, they ousted him in a most humiliating way. Even after he went into exile, the agency used constant disinformation to smear him in every way imaginable until his strange death in a bathtub in 1971.

3
“President Arbenz delivers on his promise — Farmers: here is your land. Defend it, care for it, cultivate it.” (1954) One of a series of photos by Cornell Capa, documenting the sweet,short-lived dream of life under a democracy. Photo credit: Cornell Capa

Since the 1954 coup, and with the ongoing support of the CIA and the School of the Americas (SOA), the Guatemalan people have lived a nightmare. What follows should give you a sense of the CIA’s thinking behind the coup and its aftermath. It is a transcription of a CIA document released to The National Security Archive, a research institute, on May 23, 1997 under a Freedom of Information Act request.

“A hammer, axe, wrench, screwdriver, fire poker, kitchen knife, lamp stand, or anything hard, heavy and handy will suffice.” For an assassin using “edge weapons,” the manual notes in cold clinical terms, “puncture wounds of the body cavity may not be reliable unless the heart is reached.”

“A Study of Assassination,” unsigned, undated:

Among the documents found in the training files of Operation PBSUCCESS and declassified by the Agency is a “Study of Assassination.” A how-to guide book in the art of political killing, the 19-page manual offers detailed descriptions of the procedures, instruments, and implementation of assassination. “The simplest local tools are often much the most efficient means of assassination,” counsels the study. “A hammer, axe, wrench, screwdriver, fire poker, kitchen knife, lamp stand, or anything hard, heavy and handy will suffice.” For an assassin using “edge weapons,” the manual notes in cold clinical terms, “puncture wounds of the body cavity may not be reliable unless the heart is reached…. Absolute reliability is obtained by severing the spinal cord in the cervical region.” The manual also notes that to provide plausible denial, “no assassination instructions should ever be written or recorded.” Murder, the drafters state, “is not morally justifiable,” and “persons who are morally squeamish should not attempt it.”

No, this dirty work is not for the “morally squeamish.”

If one is searching for the truth about the coup, the document above is accurate and revealing. However, if one searched the web and discovered a posting at globalsecurity.org (see sidebar at the end of the article) one would be misled. That posting is nothing more than a summary of a Congressional Research Service report. It never mentions Guatemala, although it includes other Latin American countries — Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Honduras, Panama, and Peru. A gullible reader might come away with the impression that the School of the Americas had nothing to do with Guatemala, when, in fact, it had a great deal to do with it. Why leave out this country in particular?

Could it be that GlobalSecurity.org is unfamiliar with documents such as the one described above? Is it one of those glib sites that posts articles that do not give the full picture, even if inadvertently? Or is it a site that presents disinformation? The web is filled with questionable information, so one must proceed skeptically.

Those interested in the truth must probe much deeper, but that is difficult as the following account of the propagandist Edward Bernays makes clear.

From PR to “The Engineering of Consent”

The 1954 coup d’etat was ably assisted by American Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s nephew, who is often called the “father of public relations.” He is barely known to the general public and is part of our secret history. A war propagandist for the US during World War I, Bernays used his propaganda techniques — now called PR — to “engineer the consent” of the American people on behalf of the power elite.

Leading up to the 1954 coup, he was the chief propagandist for The United Fruit Company and in that capacity created a vast media campaign painting the Arbenz government as communist and in cahoots with the U.S.S.R.

This was the height of the Cold War, and the American government was consumed with using anti-communist and anti-Soviet rhetoric to defend its spheres of interest; for a long time the American government, in conjunction with American corporations, had considered Latin America and the Caribbean their de facto colonies.

The United Fruit Company — now Chiquita Brands International — was an American corporation that had controlled vast tracts of land and numerous businesses in Guatemala and throughout Latin America since the early 1900s. The company was known for its support of dictators and the exploitation of the people and the land.

Intimately linked to the power elite within the US government, United Fruit extracted huge profits and rejected any reforms that challenged its control of the land. It was the largest landholder and employer in Guatemala. It owned railroads and discouraged the building of highways. It had long controlled Guatemala’s politicians. Its power was so extensive that one historian compares it to the Dutch East India Company in its influence. Its shareholders and supporters were amply distributed throughout the foreign policy establishment in the US.

As US Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler made clear in 1935, the US military was used to deal with any resistance to American corporations’ business interests overseas. Guatemala is a case study in this regard. President Arbenz’s land reform act of 1952 — Decree 900 — expropriated rural farm land, 70 per cent of which was in the hands of 2 percent of the landowners, including vast acreage controlled by United Fruit but, significantly, only land not under cultivation by the company. The land was redistributed to poor peasants. The owners ( who included Arbenz himself) were to be compensated at fair market value.

