What is #WhereAreTheChildren

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Re: What is #WhereAreTheChildren

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun May 27, 2018 11:54 pm

You're right! ICE has been an undeniably gestapo force since it's inception in 2003 and it's only been accelerated by the Trump regime, who is little else but the grotesque logical endpoint of the path the US state has been paving for the last few decades!
beetmonger




so I will continue to post whatever photos I can find ....but in the future I will make damn sure the date is up front and posted in red




I know what is important


2 pages.... 22 posts
Betrayal of trust 368 youth gymnasts 20 years 115 Adults
Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Dec 15, 2016 3:34 pm
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48 pages .....720 posts
What is #Pizzagate?
Postby guruilla » Thu Dec 15, 2016 7:24 pm
This survey is inspired by Elvis's recent comment
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=40243



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Who’s going to give back the young and beautiful lives (and others) that have been devastated and destroyed by the phony Russia Collusion Witch Hunt? They journeyed down to Washington, D.C., with stars in their eyes and wanting to help our nation...They went back home in tatters!
5:41 AM - 27 May 2018
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 seemslikeadream » Mon May 28, 2018 12:16 am

Private Prison Corporation Wrote Texas Bill Extending How Long Immigrant Children Can Be Detained
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David Dayen
May 2 2017, 2:52 p.m.
A bill written by a private prison operator to assist its immigration detention business could advance through the Texas state Senate this week, despite vocal protest from civil rights groups. The legislation would allow family detention centers to be classified as childcare facilities, enabling Immigrations and Customs Enforcement to detain women and children for longer periods.

The bill aligns with the Trump administration’s punitive immigration policies and helps it navigate a challenge to federal detention policy.

During the migrant influx of 2014, the Obama administration contracted the construction of two giant family detention centers in south Texas — one for each of America’s biggest private prison companies — to hold women and children seeking asylum. CoreCivic runs the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, and the Geo Group manages the Karnes County Residential Center.

However, because of multiple judicial rulings dating back to 1997, no undocumented child can be held for over 20 days in anything but a licensed “non-secure” childcare facility.

Almost nothing about these detention centers meets that definition. Grassroots groups have given them the grim nickname “baby jails,” and a survivor of a WWII-era Japanese internment camp said the facilities “triggered distressing associations of my own experience as a child.” Reports of inadequate medical care, sexual abuse, improper solitary confinement, and permanently stunted child development proliferate. Most of all, the presence of locks on the doors contradicts the idea of a non-secure facility. “They’re not allowed to leave. That’s jail,” said Mary Small of the Detention Watch Network, a national coalition working on immigration issues.

The Texas Department of Family Protective Services granted the facilities childcare licenses, but last year a state judge blocked the designation. So Geo Group, the nation’s second-largest private prison operator, went to work assembling legislation that would countermand the judicial ruling. The bill would lower state childcare standards for family detention centers, excluding the facilities from regulations such as ones that prohibit housing children and unrelated adults in the same room.

Republican State Rep. John Raney admitted to the Associated Press that Geo Group officials wrote the legislation. “I’ve known the lady who’s their lobbyist for a long time. … That’s where the legislation came from,” said Raney. “We don’t make things up. People bring things to us and ask us to help.” There’s companion legislation in the state House and Senate.


Image
DONNA, TX - JANUARY 03: A new temporary detention center for immigrants (lower right), awaits new arrivals on January 3, 2017 in Donna, Texas. The center, located near the Donna-Rio Bravo international bridge at the Rio Grande in Donna, Tx, can hold up to 500 people. U.S. Customs and Border Protection built the facility to provide additional temporary housing for unaccompanied children and families, most from Central America, who have been surging across the border seeking asylum from violence and poverty in their countries. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)
A temporary detention center for immigrants awaits new arrivals on Jan. 3, 2017, in Donna, Texas.

Photo: John Moore/Getty Images

If the bill, which cleared a Senate subcommittee last week, passes, women and children could be held at Karnes or Dilley indefinitely while awaiting deportation. Without the bill, the facilities would likely have to shut down, said the bill’s Senate sponsor, Bryan Hughes. The Karnes facility earns about $55 million per year for the Geo Group. But in part because of the standing judicial order, the population is only about 100 in an 830-bed facility.

Grassroots Leadership, the immigrant rights group whose lawsuit successfully blocked the childcare order last year, is urging Texas legislators to vote down the bill. It was initially supposed to come up in the Senate yesterday but has been delayed.

Because Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly has promised that families caught in border crossings would not be separated, keeping these detention centers open and available for long stays is crucial to the Trump administration’s deportation strategy. Advocates would rather asylum seekers be released while they await trial, rather than be forced into confinement.

Geo Group has a lot riding on expanding immigration detention. It runs the federal case management system for family detention and has committed significant resources to adult detention facilities, which don’t house women or children. The Trump administration just granted Geo Group a $110 million contract to build a 1,000-bed detention facility in Conroe, a small town outside of Houston. The mayor of Conroe, already home to a 1,500-bed Geo Group facility, didn’t know about the new contract until he read about it in press reports.

Geo Group made what appears to be an illegal $225,000 donation to a Trump-supporting Super PAC during the 2016 presidential election. Government contractors are barred from political donations of this type. The company also spends heavily in Texas, including $320,000 to lobby the state legislature in the first four months of this year.

Immigrant rights demonstrators in Texas also occupied the state Capitol on May Day, opposing a separate bill that would bar so-called sanctuary cities in the state.

Top photo: Residents walk across the grounds at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas on May 14, 2015.
https://theintercept.com/2017/05/02/pri ... -detained/



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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 Heaven Swan » Mon May 28, 2018 6:05 am

Infinite thanks for this thread SLAD.
Just because people are not discussing and debating the devastating news doesn't mean they're not reading and becoming alarmed.

We're here folks.

The comparisons to Nazii Germany which some say we should avoid have now officially moved into the red, high alert zone, where we have to do something or else we're complicit.

This isn't Nazi history but I have several Jewish friends who tell me that, because of the danger Jews were in in Russia, their grandparents were sent here to the US, by themselves, as young (12, 13, 14...year old) children. Having to send their children away so they could survive tore up the parents, the families and affected the mental health of all concerned and was passed on through future generations.

I think ithe time has come to get up off our ....'s folks and join the #where are the children or other campaigns.
"When IT reigns, I’m poor.” Mario
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Re: What is #WhereAreTheChildren

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon May 28, 2018 8:13 am

“It has very serious consequences for the underlying case,” she said. “Because now you have a child — and this is being done with infants, even, babies



What the legal process looks like for an immigrant child taken away from his parents
By Philip Bump
May 27 at 8:00 AM

Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi on May 17 hammered President Trump for calling some undocumented immigrants “animals." (Reuters)
There’s been an avalanche of grim news centered on young immigrants apprehended at the border with Mexico. On Wednesday, the American Civil Liberties Union published a report documenting abusive encounters between young people and border agents during the administration of President Barack Obama. Last month, the government admitted it had lost track of more than a thousand children who had been placed with sponsors after being caught crossing the border alone.

