[Discussion] Separating and/or Detaining Families at the US-Mexico Border

Just figured we could collect this mess in one thread.

Last night I was watching Rachel Maddow about her support for RAICES, and Facebook charity page for raising bail money for incarcerated men and women who have been separated from their children allowing them to get their kids back. It started as an attempt to raise $1500 for one man and has blossomed into a massive fund of over $17 million for lawyers around the country to use to free immigrants.

One of the problems the group is facing now is that finding the kids, once their parents are released, is proving difficult. That is nothing short of abject horror. To illustrate this she showed a graphic from the Washington Post, showing all the cities kids have been moved to.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/JsCyFZx.png)

I paused and looked at that graphic for about half an hour, my mind spinning into the horror show we are creating. It seems purposeful, to take the kids with the intention of never giving them back. Why move them so far?

Then I was thinking about what an early news report in 1930's Germany might have shown, where Jews were being taken, to protect society. I kept thinking, at which point in this narrative would we be admonishing German citizens for not doing enough?

Then, my thoughts kept getting darker. If they deport everyone, will we really know where they went. Guatemala is now refusing too accept the people we evict. What if deportation isn't the goal? When and what does it take for what became the Final Solution in Germany? At what point do we step in?

Darker still. If we get news reports next month, next year, or whenever, that immigrants are now disappearing, and implications that the worst is happening, what do we do? Once a government crosses that line, how do you protest? Will we cower, knowing that Trump's army is either complicit or also too scared to raise an objection? I mean, we understand that most people cannot afford to lose their jobs over protesting. What if it is you and your family's lives?

So I'm telling myself that this is nuts, to stop the brainworm and realize we are in a different time. But then the mind goes. Trump refers to these people as criminals, and worse, pests that infest our nation. Unlike the Jews, these people are true others. Read some comments from Trump supporters about immigration and look at the words they use. It is all justification, and the terms keep getting darker and uglier. Would Jeff Session and Stephen Miller support disappearing immigrants in an attempt to stop immigration?

I'm not really suggesting we are on this path, and that this is a reasonable belief. But I'm scared because, what is the moment we act before it is too late? I spoke to my wife this morning about this, mostly to get her to shake me out of it. But all she said is what German citizens said in the 1930's. Well, she did say that we have better press coverage now.

Then my mind spins some more. Fake news and millions of Americans that no longer believe the mainstream media. What could they get away with?

For the love of God, Bob Mueller, can you please finish your investigation up up and free our country of this horror show?

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/wqJX7b7.jpg)

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I'm in no way endorsing this. I'm linking to it because it's relevant. Here comes Andrew Sullivan with a hot take

If We Want to End the Border Crisis, It’s Time to Give Trump His Wall

And push him over to the outside of it?

DSGamer wrote:

I'm in no way endorsing this. I'm linking to it because it's relevant. Here comes Andrew Sullivan with a hot take

If We Want to End the Border Crisis, It’s Time to Give Trump His Wall

He's right that the Democrats need to handle this issue better. Where he's wrong is in thinking Democrats have to treat this like a real problem and thus push for a real solution. (edit) If we learned anything from Obamacare, it's that there *is* no such thing as solving a real problem if you involve the Republicans.

Republicans win because they don't weigh themselves down with reality when they talk to the populace. Democrats shouldn't either. You know what Republicans do when they talk to the populace? They tell them whatever the populace wants to hear, regardless of the truth. Especially when they criticize the Democrats.

Everything the Democrats do should be calculated to hurt the Republicans in the future. Sure--let them try and build that wall, and then when they fail like so many of Trump's previous projects, hit them over the head with it. Take the House and then parade Republicans in front of committees to grill them on wall construction corruption and graft over and over, just like the did with Buttery Males like Ben Ghazi.

The one difference is that we should put human suffering first. Resist them when they want to directly hurt the powerless. I think that still leaves a lot of territory to give them enough room to make mistakes that allow us to appeal to persuadable voters/turn off deplorables from voting.

Fox and Friends' Brian Kilmeade:

BRIAN KILMEADE (CO-HOST): The other thing that I think is the biggest joke that we're not addressing, it wasn't President Trump's idea to have everyone leave from Central and South America in June and well up at the border. Somebody has to deal with this issue. It doesn't matter who the president is. If you don't like his policy, he's also open to your policy rather than just criticizing his. He's trying to send a message to the other countries. This is not the way you do it because this is a country that has rules and laws. The port of entry will be one thing. We can bolster those laws, but we just can't let everybody in that wants to be here.