But this arrangement was not acceptable to United Fruit or their backers in Washington. The American Ambassador to Guatemala, John Peurifoy (CIA Director Allen Dulles’s handpicked man), then tried to bribe Arbenz with a $2 million payoff to terminate the land reforms.

Arbenz refused, and his overthrow was set in motion by the CIA. Bernays was called upon to present the land redistribution as a communist takeover and a threat to US national security. His media propaganda campaign, presenting Arbenz as a communist in league with the USSR, together with the CIA’s additional propaganda, created the justification for the CIA-led coup.

What wasn’t revealed at the time was that the Eisenhower administration had intimate ties to United Fruit. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had represented United Fruit at his law firm Sullivan and Cromwell, and his brother, Allen Dulles, the CIA chief in charge of the 1954 coup, once sat on United Fruit’s board of directors and had also done legal work for them. Both brothers had large financial stakes in the company. Such clear-cut conflicts of interest were not an anomaly within the Eisenhower administration. Many other administration officials were connected in one way or another to United Fruit. Bernays’s propaganda, using anti-communist rhetoric, served perfectly the interests of his conjoined clients — United Fruit and the CIA. As a result of Dulles’s and Bernays’s machinations, hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans were eventually massacred

The excellent documentary by Adam Curtis, The Century of Self, documents Bernays’s profound and largely pernicious influence on American life with a section specifically devoted to his propaganda efforts on behalf of the 1954 coup. Today’s “mainstream media” has learned a lot from Bernays, so if one wishes to see through the vast amount of propaganda and dissimulation in current news coverage, learning about Bernays is crucial.

The recent arrest of Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina on corruption charges cannot be understood except within the larger context of US interference in Latin American countries going back more than a century. And that record of US meddling in Central and South America has been largely left out of official histories of the United States.

The rise of the CIA to virtually unchallenged supremacy in Washington’s power structure is but one part of this backstory. Peter Dale Scott, who has written voluminously on the subject, calls this phenomenon of a de facto shadow government hidden behind the public facade while serving corporate interests, “the deep state.” This secretive power elite, through its decades-long support of coups and death squads in Guatemala, has linked that country’s fate inextricably to US interests and policies.

***

Sometimes even when the mind knows and assents, the heart stays frozen. But music, like poetry, can often break the ice within. Here is the acclaimed singer and former Panamanian reform presidential candidate Ruben Blades, singing a song from his album, Nothing but the Truth. The song is called “In Salvador,” but his words could apply to what goes on in many Latin American countries. The “regular guys” of Ruben’s song are often death squad killers, “made in America” at the “School of the Assassins.”



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SIDEBAR

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Protest against the School of the Americas in August 2012. Photo credit: Caravan 4 Peace / Flickr

People who want information on the School of the Americas from a seemingly independent source may find themselves at the website, GlobalSecurity.org, based in Alexandria, Virginia. It presents itself as “a leading source for reliable news and security information.” It is directed by John Pike, whom we are told is “one of the world’s leading experts on defense, space and intelligence policy.”

But is the information here objective? The site presents, in a Wikipedia-like way, what seem to be fact-based statements. Yet they tend to cast highly controversial programs, outfits, and individuals that are part of the security establishment in what can only be seen as an overly generous light.

Such is the case with the US military school most widely associated with teaching morally indefensible tactics and techniques.

Here is a small sample:

“Human rights training is part of the program of the School of the Americas….

“Prior to 1989, the School of the Americas provided human rights training both formally — in classroom instruction on the Laws of Land Warfare — and informally — through exposure to American institutions. Since 1989, the School has established a policy on human rights training and revised its curriculum to integrate human rights training into every course taught. A total of nearly 1,000 hours of such instruction is reportedly interwoven into the curriculum and consists of four specific components: human rights, military justice, civilian control of the military, and democratization.”

Like other sites styling themselves as neutral even as they stack the deck, it also includes passages about what “critics say.” One comment in particular seems quite revealing even in its drastic understatement:

“A former School logistics instructor, retired Army Major Joseph Blair, maintains that the human rights message is not taken seriously by the Latin American students and contends that the soldiers associate human rights with subversives …”

If there is any doubt about the preferred “takeaway”, here is the site’s final entry on the topic:

“Supporters of the School contend that democracy is being respected throughout the region with only a few exceptions and that the School of the Americas has played a key role in the resurgence and defense of democracy in Latin America.”

Could it be that GlobalSecurity.org is unfamiliar with documents such as the one described above (“A Study of Assassination”)? Shall we give it the benefit of the doubt and assume it is just one of so many sites that presents an incomplete or false picture out of ignorance? Or is it a site that seeks to disseminate untruths?