In recent days, though, attention has been focused on a new crisis for immigrant children. Earlier this month, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a new policy in which families arriving at the border would be forcibly broken up, with children and parents separated from one another and detained separately. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes explored the practical ramifications of the policy: children as young as 1½, too young to form complete sentences, much less care for themselves, torn away from their parents and sent to government detention facilities.

It’s a policy specifically meant to serve as a deterrent to future immigrants, as White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly made clear in an interview with NPR a few weeks ago. Sessions tried to argue that it was meant to prevent trafficking and abuse, but Kelly’s insistence that it was a deterrent matches reporting that indicates President Trump himself authorized the change to limit a recent increase in the number of families seeking entry to the United States.


On Saturday, Trump tweeted that the policy of ripping apart families was a law being supported by Democrats. That’s not true. It’s a policy he supported and implemented, apparently because of its “horrible” — his descriptor — deterrent effects.

The organization Kids in Need of Defense (KIND) has for a decade been supporting minors who are detained after entering the country. Its president, Wendy Young, spoke with The Washington Post by phone on Friday to explain how Trump’s policy shift affects young immigrants — and how it fits into his broader shift in how the country deals with immigrants.

Her organization provides pro bono legal services to immigrants who arrive at the border without a parent — unaccompanied children, in the parlance — once they leave federal detention facilities to join family members already in the country.

“This is the really sad and ironic and tragic part of this new policy of family separation,” Young said. “Obviously, from both a child welfare perspective and from the perspective of the U.S. immigration system in terms of its adjudication of cases when people arrive, it is much better to have a child arrive with a parent, because that’s a natural source of care and support for the child and that also means that the child’s case is attached to the parent’s case, and typically the parent is the one who has the information and the resources to inform the immigrant judge about what’s going on.”


“Now they’re making it a very formal policy to separate the child from the parent,” she said. “Because of that, the child is reclassified as unaccompanied.”

There are special protections under the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008 that apply to unaccompanied children. After all, young people may lack the ability to advocate for themselves in the way that an adult might. KIND helps provide representation to between 50 and 60 percent of those young people — but Young fears the percentage will drop now that the pool of unaccompanied children is being deliberately expanded.

“It has very serious consequences for the underlying case,” she said. “Because now you have a child — and this is being done with infants, even, babies — now you have a child with a much more challenging case detached from the parent. Very often they’re not being allowed to even communicate, and in some cases, the parent’s being deported and the child’s being left behind.”

When the child is meeting with an attorney or appearing before a judge, their ability to explain why they are there and the reasons they might be seeking refuge are limited. There’s a parent who could potentially answer those questions — but that parent was moved by the Department of Homeland Security to another facility. The child, detained by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, has probably had no contact with his or her parent.


It’s tricky for the attorneys to make contact, too.

“It can be extraordinarily challenging to figure out where that person went, to establish communication,” Young said. “If that parent is deported in the meantime, then you have the added challenge of trying to find the parent back in the home country.”

“From humanitarian perspective, we’re quite concerned about this,” she added, “but also from a government efficiency perspective, it’s creating an additional case in a backlogged system and it’s making it more challenging for the immigration judge or the [Citizenship and Immigration Services] officer to sort out what’s going on in this child’s life.”

Remember: Those legal complications begin only once the child is released from detention. That period in detention is problematic for its own reasons — and Young says that the amount of time children are spending in detention is increasing. Under Obama, children were held for about a month, Young said, while the government tried to find family members who could take them in. The law, she said, “is really grounded in the notion that children are better off cared for by their families than they are in a detention center by the federal government.”


That month-long detention is getting longer.

“We’re starting to see that creep up more into the 45- to 55-day range,” she added. “Which is also concerning to us because obviously locking children up is not a good thing.”

In part because of the new policy of child separation, the government is exploring opening detention centers on military bases, housing hundreds or thousands of kids. But such mega detention centers already exist.

“I actually was down at the border a few weeks ago,” Young said, “and saw a facility that opened in the past year or so, that’s actually a permanent facility, a converted Walmart with 1,200 beds.”

“Generally what we’re seeing there, through a whole lot of administrative changes, is they’re turning what were intended to be protection tools under the trafficking act into law enforcement tools,” Young said. She added, “The framework of protection is starting to really fragment.” KIND recently released a report documenting recent changes to immigration policy.

She said that her organization had seen an increase in the number of children separated from their families. Asked if she thought it would at least be an effective deterrent for future immigrants, she said it wouldn’t.

“This is truly a refugee crisis,” Young said. “People become refugees when they’re desperate to escape violence. The violence is throughout Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, and the governments are too weak or too corrupt to control it. So people make the only choice they feel they have available, and they run.

“You’re not going to be able to stop that,” she added, “until conditions in the home country improve.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/pol ... 5a53a2558a
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.
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Re: What is #WhereAreTheChildren

Postby PufPuf93 » Tue May 29, 2018 6:04 pm

PufPuf93 » Sun May 27, 2018 5:58 pm wrote:


Those photos and that facility were in 2014 under POTUS Obama.


Trump is certainly a better POTUS on immigration and everything else than Trump but look at the date on these photos at that facility:


https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/po ... /10780449/



Note that I made an error. Obama not Trump is certainly a better POTUS. Trump is not better than Trump. Obama was in general a respectable POTUS. Just noticed this. Later in this thread and in total it should be obvious that I am not and have never been a Trump supporter. Too late to edit. :hug1: to SLAD
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Re: What is #WhereAreTheChildren

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Jun 13, 2018 2:14 pm

Rep. Pramila Jayapal—‘They Could Hear Their Children Screaming for Them in the Next Room’

The congresswoman met with dozens of immigrant mothers who have had their children forcibly removed.

By Joan WalshTwitter June 11, 2018

Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) speaks on Capitol Hill, May 17, 2017. (Reuters / Aaron P. Bernstein)
In the week since Senator Jeff Merkley made news when he was turned away from a child-immigrant-detention center in Brownsville, Texas, mainstream news outlets have begun covering the abomination at the border. There have been numerous stories about parents, many seeking asylum and escaping violence, having their children ripped away from them by US authorities, who then send those kids far and wide, often where their parents can’t find them. Maybe the worst story came from The Washington Post on Friday: Honduran asylum seeker Marco Antonio Muñoz lost his son at the McAllen, Texas, processing center—and then killed himself while in US custody.

Only one member of Congress has been able to talk to the mothers who have had their children taken from them: Washington state Rep. Pramila Jayapal, who got into a federal Bureau of Prisons facility Saturday near Seattle to meet with roughly 170 immigrant women held there. More than a third had lost their children during their migration, either when they were detained by US officials at the southern border or when they turned themselves in seeking asylum. Some of the women she met had lost children but were not from Latin America; because she only had a Spanish-English translator, she couldn’t talk to them, Jayapal told me.

The first-term congresswoman knows the US immigration system and its abuses very well. She came to the United States from India at 16 to study at Georgetown. After 9/11, she founded an organization to promote immigrant rights. And in 2014, running for Washington State Senate as a Democrat, she joined a hunger strike to protest President Obama’s deportation policies. While she still argues that Obama made mistakes on immigration, she makes clear that the Trump policy of family separation has no parallel in recent American history.