And these are not -- like it or not, these aren't our kids. Show them compassion, but it's not like he is doing this to the people of Idaho or Texas. These are people from another country and now people are saying that they're more important than people in our country who are paying taxes and who have needs as well.

So easy...

edit: eh, not really all that funny.

Jayhawker wrote:

Fox and Friends' Brian Kilmeade:

BRIAN KILMEADE (CO-HOST): The other thing that I think is the biggest joke that we're not addressing, it wasn't President Trump's idea to have everyone leave from Central and South America in June and well up at the border. Somebody has to deal with this issue. It doesn't matter who the president is. If you don't like his policy, he's also open to your policy rather than just criticizing his. He's trying to send a message to the other countries. This is not the way you do it because this is a country that has rules and laws. The port of entry will be one thing. We can bolster those laws, but we just can't let everybody in that wants to be here.

And these are not -- like it or not, these aren't our kids. Show them compassion, but it's not like he is doing this to the people of Idaho or Texas. These are people from another country and now people are saying that they're more important than people in our country who are paying taxes and who have needs as well.

So easy... :-(

And this is where they start moving the line.

Rat Boy wrote:
Jayhawker wrote:

Fox and Friends' Brian Kilmeade:

BRIAN KILMEADE (CO-HOST): The other thing that I think is the biggest joke that we're not addressing, it wasn't President Trump's idea to have everyone leave from Central and South America in June and well up at the border. Somebody has to deal with this issue. It doesn't matter who the president is. If you don't like his policy, he's also open to your policy rather than just criticizing his. He's trying to send a message to the other countries. This is not the way you do it because this is a country that has rules and laws. The port of entry will be one thing. We can bolster those laws, but we just can't let everybody in that wants to be here.

And these are not -- like it or not, these aren't our kids. Show them compassion, but it's not like he is doing this to the people of Idaho or Texas. These are people from another country and now people are saying that they're more important than people in our country who are paying taxes and who have needs as well.

So easy... :-(

And this is where they start moving the line.

This is why it’s important to be morally firm and intellectually rigorous right now. Things can literally go anywhere from here. Recent podcast on Slate makes this case well, IMO.

http://www.slate.com/articles/podcas...

Jayhawker wrote:

Fox and Friends' Brian Kilmeade:

These are people from another country and now people are saying that they're more important than people in our country who are paying taxes and who have needs as well.

I see Conservatives spouting this sh*t all the time and it makes me nuts. What are these rights that they think these people are getting? To live in some temporary shelter and maybe get 3 meals a day? That only means we need to do better by so many others that live here.

Re: "the girl in the picture wasn't separated" -- yeah, that's because the government has been intentionally forbidding photographers to get anywhere near the separated kids. Also note how horrific the government provided photos have been. Let the photographers into the shelters and then we can talk.

Re: The Wall: all of that supposes that there's some kind of immigration crisis (border crossings were at a low point when he started campaigning and they've dropped lower since). There is no immigration crisis except in his and his supporters' heads. Maybe an expensive symbolic act will appease them...but I think it's at least as likely to empower them to demand more.

Re: The parents: These people are refugees, fleeing horrific violence. The kids don't deserve to have this happen to them. But despite the horrific violence we're inflicting on them, it might still be better than what they're fleeing.

Re: The people in our country who have needs: Yes, let's talk about how this zero-tolerance policy is way, way more expensive than the previous approaches to handling asylum-seekers. Let's cancel it and spend the money on useful services. And then maybe we can talk about why you are currently trying to take away insurance from people with pre-existing conditions. And why Puerto Rico still doesn't have full power. And why Flint still doesn't have clean water. And why the Pittsburgh police shot another unarmed black kid in the back. Oh, you didn't care about those needs?

(Also, immigrants pay taxes and don't get nearly as much in the way of services as citizens, but that should be a dead horse by now.)

Gremlin wrote:

Re: "the girl in the picture wasn't separated" -- yeah, that's because the government has been intentionally forbidding photographers to get anywhere near the separated kids. Also note how horrific the government provided photos have been. Let the photographers into the shelters and then we can talk.

I saw John Heilman going off about this today on MSNBC with Nicole Wallace. The secrecy of these detention centers is beyond ridiculous. They aren't allowing reporters or members of congress inside these facilities.

A congressman two days ago was told he needed to give two weeks notice before he would be allowed in. That is horrifying.