One cannot help suspecting that from the Great Beyond, Edward Bernays is smiling.

Related front page panorama photo credit: Exhumation in the ixil triangle in Guatemala: (Trocaire / CAFCA archive / Wikimedia [CC BY 2.0])
https://whowhatwhy.org/2015/10/07/why-a ... la-part-2/



Child Separation Crisis Background: Who Caused the Misery South of the Border?

immigrants, cages
US Border Patrol agents conduct intake of illegal border crossers at the Central Processing Center in McAllen, Texas, Sunday, June 17, 2018. Photo credit: U.S. Customs and Border Patrol / Flickr
In our interconnected world, nothing happens in a vacuum — certainly not in the backyard of the United States. So while the eyes of the world are on the Trump administration’s inhumane policies regarding migrants and their children, it is worth taking a step back to figure out why so many people from Central American countries are risking their lives to seek refuge and a better future in the US.

As he made clear from the moment he announced his run for the presidency, Donald Trump would have Americans believe that these migrants are a bunch of criminals and only a wall would keep them out. That played so well with GOP primary voters afraid of “the other” that it helped earn Trump the Republican nomination and eventually swept him into office. The president said as much this week in a speech to a business group.

“Remember I made that speech and I was badly criticized?” Trump said. “‘Oh it’s so terrible, what he said.’ Turned out I was 100 percent right. That’s why I got elected.”

To the president and many Americans, “securing the border” against migrants is a national security issue and helps keeps drugs out. That is why it is particularly ironic that other US actions in the name of national security destabilized much of Central America and also helped fuel the drug trade.

For decades, the United States has helped train and prop up brutal right-wing dictators in the region that are friendly to US interests, which in many cases means the interest of US businesses — all at the expense of local democracy. The means for achieving that have been both covert and overt.

And the effects are still being felt today, which is why thousands of people are making that treacherous track to escape from the “bad hombres” that the US helped create.

To gain a better understanding of the big picture, take a look at this WhoWhatWhy article, originally published October 2015, that takes an in-depth look at what happened in Guatemala, where a trail of bodies has led back to the US.


Otto Perez Molina, former President of Guatemala. Photo credit: Michael Wuertenberg / World Economic Forum / Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 2.0)

A friend of mine told me the following curious story. In the early 1990s, while taking a course at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, he sat next to an ordinary-looking older man, a soft-spoken, pudgy fellow, who said he was from Guatemala. After a few weeks into the term, he came to class one day and found the man sitting alone, far from the other students, who seemed to be avoiding him.

Another student explained to my friend who the man was: Hector Gramajo, a former Guatemalan general and defense minister who was there on a Mason fellowship, studying for a degree in public administration. While he was Army Vice-Chief of Staff and Director of the Army General Staff, the Guatemalan army massacred more than 75,000 Mayans in what a United Nations Truth Commission later (1999) called genocide.

On graduation day, while in his academic gown, Gramajo was handed court papers informing him that he was being sued in the US by eight Guatemalans who together with family members had been abused by soldiers under his command. Later, the lawsuit was joined by one from Sister Dianna Ortiz, an American nun, who had been raped and tortured by Gramajo’s men.

He didn’t contest the lawsuit; he just ignored it, and left the US for Guatemala to run for — what else! — the presidency. Before he left, however, he gave a public lecture at Harvard and, blessed by that august institution, and with his prestigious degree in hand, went to his other alma mater, the School of the Americas (SOA), which some refer to as the “School of Assassins,” at Ft. Benning, where he gave the commencement address. (More on this “educational” organization below.)

In 1995, a federal judge in Boston awarded $47.5 million to the plaintiffs. Gramajo never paid. He was back in Guatemala, where, in 2004, in a fitting twist of fate, he was killed by a swarm of Africanized bees.

Another Soft-Spoken Man, Otto Perez Molina

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John Kerry, Perez Molina
Former Secretary of State John Kerry with Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina in 2013. Photo credit: US Department of State / Wikimedia

Joy erupted in the streets of Guatemala in early September, after months of demonstrations had forced the congress to strip presidential immunity from President Otto Perez Molina, who then resigned and was subsequently jailed on corruption charges.

The fraud, conspiracy, and bribery charges against Molina, 64, a former army general and intelligence chief, are dubbed “La Linea,” or “The Line,” because a network, or long line of government officials is involved. The case concerns bribes paid by businesses to customs officers and government officials in order to evade import duties. Molina is alleged to have profited handsomely, but he denies the charges. His former vice president, Roxanna Baldetti, was jailed on August 21st on similar charges.

Molina is implicated in many massacres and murders while he was an army general, and chief of military intelligence while on the CIA payroll. One of these many victims was the husband of the Harvard-trained American lawyer Jennifer Harbury.