For one thing, she notes, asylum seekers have always been able to make their case for having a “credible fear” of facing violence in their home countries, before facing penalties for crossing the border. “There isn’t precedent for asylum seekers being criminally prosecuted at the border before they’ve had a ‘credible fear’ hearing,” Jayapal told me. Also, she said, these parents seeking asylum with their children are being processed in large group proceedings called “Operation Streamline,” designed to prosecute violent criminals. How could anyone make a case that they face violence in their home country in such a system?

I spoke with Representative Jayapal on Sunday evening; our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Joan Walsh: We think of this as a crisis on our southern border—but you found these women in a detention center near Seattle. What’s going on?

Pramila Jayapal: They came from the southern border. The majority are from Texas, those exact same checkpoints that have been written about before. But because there’s no place to keep them there, they’re being transferred around the country. Interestingly, we do have an immigration detention center in Tacoma, but that’s full because Trump has ramped up detention so dramatically—most of those centers are full now. So these women were transferred to a Bureau of Prisons federal facility that is used to keep everyone from pretrial detainees to the highest-level federal criminals in top security. It’s owned and operated by the federal government. It’s not contracted out. It’s all unionized employees—and that is why these women said this is the first place they felt treated like a human being. There are standards at these government-run facilities.

Current Issue

JW: So normally they’re held in private facilities, with lower standards?

PJ: Yes, they’re contracted out—both CBP and ICE facilities, so many of them are contracted out to for-profit and private contractors.

JW: How did you wind up getting in so quickly? Is it because of that?

PJ: Well, that is interesting, I do think it was easier because it’s a federal Bureau of Prisons facility. We called the warden on Friday. We were on the phone with the BOP folks, with ICE nationally and locally, but because it’s a BOP facility it was easier to get access. ICE often requires two weeks advance notice. The BOP essentially let us in immediately. We went in at 10 am on Saturday morning.

JW: So I know you heard a lot of horrible stories there. It’s almost impossible for the media to get cameras down there, so I don’t think we’re hearing or seeing a lot of what’s going on. Can you share some of what you saw?

PJ: I met with 174 women, in three different pods. I went from one pod to the next. The vast majority were Spanish speaking, but there was a group of Chinese speakers and some others. We had a Spanish interpreter. The women would all answer at once sometimes. I did a lot of “raise your hand” questions. “How many are asylum seekers?” The majority lifted up their hands.

Thirty to 40 percent of these women came with children who had been forcibly taken away from them. None got a chance to say goodbye to their children—they were forcibly taken away. One said she was deceived, because they were in detention together. Then the CBP officers told her she was going out to get her photograph taken. When she came back, she was put in a different room, and she never got to see the child again. Some of them said they could hear their children screaming for them in the next room. The children ranged anywhere from one to teenagers.

One of the mothers told me DHS officers threatened to take away her 6-year-old daughter, right in front of them, and her daughter started screaming. She was separated from her daughter on the second day of custody and hasn’t had contact in over a week. But in some ways, she was one of the lucky ones, because her daughter was placed with family in Los Angeles.

Another woman came from Guatemala with her children, 8 and 12. Her husband was in prison for raping a 12-year-old child, and he was coming out. She was afraid her children would be raped either by him or some of his fellow gang members. She had been separated from her two children, she didn’t know where they were.

Another woman came fleeing gang violence, she had a 14-year-old child killed nine months ago. Another child in a wheelchair, paralyzed in a gang shooting. So she came with her third child, just to get one of them to safety.

Another woman came with her two sons, 11 and 16—for whatever reason, her older son is going to be reunited with his father in Virginia, but the younger son is staying in custody, which is crazy.

JW: And she doesn’t know why.

PJ: The majority of the moms—but not all—had only just [the day before] been given a slip by ICE agents that had their names, the name of their children, and the facility their children were held in. But one mom said, “These are not my children.” They’re listed on the slip, but they’re not her children. We collected all the slips we could so we could start to find out where these children were and have the lawyers help get in touch with them.

JW: I know you saw women of different ethnicities, there were some Chinese speakers there, but were any of the other women mothers whose children had been taken away?

PJ: Yes, they were, but we unfortunately only had a BOP interpreter who spoke Spanish—who did a phenomenal job, for three hours straight. So we didn’t have speakers in the other languages. We could see they wanted to tell us things. My staffer, who is of Chinese origin, but doesn’t speak Cantonese or Mandarin, asked if they could write something on a piece of paper so she could take it home to her dad to translate. They wouldn’t let them.

JW: So you said a lot of these women are asylum seekers, yet they’re being seen in groups of 50 to 100. How do you make the case for asylum if you’re being seen in a large group?

PJ: This is a huge problem. This is part of Operation Streamline, which I have written letters and done other things to try to stop. It was set up for mass prosecutions of quote “the really bad guys,” to get that process moving, because we have so few immigration judges. But they’re now using Operation Streamline for asylum seekers, and these women said anywhere from 75 to 100 are being prosecuted all together; they have headphones but they’re not allowed to speak to the judge…

JW: Headphones so they can hear a translation of the proceedings–but not speak?

PJ: Yes, they’re not allowed to speak themselves. There’s only one argument made for all of them. There’s only one public defender for all of them. This is a huge problem. One thing also of concern is they are pleading guilty of the crime of crossing the border. Well, when you seek asylum, if you have a criminal record, you don’t qualify for asylum.

JW: Yes, I saw that in the Washington Post story, where parents were debating whether to say “culpable” or “no culpable.” There’s this notion that if they do plead guilty, they will at least be reunited with their kids faster, even if they’re maybe then sent back. But what is your understanding?

PJ: I don’t think that’s true. These women were all processed through, and they think that may be the case…

JW: That if they plead guilty they’ll be reunited with their kids?

PJ: Yes. But they’re being prosecuted in criminal courts, not immigration courts, so the immigration consequences of pleading guilty to a crime may not be clear to everybody. There isn’t really precedent for asylum seekers’ being criminally prosecuted at the border before they’ve had a “credible fear” hearing. You come seeking asylum. Seeking asylum is not illegal. So typically what would happen is somebody would come to the border seeking asylum, they would get a “credible fear” hearing, then they would be released, then they would come back.

JW: You and I have talked before about the problems with some of President Obama’s immigration policies. Can you help me distinguish what would not have happened under President Obama?

PJ: For the most part, President Obama did not try to rob asylum seekers of their “credible fear” hearings. He also never separated families at the border. He put them in family-detention centers, which we know…

JW: Which we know weren’t great…

PJ: Which we know weren’t great, but he tried to keep families together, for the most part. But the big difference is that the “zero tolerance” policy of the Trump administration has been across the board. There really is no difference between immigrants. So an immigrant who could be a threat to national security or to safety… I mean, we had problems with [the way] President Obama treated people who’d been caught getting deported before, because they would have had a violation in their record. But for the most part there was an attempt to distinguish between people we needed to be worried about and people we didn’t. They didn’t have a policy to go after everybody.