This is one of the most powerful and well said videos I've seen on the crisis. Curtis Milsap is a farmer in Springfield, MO, which is about as red as you can get. I have not found a Youtube version, but it has gone quite viral on Facebook.

https://www.facebook.com/curtis.mill...

NYT: Why Are Parents Bringing Their Children on Treacherous Treks to the U.S. Border?
President Trump hopes to deter the flow of migrants into the United States, but near the busy border crossing in Arizona, some said that the threat of separation from their children would not deter them.

TUCSON, Ariz. — When Luis Cruz left behind his wife, four of their children and the house he’d built himself, he’d heard that American officials might split him from his son, the one child he took with him. But earlier this month, the two of them set out from Guatemala anyway.

The truth, he said this week, moments after they arrived at a cream-colored migrant shelter in Tucson, was that he would rather be apart from his child than face what they had left behind. “If they separate us, they separate us,” said Mr. Cruz, 41. “But return to Guatemala? This is something my son cannot do.”

For years, children and parents caught crossing the nation’s southern border have been released into the United States while their immigration cases were processed, the result of a hard-fought legal settlement designed to keep children from spending long months in federal detention. In the eyes of the Trump administration, this practice has served as an open invitation for people like Luis Cruz, and has played a major role in driving thousands of families across the border with Mexico.

Mr. Trump’s newest immigration policies — first an effort to separate families crossing the border, and now an effort to change the legal settlement on migrant family detention — represent an aggressive effort to rescind that invitation, one that has plunged the nation into a debate about the limits of its generosity.

But interviews at shelters and passage points along both sides of the border this week, as well as an examination of recent immigration numbers, suggest that even with tightened restrictions on families, it’s going to be difficult for the president to stanch the flow.

Though it’s impossible to know yet whether the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” crackdown on illegal border crossers will have a significant deterrent effect, one thing was clear this week at the Arizona-Mexico border: Many families — especially those from countries in Central America plagued by gang violence and ruined economies — are making the calculation that even separation or detention in the United States is better than the situation at home.

“Why would you undertake such a dangerous journey?” said Magdalena Escobedo, 32, who works at the migrant shelter here in Tucson, called Casa Alitas. “When you’ve got a gun to your head, people threatening to rape your daughter, extort your business, force your son to work for the cartels. What would you do?”

George Lakoff explains the checklist of reasons behind all conservative-base-fueling policies and how separating children from their parents fits in.

https://medium.com/@GeorgeLakoff/why...

Trump administration's 'zero tolerance' border prosecutions led to time served, $10 fees

USA Today wrote:

The Trump administration border crackdown that has separated thousands of children from their parents is built on a mountain of small-time criminal prosecutions that typically end with people sentenced to spend no additional time in jail and pay a $10 fee, according to a USA TODAY analysis of thousands of cases.

The “zero tolerance” push along the U.S. border with Mexico was meant to deter migrants by bringing criminal charges against everyone caught entering the United States illegally. In addition, it served as the legal machinery for splitting children from parents who were accompanying them across the border. Since the crackdown began in May, border agents have separated about 2,300 children from their families.

DOJ: Trump's immigration crackdown 'diverting' resources from drug cases

USA Today wrote:

Federal prosecutors warned they were diverting resources from drug-smuggling cases in southern California to handle the flood of immigration charges brought on by the Trump administration’s border crackdown, records obtained by USA TODAY show.

Days after Attorney General Jeff Sessions instructed prosecutors to bring charges against anyone who enters the United States illegally, a Justice Department supervisor in San Diego sent an email to border authorities warning that immigration cases “will occupy substantially more of our resources.” He wrote that the U.S. Attorney’s Office there was “diverting staff, both support and attorneys, accordingly.”

The email, sent by the lawyer who runs the office’s major crimes unit, said prosecutors needed to streamline their work on smuggling cases. He said that would mean tight deadlines – sometimes just a few hours to produce reports and recordings – for those that would land in federal court. Going forward, the lawyer, Fred Sheppard, warned, if agents can’t meet that high bar, “the case will be declined.”

Nice to know that we're not going to be able to prosecute drug smugglers because everyone's focused on busting people (and separating them from their kids) for a crime that is so severe that our justice system deems time served and a ten spot a suitable punishment.

Has there been any talk on how this is going to affect food supply or prices?

It's been an ongoing issue long enough that the American Farm Bureau Federation crunched the economic numbers back in 2014 for a variety of immigration reform scenarios.