The corruption charges were the result of an investigation conducted by the United Nations International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) in collaboration with the Guatemalan Justice Department.

The huge street demonstrations in Guatemala City and around the country, fueled by indignation at long-standing systemic corruption, put enormous pressure on the judiciary to finally arrest Molina. His September 3rd arrest brought optimism to a country sorely in need of some good news.

But then, three days later, a television comedian (shades of US election theatrics), Jimmy Morales — backed by military officers implicated in torture, assassinations, and massacres — won the first round of the presidential elections, despite widespread remonstrations to postpone an election considered rigged by corrupt oligarchs and drug lords.

The US mainstream media has reported the basics of these events. But, as usual, what they haven’t done is report on the deeper back story to all this, and how the US government is involved in nefarious ways that stretch back many years.

For example, the fact that Molina was trained at the SOA at Ft. Benning, GA, in torturous interrogation techniques, and is implicated in many killings, is never mentioned in the The New York Times story of his resignation, nor in any subsequent story, as of the date of this publication.

For a long time, the United States government has been deeply involved in the support and training of death squads, and corrupt military officers, not only in Guatemala, but throughout Latin America.

Corruption is child’s play compared with the massacres, acts of torture, assassinations, and disappearances that were carried out across Latin America by personnel trained and supported by the US. Carolyn Forche, an American poet and activist, got a rare, intimate glimpse of the kind of monster who was involved in these acts when, in 1978, she had dinner at the home of an unnamed Salvadoran colonel. This event inspired a prose poem — The Colonel — that you can listen to here. Below is an excerpt from it. It is not for the squeamish:

Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to scoop the kneecaps from a man’s legs or cut his hands to lace… We had dinner, rack of lamb, good wine… I was asked how I enjoyed the country… There was some talk of how difficult it had become to govern. The parrot said hello on the terrace. The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed himself from the table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck themselves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground. May 1978

Expertise in Torture and Murder

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As for Molina — like the Salvadoran death squad leader of the period of Forche’s poem, Roberto D’Aubuisson, who ordered the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, the defender of the poor — he, too, was trained by the US at the SOA.

This is where for more than half a century the US has trained Latin American and Caribbean military in the most efficient techniques for torturing and killing their own people. Trained by the US, these soldiers have returned to their countries where they have tortured and killed peasants, students, priests, nuns, opposition leaders, et al. by the thousands. Far too many Americans are blissfully unaware of what is done in their name. (In 2001, it was euphemistically renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation [WHINSEC] — pure Orwell.)

For years, Roy Bourgeois, a former US naval officer and Maryknoll priest, has led an effort to inform the American people of what is occurring at the SOA, and to have the US government shut it down.

At the website he founded, one can find extensive documentation on the people who have graduated from this “Institute” for lower learning, and on their murderous histories. In Guatemala alone, conservative estimates put the number at well above 200,000 killed. This is not simply Guatemalan history, but the secret history of the United States.

Despite its notorious and well-documented history, here is how the New York Times described the SOA on April 1, 1985:

“Col. Michael J. Sierra, the commandant of the school, said that later this year courses in medicine, engineering, psychological operations and maintenance would be offered for the first time as the curriculum goes beyond standard military operations.

“‘We have been been teaching military science,’ Colonel Sierra said. ‘Now we’ll start teaching courses that can contribute to national development….’

“In many Latin American nations, military officers have been far more involved in political and economic development than have soldiers in the United States….

“The school, the basic purpose of which is to build ties between the United States and Latin America, has sought to expose Latin American officers and their families to life in the United States…”

Build ties between the United States and Latin America? They certainly have achieved that.

Molina is implicated in many massacres and murders while he was an army general and chief of military intelligence — and on the CIA payroll. One of his many victims was Efrain Bamaca Velasquez, known as “Everado,” who fought against the US-backed government that massacred hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans. Captured in 1992, he was tortured for years, then killed under Molina’s auspices. His wife, the Harvard-trained American Lawyer and activist Jennifer Harbury, has done much to publicize his case.

Other victims tied to Molina are Judge Edgar Ramiro Elias Ogaldez, and Bishop Juan Gerardi. See Francisco Goldman’s intriguing story on the Gerardi assassination. He reports that once the death squads and military killers were exposed by the UN for genocide and widespread assassinations, they mutated into the criminal mafia and drug cartels. In 2007 he published his authoritative book — The Art of Political Murder — on the Gerardi case.

Molina is currently being charged with corruption, not murder — at least not yet. As with the recent corruption charges, Molina denies all.

https://whowhatwhy.org/2018/06/21/child ... he-border/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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