But this so-called zero-tolerance policy, I’ve never seen anything like it. And I’ve worked on these issues for years. I mean, I saw some of these things happening after 9/11 to Arab Americans, Muslim, people being secretly detained and deported. It takes me back to that time when there were mass roundups of people.

There was a time when waterboarding and torture was the accepted thing to do. Then it became unacceptable. This separation of children from their parents is really a form of torture. These women have no idea where their children are. There’s been a lot of research on what happens to young children who are separated from their parents. For some of these kids, it’s been a month—or more! I know you talked about this with Jeff Merkley—well, these women describe the facilities they were in as “dog pounds.”

JW: Yes, he called them “dog kennels.”

PJ: Right. Well that’s what they call them in Spanish: “dog pound.” And Obama set up family-detention centers. It’s complicated. We didn’t think Obama’s enforcement policies should have been that way either, but this is such a different situation from that.

JW: So many of us assume these people are being detained at the border, and so we can’t necessarily go protest, if we can’t go down there, but that’s not true. How do we find out if women are detained in our states? Do I have women being held without their children near me in New York?

PJ: We know some of the places they’re being sent, but we are going to be asking ICE to tell us exactly where these people who’ve been transferred, to different BOP facilities and different detention centers, where they are. But yes, they may be in your backyard. And many of the children may also be in shelters in your backyard. Children are being held in [Office of Refugee Resettlement] shelters, which exist in many places around the country. So most likely many US citizens across the country are near places where mothers and children are being held in this way. I told these women: “I’m going to make sure that everybody outside knows what’s happening to you.

https://www.thenation.com/article/rep-p ... next-room/
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 seemslikeadream » Wed Jun 13, 2018 4:37 pm

She says federal officials took her daughter while she breastfed the child in a detention center

500+ immigrant children separated from parents

McAllen, Texas (CNN)The undocumented immigrant from Honduras sobbed as she told an attorney Tuesday how federal authorities took her daughter while she breastfed the child in a detention center, where she was awaiting prosecution for entering the country illegally.

When the woman resisted, she was handcuffed, Natalia Cornelio, the attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project, recalled from her interview with the woman, who had been detained under the Trump administration's zero-tolerance policy to refer anyone caught crossing the border illegally for federal prosecution.

Miguel Nogueras, a federal public defender, handles immigration cases.
Since the policy was announced in May, some 500 children have been separated from their parents within the last month, according to Miguel A. Nogueras, an assistant federal public defender for the Southern District of Texas in McAllen, citing an unofficial count by an attorney in his office.

Some parents who are under arrest tell public defenders they don't know what happened to their children, Nogueras said. Some parents also claim they have been told their children are being taken to be bathed or cleaned up, then the adults don't see them again.

"The government is essentially torturing people by doing this," Cornelio said.

In an interview outside the federal courthouse in McAllen, Nogueras said: "It depends on who the agent is on that day. They'll be told, 'We're going to separate your kids so they can bathe.' And that's not true."

He added: "It's really hard to look in the eye of a mother or father who would plead for you -- help me get my child back."

'My daughter is here'


Inside the crowded federal courtroom, another undocumented Honduran immigrant stood in shackles Tuesday pleading with a judge preparing to sentence him for illegally entering the United States.

Authorities had separated Oman Rodriguez-Avila from his 8-year-old daughter when they caught him and other immigrants crossing the border a day earlier.

"I would ask that you give me a short sentence because my daughter is here," he told a judge in Spanish, speaking through a translator.

The federal judge sentenced Rodriguez-Avila to 15 days in jail because Rodriguez-Avila was previously convicted for the same misdemeanor offense in 2012 and deported.

The scene Monday in a federal courthouse in McAllen, Texas, where defendants are facing a federal misdemeanor charge of illegally entering the United States.
The scene Monday in a federal courthouse in McAllen, Texas, where defendants are facing a federal misdemeanor charge of illegally entering the United States.

US Customs and Border Protection did not return calls to address Nogueras' claims.

Cornelio recalled how quickly the tears flowed when the Civil Rights Project interviewed immigrants, whose children had been taken from them, after their arrest for illegally entering the country.

"All the women would start crying and would need to take a couple of minutes before being able to continue talking about it," Cornelio said.

This week, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department's Southern District of Texas said her office could not comment on the number of parents who had been separated from their children or how families were separated because of the zero-tolerance policy.

'It should never happen'


Children generally are separated from parents who are awaiting prosecution for crossing illegally, so prosecuting more parents will result in the separation of far more children from their parents at the border than before the policy took effect.

Those children become the charges of the Health and Human Services' Administration for Children and Families (specifically, the Office of Refugee Resettlement).

Fact checking the Trump administration on immigration
In an interview with NPR last month, when asked what he would say to people who say it would be "cruel and heartless" to separate a mother from her children, White House chief of staff John Kelly said: "I wouldn't put it quite that way. The children will be taken care of -- put into foster care or whatever. But the big point is they elected to come illegally into the United States, and this is a technique that no one hopes will be used extensively or for very long."
The administration said it seeks to reunite the families as much as possible after court proceedings, but it puts the onus largely on the parents to locate their children within government custody and seek their return.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the administration's policy last month.
"So, if you cross the border unlawfully, even a first offense, we're going to prosecute you," Sessions told a gathering of the Association of State Criminal Investigative Agencies. "If you're smuggling a child, we're going to prosecute you, and that child will be separated from you, probably, as required by law. If you don't want your child to be separated, then don't bring them across the border illegally."

How one month reshaped the US immigration landscape
The new policy does not apply to asylum seekers who enter the United States through an official port of entry without paperwork; those people would only be placed into immigration proceedings.

It has long been a misdemeanor federal offense to be caught illegally entering the country, punishable by up to six months in prison and a $5,000 fine. But previous US administrations generally didn't refer everyone caught for prosecution. Those who were apprehended were put into immigration proceedings and faced deportation from the country, unless they qualified to pursue an asylum claim.

Supporters of the new program credited it with reducing the number of crossings and repeat offenders, while critics said it overwhelmed the courts and US attorneys' offices with low-level crimes that made it difficult to use resources to go after serious and dangerous crime, like drug smuggling and cartels.
Nogueras said he has seen a shift in the caseload. During the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, public defenders in the federal courthouse in McAllen handled about 20 to 30 cases a day involving defendants facing charges for minor crimes, he said.

On Monday, public defenders handled 170 cases of undocumented immigrants who were charged with illegally entering the country and about 120 on Tuesday. At least 60 children have been separated from their parents over the past two days, according to the federal public defenders in McAllen.

"I'm outraged about it. I'm angry. It should never happen," Nogueras said. "I don't think that this represents the values of the American people."

CNN's Tal Kopan and Jason Hanna contributed to this report.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/12/us/immig ... index.html


FAMILIES BELONG TOGETHER

Families Belong Together opposes the cruel, inhumane and unjustified separation of children from their parents along the U.S. border. Join us on June 14, 2018.