What's happening now is their Alternative 1: enforcement only/enforcement first where the border is effectively closed combined with aggressive federal and state efforts to identify and deport undocumented workers already in the country.

About half of all agricultural workers are undocumented, so their model showed a pretty significant impact.

  • 70% to 146% increase in farm wages
  • 1% to 3% decrease in grain production.
  • 13% to 27% reduction in meat production.
  • 15% to 31% and 30% to 61% drop in vegetable and fruit production.
  • 15% to 29% drop in net farm income from lower production and gross receipts and higher expenses.
  • 5% to 6% increase in food prices (the model assumes farmers won't be able to pass on most of their increased cost of labor because consumers have been trained to view food as a commodity).

It's also interesting to note that the AFBF assumed that this policy alternative would be gradually phased in because it would have such a disrupting effect on the agricultural sector (and the US economy).

Gauging the Farm Sector’s Sensitivity to Immigration Reform via Changes in Labor Costs and Availability wrote:

Should immigration reform stop here with no provision for a path to legalization for undocumented workers already in the country or for a guest worker program, agriculture faces the loss of 50% or more of the hired workforce as the supply of undocumented workers dries up and as legal hired farm workers consider more attractive, higher paying jobs that have become available as a result of undocumented worker displacement in the general labor market. For purposes of this analysis, it was assumed that such a draconian program would be implemented over a 3- period starting in 2015 simply because the immediate loss of this large a share of the general work force would cause economic chaos.

For purposes of this analysis, it was assumed that such a draconian program would be implemented over a 3- period starting in 2015 simply because the immediate loss of this large a share of the general work force would cause economic chaos.

преждевременная эякуляция

Kids in exchange for deportation: Detained migrants say they were told they could get kids back on way out of U.S.
In a detention center near Houston, an asylum seeker from Honduras said he agreed to sign a voluntary removal order from the U.S. after federal officials promised to reunite him with his 6-year-old daughter.

HOUSTON — Central American men separated from their children and held in a detention facility outside Houston are being told they can reunite with their kids at the airport if they agree to sign a voluntary deportation order now, according to one migrant at the facility and two immigration attorneys who have spoken to detainees there.

A Honduran man who spoke to The Texas Tribune Saturday estimated that 20 to 25 men who have been separated from their children are being housed at the IAH Polk County Secure Adult Detention Center, a privately-operated U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility for men located 75 miles outside Houston. He said the majority of those detainees had received the same offer of reunification in exchange for voluntary deportation.

The 24-year-old detainee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity and requested the Tribune use the pseudonym Carlos because he feared retaliation, told the Tribune that he abandoned his asylum case and agreed to sign voluntary deportation paperwork Friday out of “desperation” to see his 6-year-old daughter, who was separated from him after the pair illegally crossed the border in late May. The man said two federal officials suggested he’d be reunited with his daughter at the airport if he agreed to sign the order, which could lead to him being repatriated to his violence-torn home country in less than two weeks.

“I was told I would not be deported without my daughter,” said Carlos, adding that he's now hoping to revoke the voluntary deportation order he signed and get legal help to fight his case. “I signed it out of desperation… but the truth is I can’t go back to Honduras; I need help.”

'All I hear is my daughter, crying': a Salvadoran father's plight after separation at border
Arnovis Guidos Portillo was deported from US but his six-year-old daughter remains in custody

“Papa, when are you getting me out of here?” asks the small voice on the telephone.

Arnovis Guidos Portillo holds his mobile phone away from his face as he struggles to hold back tears, but his six-year old daughter, Meybelin, can still be heard on speakerphone, asking when she will be released from custody in an American detention centre.

Though he knows it’s a lie, he tells her that she can’t return to El Salvador because the US government’s plane is broken; the truth is that he has no idea what will become of her.

“They’re going to bring you home soon,” he says. “They haven’t fixed the plane.”

Portillo, 26, was separated from Meybelin in McAllen, Texas, on 27 May – over three weeks after the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, announced the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance policy”, mandating children of undocumented migrants would be removed from their parents. Since then, 2,575 have been separated from their parents.

He has spoken to her three times since he was deported to El Salvador on Thursday, but he has no answers to her questions.

Yes, truly bad hombres that the brave people of ICE have sworn to protect us from.

Separated immigrant children are all over the U.S. now, far from parents who don’t know where they are

Their mothers are missing, their fathers far away. They get pizza, maybe cold cuts. They are exhausted; they cannot sleep. There are other children around, but they had never seen those kids before, and those kids are crying or screaming or rocking or spreading the feeling that everything is not okay.