FIND AN EVENT


Families Belong Together opposes the cruel, inhumane and unjustified separation of children from their parents along the U.S. border with Mexico and at other ports of entry into the U.S. We protest the conditions in which these children are kept. We protest the irreversible trauma that has already been perpetrated on these children and their parents for the crime of seeking a better life.

To separate immigrant families, victims of violence, hunger and poverty, is to re-violate them. Children as young as 18 months are torn from their mother’s arms by the U.S. government. This is violent abuse. These families are victimized again by the government to which they turn for help. Families Belong Together opposes the inhumane policies of the Trump Administration, Border Patrol, and I.C.E. and calls for immediate reform.
https://familiesbelong.org
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Re: What is #WhereAreTheChildren

Postby Cordelia » Thu Jun 14, 2018 8:38 am

Addressing the emotional impact on the recipients of this deliberately horrific but hardly new practice.

I work with children separated from caregivers at the border. What happens is unforgivable: The policy has a devastating emotional impact on kids.

By Katie Annand Jun 6, 2018

Image
A security guard watches as girls from Central America sleep at a detention facility run by the U.S. Border Patrol on September 8, 2014 in McAllen, Texas. John Moore/Getty Images


Helplessness. It’s what I feel when children are faced with the forced separation from their parent or caregiver at the US border. Anger, sadness, uncertainty, and dismay all follow closely behind.

I work as an attorney with an organization called Kids In Need of Defense, or KIND, devoted to working with unaccompanied children. I hear firsthand stories that illustrate the severe impact of family separation on children; to say they are terrorized and completely devastated is an understatement. This new terror is compounded by the trauma already experienced by these children — the violence, persecution, and other harm they faced in their home country that caused them to seek protection in the US in the first place.

Among our cases of family separation are two siblings, a 7-year-old girl and 12-year-old boy, who traveled with their mother to the United States from Central America and were apprehended in September 2017 in El Paso, Texas. On the cold January day when they came into our office, the 12-year-old was wearing a green raincoat while his sister wore only a rainbow-adorned blouse because, as she told us, she was “too young to get cold.” We learned from the children that Customs and Border Protection, or CBP, had taken them from their mother at the border. The 7-year-old told us how she cried and begged to be with her mother — she was clearly still in shock.

We later learned that their mother had been detained, transferred between various detention facilities over the course of about two weeks, and then deported. The children were told their mother had committed a crime by bringing them to the United States, and were promptly transferred to a shelter.

A few months later, as these two children sat in KIND’s office telling their story, their emotions were still raw. They are currently living with a member of their family who they are not close with; it hardly feels like home to them. They remembered every detail of the horrifying moment when immigration officials took their mother away. The 7-year-old kept saying over and over how she was having trouble going to school because she missed her so much. Only her mom knew how to do her hair just right each morning, she said. Her brother, a few years older, told us he had to take care of his little sister after their mom was taken away. They were terrified of never seeing her again.

What could we tell them? We didn’t know if or how they would see their mother again, either.

Separating children from their parents has a devastating emotional impact on the child[/b]

Separation of children from non-parental caretakers at the border is not new. It’s been a longstanding policy since the system for these children was created by the Homeland Security Act of 2002. We have seen firsthand the devastating effect of this practice, which is often just as damaging when these non-parental caretakers are the primary caregiver for the child.

In April of this year, 8-year-old Abel from El Salvador was separated from his grandmother, with whom he had lived his entire life, as soon as they arrived at the border. Abel was placed in a shelter, and his grandmother was taken to a detention facility, where she was held for two weeks and then deported. They were fleeing El Salvador because Abel’s grandmother was being extorted; people were threatening Abel’s life if she did not pay a monthly fee. Under federal law, children who are apprehended by immigration without a parent or legal guardian are routinely separated from that adult.

When Abel came into our office, his eyes were filled with fear. He was frightened to meet our staff and scared to even talk to us — he didn’t know if he could trust authority figures. He barely talked his first month in the United States.

In addition to the nearly incomprehensible suffering the United States is imposing on these children, the administration’s new policy, which separates children from parents, makes it much harder for the child to make a claim for US protection. As of last month, all parents are being referred for prosecution because they crossed into the United States without documentation. The parents are placed into US Marshal’s custody in an adult detention facility, while the child is rendered “unaccompanied” and deportation proceedings are initiated against the child alone. Their case is completely separated from their parent’s and little to no communication is facilitated between the parent and child.

Parents don’t know what’s happening to their children, and vice versa. This has significant implications for the child’s ability to make their case for US protection. Often, adult family members have information and documents that are vital to making their case. We see children who may not know why they came to the United States – parents and caregivers often do not tell their children the full story, lest they be scared or traumatized.

Testimonies from family members are vital to their path to legal protection. When children and parents are separated, who helps the child tell her story? How will they answer questions when all they can think about is, “Where is my mom?”

The idea that separating children from their families acts as a deterrent is not accurate

http://www.rapidshift.net/i-work-with-c ... t-on-kids/
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Re: What is #WhereAreTheChildren

Postby Cordelia » Thu Jun 14, 2018 8:58 am

Tuesday, June 12, 2018


NEW YORK STATE PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION'S STATEMENT ON CHILDREN SEPARATED FROM THEIR PARENTS AT THE BORDER


New York State Psychological Association (NYSPA) is deeply concerned for the well-being of children at the border who are torn apart from their parents and placed — according to media reports — in fence-like wire boxes or barrack-like buildings with other children who have been subjected to similar traumatic experiences.

We know from clinical and research experience that there are many ways disruptive attachment experiences can have a profoundly negative impact on a child’s emotional and physical health, not only during the acute phase of the experience, but as well across the lifespan and impinge on the child’s cognitive, medical, emotional, social and relational, educational, and vocational development.

We ask: who is there to comfort and protect these children from further mistreatment or abuse in the sites they are sent to; who is there to understand the anguish and layers of fear and abandonment in their cries or avoidant silences; who is there to keep these children safe during this terrifying time of loss and separation? What will be the long-term consequences?

This horrific policy of a government confiscating children from their parents, under the guise that this form of kidnapping is a legitimate policy and punishment for parents is not acceptable and violates the core humanity and psychological well-being of these children. NYSPA stands with more than a thousand and growing number of mental health professionals across the United States who have added their signature to the letter initiated by Dana L. Sinopoli, PsyD. We invite you to sign this letter by linking to: https://childsworldamerica.org/stop-border-separation/

We also invite you to read NYSPA Member Todd Essig’s essay on the separation issue that has been published by Forbes and may be linked to here:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/toddessig/ ... c1cd8c2392

We hope you will join the groundswell of support building for the principles put forth in this letter (see letter below). Please feel free to forward the letter to your colleagues, professional organizations, friends, and family for their signatures.

With deep respect and concern for the children at the border,

Patricia Dowds, PhD
President, New York State Psychological Association
and
Sharon Brennan, PhD
Chair, NYSPA’s Disaster Resources Network


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Border Separation of Children from Parents!
childsworldamerica.org/stop-border-separation

We would like you to remember what it feels like to be a child. To take a moment and remember how big and sometimes scary the world felt and how, if you were lucky, the adults in your life represented security and safety. We want you to remember what little say you had over what you did and what happened to you and that even though this was frustrating, some part of you trusted that your parents knew what was best for you. And that your physical and psychological survival depended on them.