The children who were forcibly separated from their parents at the border by the United States government are all over the country now, in Michigan and Maryland, in foster homes in California and shelters in Virginia, in cold, institutional settings with adults who are not permitted to touch them or with foster parents who do not speak Spanish but who hug them when they cry.

The separations have stopped and the Trump administration has said that it is executing a plan to reunify the children with their parents before deporting them. Still, more than 2,000 children remain spread around the United States, far from their parents — many of whom have no idea where their sons and daughters have been taken.

The children have been through hell. They are babies who were carried across rivers and toddlers who rode for hours in trucks and buses and older kids who were told that a better place was just beyond the horizon.

And now they live and wait in unfamiliar places: big American suburban houses where no one speaks their language; a locked shelter on a dusty road where they spend little time outside; a converted Walmart where each morning they are required to stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance, in English, to the country that holds them apart from their parents.

OG_slinger wrote:

It's been an ongoing issue long enough that the American Farm Bureau Federation crunched the economic numbers back in 2014 for a variety of immigration reform scenarios.

What's happening now is their Alternative 1: enforcement only/enforcement first where the border is effectively closed combined with aggressive federal and state efforts to identify and deport undocumented workers already in the country.

About half of all agricultural workers are undocumented, so their model showed a pretty significant impact.

  • 70% to 146% increase in farm wages
  • 1% to 3% decrease in grain production.
  • 13% to 27% reduction in meat production.
  • 15% to 31% and 30% to 61% drop in vegetable and fruit production.
  • 15% to 29% drop in net farm income from lower production and gross receipts and higher expenses.
  • 5% to 6% increase in food prices (the model assumes farmers won't be able to pass on most of their increased cost of labor because consumers have been trained to view food as a commodity).

It's also interesting to note that the AFBF assumed that this policy alternative would be gradually phased in because it would have such a disrupting effect on the agricultural sector (and the US economy).

Gauging the Farm Sector’s Sensitivity to Immigration Reform via Changes in Labor Costs and Availability wrote:

Should immigration reform stop here with no provision for a path to legalization for undocumented workers already in the country or for a guest worker program, agriculture faces the loss of 50% or more of the hired workforce as the supply of undocumented workers dries up and as legal hired farm workers consider more attractive, higher paying jobs that have become available as a result of undocumented worker displacement in the general labor market. For purposes of this analysis, it was assumed that such a draconian program would be implemented over a 3- period starting in 2015 simply because the immediate loss of this large a share of the general work force would cause economic chaos.

Sorry for the tangent, but that should work out well for the ag sector when combined with the potential for ag exports to be hit hard in the current trade situation.

In unrelated news, a Texas-based company has announced their new low-cost food product, "Soylent BOLD!™"

Gremlin wrote:

Separated immigrant children are all over the U.S. now, far from parents who don’t know where they are

Their mothers are missing, their fathers far away. They get pizza, maybe cold cuts. They are exhausted; they cannot sleep. There are other children around, but they had never seen those kids before, and those kids are crying or screaming or rocking or spreading the feeling that everything is not okay.

The children who were forcibly separated from their parents at the border by the United States government are all over the country now, in Michigan and Maryland, in foster homes in California and shelters in Virginia, in cold, institutional settings with adults who are not permitted to touch them or with foster parents who do not speak Spanish but who hug them when they cry.

The separations have stopped and the Trump administration has said that it is executing a plan to reunify the children with their parents before deporting them. Still, more than 2,000 children remain spread around the United States, far from their parents — many of whom have no idea where their sons and daughters have been taken.

The children have been through hell. They are babies who were carried across rivers and toddlers who rode for hours in trucks and buses and older kids who were told that a better place was just beyond the horizon.

And now they live and wait in unfamiliar places: big American suburban houses where no one speaks their language; a locked shelter on a dusty road where they spend little time outside; a converted Walmart where each morning they are required to stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance, in English, to the country that holds them apart from their parents.

The next couple of paragraphs made me see red.

WaPo wrote:

Why must they say those words, some of the children ask at the shelter in Brownsville, on the Mexican border in Texas?

“We tell them, ‘It’s out of respect,’ ” said one employee of the facility, known as Casa Padre, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of losing their job.

Who in the f*ck thought it would be a great idea to force non-American children who are traumatized from being stripped from their parents and held against their will to recite a creepy ass loyalty pledge to a country whose government hates and fears them.