Between October 2017 and April 2018, 700 children have been separated from their parents at the border. One-hundred of these children are under 4 years old. These children are thrust into detention centers often without an advocate or an attorney and possibly even without the presence of any adult who can speak their language. We want you to imagine for a moment what this might be like for a child: to flee the place you have called home because it is not safe to stay and then embark on a dangerous journey to an unknown destination, only to be ripped apart from your sole sense of security with no understanding of what just happened or if you will ever see your family again. And that the only thing you have done to deserve this, is to do what children do: stay close to the adults in their lives for security.

It seems quite clear that the adults who are enacting a Zero Tolerance policy at our borders are not remembering what it is like to be a child. How many of us have memories of our parents suddenly disappearing in a grocery store and the temporary terror we felt? Not only is the terror these children experience at the border not temporary, these children have no way of knowing if and when they are ever going to see their parents again. As the Trump administration defends this separation policy, there is no mention of the impact this has on the children themselves. It appears that the only way to justify this policy is to completely disconnect from either one or both of the following realities: that these are children; and that children are affected by what happens to them.

From decades of research and direct clinical experience, we know that the impact of disrupted attachment manifests not only in overwhelming fear and panic at the time of the separation, but that there is a strong likelihood that these children’s behavioral, psychological, interpersonal, and cognitive trajectories will also be affected. The National Child Traumatic Stress Network, which is funded in part by the Department of Health and Human Services, notes that children may develop post traumatic responses following separation from their parents and specifically lists immigration and parental deportation as situations of potentially traumatic separation. To pretend that separated children do not grow up with the shrapnel of this traumatic experience embedded in their minds is to disregard everything we know about child development, the brain, and trauma.

We find ourselves again upon a time where we will one day utter “how could we have let that happen?” We cannot afford to forget that there is a history of separating children from their parents: during slave auctions; during the forced assimilation of American Indians; and during the Holocaust. The reverberations of these barbaric stains on our history are still felt today and future generations of these original victims will inherit the intergenerational transmission of these traumas. To try and argue that this policy of ripping children from their parents at the border is somehow different from the systematic traumatization of children during the times of slavery, forced assimilation, and the Holocaust is to disregard history. To somehow convince ourselves that this systematic traumatization of children has no bearing on the lives of these children and no impact on the legacy of our country is to be living in an alternate universe. And to not care about the impact these policies have on these children is to succumb to the worst potential of humanity.


We, the undersigned, implore you to recognize what is at stake when children are taken from their mothers and other attachment figures. As psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and counselors we have a responsibility to report any concern of child maltreatment. This policy of separation is an indefensible violation of children’s civil rights and we uphold our responsibility as mandated reporters to sound the alarm.

Please go to childsworldamerica.org/stop-border-separation to see list of mental professionals who have signed on to this letter. We invite you to also sign this letter.//

https://www.nyspa.org/news/404727/NYSPA ... Border.htm
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Re: What is #WhereAreTheChildren

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Jun 14, 2018 8:15 pm

there are no windows in the Walmart..... the children get two hours of fresh air a day but trump has put up a lovely mural

Image


where are the girls?

Defense Contractors Cashing In on Immigrant Kids’ Detention

A scandal-plagued company that used to work for the CIA is poised to profit off the influx of immigrant children being forcibly separated from their parents.

Separating refugee and immigrant children from their parents isn’t just an emotionally wrenching policy. It’s an enterprise that is benefitting intelligence and defense contractors.

Those contractors—including one with a history of scandals—have advertised a flurry of jobs in recent weeks to support the infrastructure surrounding undocumented children whom the Trump administration has taken from their families.

One of them, from Virginia-based MVM Inc., seeks a compliance coordinator to help in San Antonio with the “rapid deployment of an Emergency Influx Shelter for unaccompanied children.” As billed, the coordinator would ensure the children’s shelter met “policies and procedures” set by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement. MVM posted the job on its website this week.

MVM appears to believe its business is growing. A job posting on Indeed.com from 20 days ago advertises for youth care workers “in anticipation of a contract award.”

Matthew Kolken, an immigration attorney who frequently represents undocumented children, told The Daily Beast he’s deeply concerned about these contractors’ childcare work.

“I’m guessing that in their mission statement, one of the central components isn’t the care of refugee children,” he said. “It is mind-blowing that those types of industries would be even considered with respect to the care of children. They’re not equipped to be able to do it. Would you want your child to be dropped off in their hands? I know I wouldn’t.”

“It is mind-blowing that those types of industries would be even considered with respect to the care of children. Would you want your child to be dropped off in their hands? I know I wouldn’t.”

— immigration attorney Matthew Kolken

Because of a new Justice Department zero-tolerance policy toward people entering the country illegally, parents caught bringing their children to the United States––including those seeking asylum––are automatically arrested and detained pending immigration court proceedings. Previously, some parents were let out on bond, often with ankle monitors. Hundreds and hundreds of children have been separated from their newly detained parents since the policy change. The children enter the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement. ORR puts the children in shelters or foster care. This is where the contractors come in: to help ORR with the logistics of caring for these children. The shelters that house children appear to be operating above capacity.

A child-advocate contract in pre-solicitation from ORR on June 1 bluntly described the “traumatic situations” undocumented children separated from their families have survived in their home countries. Many such children experienced “dire poverty, war, forced military or gang recruitment, human trafficking, domestic violence, abuse, familial separation and government neglect.” These include “very young” children, mostly with minimal education, and after “apprehension by DHS [the Department of Homeland Security] and transfer to ORR, these children face a complicated legal system.”

The contract seeks companies that can develop child-advocacy programs to serve “a minimum of 550 minors” in Brownsville, San Antonio, Houston, Chicago, Phoenix, Los Angeles and the New York and D.C. metro areas.

MVM bills itself as having “extensive domain expertise in counter-narcotics, criminal and civil investigations, public safety, and national security.” It’s perhaps better known as a security contractor for U.S. intelligence.

In 2008, MVM lost a lucrative contract with the Central Intelligence Agency in Iraq for, the Wall Street Journal reported, “failing to provide enough armed guards.” It also faced internal allegations that its guards in Iraq, which worked for both the CIA and the National Security Agency, “were procuring and possessing unauthorized weapons and explosives,” according to a since-dismissed lawsuit from an Army Special Forces veteran employee who unsuccessfully claimed wrongful termination after blowing the whistle.

More recently, in July 2017, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued MVM after finding that the firm retaliated against one of its security guards, a practicing Muslim, by forcing him to shave his beard after he reported a supervisor called him a “n**ga.” The company settled the case months later for $135,000. And it hasn’t been the only recent example of what the EEOC has considered discrimination.

Joe Arabit, the director of MVM’s homeland security and public safety division, told The Daily Beast that its contracts “are unrelated to the examples you raise. And, I’d point out that the recent allegations you mention of discrimination and harassment have been found through investigations and arbitration to be without merit. MVM, Inc. prides itself on being an inclusive company that creates a welcoming and diverse workplace.”

Asked if it was appropriate for security and intelligence firm like MVM to be responsible for children in vulnerable circumstances, Arabit replied: “MVM, Inc.’s top priority is the welfare of children while they are in our care. We are a trusted partner of ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and ORR because of the respect and dedication with which we treat those whom we transport. Managing the transportation, security, and shelter needs of these children is a highly sensitive matter, and the safety of those in our care is the most important thing. Per our contract, we are limited in what information we can share.”

The ORR compliance officer, MVM advertises, ought to be someone who “loves the challenge of finding creative solution for dynamic, complex issues.” MVM wants a subject-matter expert familiar with “a variety of government policies that affect the children that are in shelter care.”

“The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission found that MVM retaliated against a security guard, a practicing Muslim, by forcing him to shave his beard after he reported a supervisor called him a ‘n**ga.’”

Another San Antonio-based MVM job, posted on LinkedIn three weeks ago, seeks a bilingual “transport specialist” with “compassion for children.” The position will accompany “unaccompanied minors of all age groups… via domestic flights and/or ground transportation to select government facilities.” On such trips, the specialist, who must speak both Spanish and English, will “communicate with children and teens in a way that is culturally-sensitive, while fostering a safe and humane environment.” The part-time job is billed to holders of security clearances for unspecified reasons that Arabit said were determined by the government.

Recent MVM postings indicate employment opportunities for similar travelling youth-care workers in Phoenix (“be honest, act with integrity, and keep the conversation focused on helping and nurturing children”) and McAllen, Texas – where U.S. Senator Jeff Merkley recently visited an asylum center owing to his “significant concern about children being separated from their families when their families are seeking asylum.”

Federal Contracting databases show MVM was awarded a contract worth up to $8 million over the next five years. The contract, kicked off in September 2017, calls for the company to provide assistance in emergency shelter operations for unaccompanied children and extends through September 2022.

In addition to MVM’s work with the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), it also has contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement for transporting unaccompanied undocumented children around McAllen. According to a contractor database, the work has earned MVM nearly $43 million since last September.

Arabit didn’t quantify the dollar amount of ICE and ORR’s contracts specifically. He said MVM held “multi-million dollar contracts” providing for “multiple forms of transportation, food, shelter, clothing, and other expenses related to managing these ICE and ORR programs.”

The company has been contracted with ICE for its transportation services for unaccompanied immigrant children since 2014, Arabit said, and for ORR’s “temporary shelter services for unaccompanied children since 2017.”

It’s not just MVM. The defense contracting giant General Dynamics is advertising a data-entry position within ORR’s case-coordination program for undocumented children that will, among other things, monitor youths’ cases as they move through the system. Other General Dynamics jobs for ORR involve policy analysis; tracking “new placements and progress of minors in ORR funded care”; supporting ORR’s director in, among other tasks, “review[ing] files and redact[ing] information as directed.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/defense-c ... ssion=true
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Re: What is #WhereAreTheChildren

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Jun 15, 2018 9:58 am

Image

Sessions cites Bible passage used to defend slavery in defense of separating immigrant families

Attorney General Jeff Sessions speaks about immigration to law enforcement officers in Fort Wayne, Ind., on Thursday. (Mike Moore/Journal-Gazette/AP)
Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Thursday used a Bible verse to defend his department’s policy of prosecuting everyone who crosses the border from Mexico, suggesting that God supports the government in separating immigrant parents from their children.

“I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained the government for his purposes,” Sessions said during a speech to law enforcement officers in Fort Wayne, Ind. “Orderly and lawful processes are good in themselves. Consistent and fair application of the law is in itself a good and moral thing, and that protects the weak and protects the lawful.”

Government officials occasionally refer to the Bible as a line of argument — take, for instance, the Republicans who have quoted 2 Thessalonians (“if a man will not work, he shall not eat”) to justify more stringent food stamps requirements.

But the verse that Sessions cited, Romans 13, is an unusual choice.

“There are two dominant places in American history when Romans 13 is invoked,” said John Fea, a professor of American history at Messiah College in Pennsylvania. “One is during the American Revolution [when] it was invoked by loyalists, those who opposed the American Revolution.”

The other, Fea said, “is in the 1840s and 1850s, when Romans 13 is invoked by defenders of the South or defenders of slavery to ward off abolitionists who believed that slavery is wrong. I mean, this is the same argument that Southern slaveholders and the advocates of a Southern way of life made.”

In May, Sessions announced a zero-tolerance policy in which the Justice Department would begin prosecuting everyone who crosses the Southwest border. Part of the policy shift meant that migrants traveling with children or unaccompanied minors end up detained instead of released; U.S. immigration law charges adults with a crime, but not the children, which means they’re held separately.

[Inside Casa Padre, the converted Walmart where the U.S. is holding nearly 1,500 immigrant children]

The Associated Press cited U.S. Customs and Border Protection figures from two weeks in May in which more than 650 children were separated from parents. Reports from the same month that the government lost track of 1,475 children sparked a national outcry; those reports were later disputed.

Sessions has said “we’ve got to get this message out” that asylum seekers or anyone else immigrating through unofficial means is not given immunity. He appealed to “church friends” later in Thursday’s speech in Fort Wayne, emphasizing that non-citizens who enter the United States illegally are breaking the law.

On the same issue, other religious groups and individuals have cited the Bible as well, to take the opposite side.

“Overwhelmingly, Scripture causes families to be kept together,” said Gabriel Salguero, president of the National Latino Evangelical Coalition. “Overwhelmingly Scripture causes us to defend families. As Evangelicals, we have a doctrine to be a pro-family-values people, you know. The Bible calls us to be pro-family, and I personally find it deeply lamentable that we are separating children from their parents at the border or anywhere.”

Likewise, on Thursday afternoon, the Migrants and Refugees Section at the Vatican tweeted a verse of Deuteronomy:


At a meeting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops on Wednesday, the nation’s Catholic leaders strongly condemned the administration’s immigration policies as immoral, with one bishop going so far as to suggest that Catholics who help carry out the Justice Department’s policies are violating their faith and perhaps should be denied Communion.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said during a briefing Thursday that she hadn’t seen Sessions’s comments, but she backed his line of thinking.

“I can say that it is very biblical to enforce the law. That is actually repeated a number of times throughout the Bible,” she said. “It’s a moral policy to follow and enforce the law.”

[Fact-checking immigration spin on separating families and 1,500 ‘lost’ children]

Fea, the American history professor, said that after the Civil War, historians don’t see many references to Romans 13 because the essence of the passage — submission to authority — is regarded as un-American.

“America was built and born on rebellion and a sort of radical resistance to authority,” Fea said. “Whenever Romans 13 was used in the 18th and the 19th century — and Sessions seems to be doing the same thing, so in this sense there is some continuity — it’s a way of manipulating the scriptures to justify your own political agenda.”

The chapter itself can be interpreted in varying ways.