Double WTF points because the original Pledge of Allegiance was written by Francis Bellamy who wanted to distinguish "true Americanism" from the bugaboo of the turn of the 20th century: the immigrants from southern and eastern Europe (and Ireland) that were "pouring over our country."

Bellamy penned this wonderful editorial for The Illustrated American in 1897, a few years after he wrote the Pledge:

Francis Bellamy wrote:

The hard inescapable fact is that men are not born equal. Neither are they born free but all in bonds to their ancestors and their environments. Many achieve freedom but by no means all. The success of government by the people will depend upon the stuff the people are made of. The people must realize their responsibility to themselves. They must guard more jealously even than their liberties the quality of their blood.

A democracy like ours cannot afford to throw itself open to the world. Where every man is a lawmaker every dull witted or fanatical immigrant admitted to our citizenship is a bane to the commonwealth. Where all classes of society merge insensibly into one another every alien immigrant of inferior race may bring corruption to the stock. There are races more or less akin to our own whom we may admit freely and get nothing but advantage from the infusion of their wholesome blood. But there are other races which we cannot assimilate without a lowering of our racial standard which should be as sacred to us as the sanctity of our homes.

In reality it is only an old long settled civilization where society is divided by inflexible lines of caste that can afford to open hospitable gates to immigration. This country the citadel of democracy must consider the quality of those coming generations whose hands will make or mar her destiny.

OG_slinger wrote:
WaPo wrote:

Why must they say those words, some of the children ask at the shelter in Brownsville, on the Mexican border in Texas?

“We tell them, ‘It’s out of respect,’ ” said one employee of the facility, known as Casa Padre, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of losing their job.

Who in the f*ck thought it would be a great idea to force non-American children who are traumatized from being stripped from their parents and held against their will to recite a creepy ass loyalty pledge to a country whose government hates and fears them.

Double WTF points because the original Pledge of Allegiance was written by Francis Bellamy who wanted to distinguish "true Americanism" from the bugaboo of the turn of the 20th century: the immigrants from southern and eastern Europe (and Ireland) that were "pouring over our country."

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New audio from a detention center for unaccompanied children where the staff threaten the kids not to talk to reporters...

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Saying "Whoever it be" seems to invalidate every other reassurance the guards were trying to give the prisoners.

Such family values!

Garrcia wrote:

I would add that yes it is true that children are not incarcerated with a parent that is sent to jail/prison, and presumably if they do not have a relative to turn to they become wards of the state (ultimately foster children I would guess). However, that would be after a verdict is rendered (setting aside the whole issue of bail and being in jail prior to and during a trial); in the case of the immigrants at the border today they are having their children separated from them with no clear path as to what will happen (e.g. will they enter the foster child system) while their parents are awaiting trial.

Treatment of American children caught up in the justice system is a separate but definitely related issue. Not only does the American justice system take children from those convicted of minor crimes, but it also takes children from victims of serious crimes and takes children from Native Americans for the money. Americans treated this way do have a clear path as to what will happen: they either spend thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours trying to get them back, or they will never see them again.

You'll also notice a a couple of trends in those kinds of stories - the War on Drugs figures prominently, as suspected drug use and related minor crimes are *the* most common reasons for child removal. The other trend is that no one listens to the kids. Kids who want to get out of an abusive situation can't get CPS to do anything, and kids who want to stay are removed against their will.

cheeze_pavilion wrote:

I don't think it's much of an exaggeration to say that liberals should logically support borders where any law enforcement restrictions on the free flow of people have nothing to do with something like nationality. That liberals don't just come out and say that is more about just playing nice with conservatives for now for politically pragmatic reasons.

You'd think that, but the majority of liberals don't, and they rationalize it with precisely the reasoning jdzappa described. They make noises supporting immigrants, but when pressed value support for the government more than what happens to people at the border. Most supported the Clinton/Bush/Obama administrations' high levels of deportation and increased funding for CBP/ICE. The only concrete action taken to improve the immigration situation was the DACA, which only dealt with kids who were already in the United States. Most liberals also continue to pretend that legal immigration is a realistic option, when it really isn't except for the richest and/or whitest of immigrants.

The fact is that most Americans are afraid of immigrants, especially those who speak different languages and have a different skin color. It's completely irrational, as all the evidence - especially economic evidence - indicates that immigrants are a huge positive to the receiving society, but the fear been there since before the country was founded and we've never dealt with it as a society. If we were a rational society, we'd be advertising for immigrants and trying to attract as many as possible.