“Romans 13 says that the purpose of government is to pursue what is good, and it says that the government should not be a terror for those who are doing good,” said Matthew Soerens, U.S. director of church mobilization for World Relief, the humanitarian arm of the National Association of Evangelicals.

“You cannot read Romans 13 without reading Romans 12,” Salguero said, pointing to the prior chapter, which in part suggests that love must be the guide instead of evil.

“Laws are good, and order is good, but that doesn’t mean that separating families from each other is a good law,” he said. “There are good laws, and there are bad laws, and separating families from each other is a bad policy. We’re not against the law, we’re against bad laws and bad policies.”

Besides, as Soerens points out, the person in the Bible whom Sessions referenced ran afoul of the law.

“The fact that the Apostle Paul, who wrote Romans, wrote several epistles from jail suggests that he was occasionally on the wrong side of an unjust law,” Soerens said.

The evangelical polling group Barna found that evangelical Christians’ attitudes toward immigration seem to be warming somewhat. In 2016, Barna found that 42 percent of evangelicals agreed with the statement “We allow too many immigrants into the country,” compared with 30 percent of American adults overall. By the next year, just 23 percent of adults overall and 31 percent of evangelicals agreed.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act ... e0509d7f5f
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Re: What is #WhereAreTheChildren

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Jun 15, 2018 7:43 pm

Image
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 Grizzly » Sat Jun 16, 2018 9:26 pm

DOJ Lets Cops Know SESTA/FOSTA Is For Shutting Down Websites, Not Busting Sex Traffickers

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180614/08352740037/doj-lets-cops-know-sesta-fosta-is-shutting-down-websites-not-busting-sex-traffickers.shtml
from the work-dumber,-not-harder dept

SESTA/FOSTA was pushed through with the fiction it would be used to target sex traffickers. This obviously was never its intent. It faced pushback from the DOJ and law enforcement agencies because pushing traffickers off mainstream sites would make it much more difficult to track them down. The law was really written for one reason: to take down Backpage and its owners, who had survived numerous similar attempts in the past. The DOJ managed to do this without SESTA, which was still waiting for presidential approval when the feds hits the site's principal executives with a 93-count indictment.

The law is in force and all it's doing is hurting efforts to track down sex traffickers and harming sex workers whose protections were already minimal. Sex traffickers, however, don't appear to be bothered by the new law. But that's because the law wasn't written to target sex traffickers, as a top DOJ official made clear at a law enforcement conference on child exploitation. Acting Assistant Attorney General John P. Cronan's comments make it clear SESTA/FOSTA won't be used to dismantle criminal organizations and rescue victims of sex traffickers. It's there to give the government easy wins over websites while sex traffickers continue unmolested.


More at the link ...
----

Reply All has a good episode going over the justification for, and reasons against, passing SESTA/FOSTA.
#119 No More Safe Harbor
https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/119-no-more-safe-harbor

PS: Defense Contractors Cashing In on Immigrant Kids’ Detention

No, no, no, no, no, ... They go into the penalty box, I’m told... /s
“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”

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Re: What is #WhereAreTheChildren

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Jun 17, 2018 9:36 am

Shelter workers are not allowed to touch the children



Olga Lautman


The world watched the Syrian refugee camps being set up in neighboring countries and the parents were ALLOWED to keep their kids!

The Trump regime set up the 1st tent city in the middle of nowhere to throw kids in 100+ degrees..

Who did they award the 10 million contract too?


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We need to get to the bottom of who the hell got this contract and why this regime is keeping it a secret.



It’s beyond outrageous that they built this tent city in the middle of nowhere. The trauma these kids will endure is something they will never recover from. The trump regime is acting like terrorists holding kids hostage and psychologically destroying them




Olga Lautman Retweeted Texas Tribune
https://twitter.com/texastribune/status ... 56097?s=21

This is HORRIFYING! The Trump Regime and all involved in following orders need to be tried in an international court and sanctioned by other countries


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Trump administration opens tent city near El Paso to house separated immigrant children

by Julián Aguilar June 15, 2018 6 PM

A view of the access to the Tornillo-Guadalupe international bridge in the municipality of Guadalupe, in the Juarez Valley, Mexico on January 18, 2017. REUTERS/Tomas Bravo
A federal detention center for unaccompanied immigrant minors is up and running in West Texas, just one day after federal officials announced the location.

The office of state Rep. César Blanco, D-El Paso, confirmed the opening of the facility at the federal port of entry at Tornillo, about 20 miles east of the El Paso city limits. As of Friday afternoon, 100 minors were on site there, Blanco said.

The shelter, which critics have called a tent city because of the makeshift, temporary buildings that are being used, was deemed necessary after President Donald Trump's administration began its policy of “zero tolerance” for people who are seeking asylum and who cross into the country illegally in between ports of entry. The policy means that adults will be prosecuted for federal charges while their children are taken into government custody.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families said in a fact sheet provided by Blanco’s office the shelter currently has space for 360 unaccompanied minors “with the ability to expand or contract” as needed.

Blanco sent the department a written request Thursday inquiring into when the facility would be constructed and if the children would be able to communicate with their family members, among other things.

He told the Tribune Friday afternoon he was blindsided by how fast the government moved on the project.

“There is clearly a lack of transparency, and clearly this administration is in a hurry to set these tent cities up without any input from the local community, without any input from any kind of third party,” he said.

Blanco said his office has requested a site tour to inspect the facility and have some of his questions answered.

“We don’t want to go two weeks from now,” he said “We want to have access immediately. It’s 100 degrees out, these are out there in tents, so we want to make sure we have access as soon as possible.”

In a fact sheet, the Department of Health and Human Services asserted the impact to local communities would be minimal and that the minors in the centers spend an average of 57 days in custody. The children will be supervised round the clock, and there will be an average of one adult supervisor for every eight children, the sheet stated. They will also be given vaccinations and medical screenings and must be deemed “fit to travel” before they are transferred from U.S. Border Patrol custody to the health department.

During a conference call with reporters on Friday, Department of Homeland Security officials said that as of May 31, there were 1,995 immigrant children in custody as a result of the “zero tolerance” mandate.

Read related Tribune coverage:

Trump administration makes site selection for tent city near El Paso to house immigrant children separated from parents

Court won't hear case of undocumented teenager seeking abortion access

There are hundreds of headlines competing for your attention every day. But none come with a mission like ours: creating a more engaged and informed Texas with every story we cover, every event we convene and every newsletter we send. As a nonprofit newsroom, we rely on members to help keep our stories free and our events open to the public. Do you value our journalism? Show us with your support.
https://www.texastribune.org/2018/06/15 ... 6700776237
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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seemslikeadream
 
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Re: What is #WhereAreTheChildren

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Jun 18, 2018 7:30 am

they are just little kids



concentration camps

workers are told not to hold or comfort the children

how do you not hold a child when you have to change their diaper?


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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.
User avatar
seemslikeadream
 
Posts: 32090
Joined: Wed Apr 27, 2005 11:28 pm
Location: into the black
Blog: View Blog (83)

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