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

Just figured we could collect this mess in one thread.

bekkilyn wrote:

That was only a separation of a few minutes. These children are separated for *months* under horrible conditions. I can't comprehend how people can think that it's no big deal or that they deserve it somehow.

They don't think it's no big deal because they think separation isn't traumatic, they think it's no big deal because it's "not our kids" (read: not white) being traumatized, to quote Fox & Friends.

And the reality is, this is what they want. The press has spread the word about the evil at the border, which people like Stephen Miller thinks will stop immigrants from wanting to come here.

In hundreds of cases, Customs agents deleted the initial records in which parents and children were listed together as a family with a “family identification number,” according to two officials at the Department of Homeland Security, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the process.
...
Officials cautioned that this was not a deliberate attempt to obfuscate, but a belief that it made more sense to track cases separately once a group of migrants was no longer in custody as a family unit, these sources said.

Bullsh*t. Nobody deletes records unless they're trying to get rid of information. There is zero reason not to simply append information to records while maintaining appropriate history. Tracking cases separately is fine, but there's no reason to not have a link to the original record.

“The guards would wake all the girls up at 4 a.m. to count them by kicking on their mats. … G cried when she told me she kept hoping her mother would show up to take her out of that horrible place, but that never happened. … G overheard a girl asking to make a phone call to her family, but she was told they did not allow girls to make phone calls while detained. “

And I am now in favor of the death penalty...

Jayhawker wrote:

And the reality is, this is what they want. The press has spread the word about the evil at the border, which people like Stephen Miller thinks will stop immigrants from wanting to come here.

And, of course, the problem with that is the horrific things they're fleeing makes it really hard to discourage refugees like that.

Like, Trump from day one has been pushing the idea of "Mexicans" being the problem, but a lot of these refugees are from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, where they're fleeing horrific violence. Unless the US government plans to start actively murdering people, there will continue to be refugees who choose to come here and apply for asylum (which, I should repeat, is generally agreed to be a human right).

When this administration is done... can we get a “The Hague: part 2”? If only to hear most of them repeat the old chestnut of “I was only following orders”.

Wink_and_the_Gun wrote:

When this administration is done... can we get a “The Hague: part 2”? If only to hear most of them repeat the old chestnut of “I was only following orders”.

"Guys, I've heard of this thing called 'The Nuremberg Defense', I think we should try it out."
"That sounds reasonable, I mean, it was apparently developed for this exact situation, it's all in the name!"

1-year-old goes to court to get reunited with family

PBS Newshour wrote:

The 1-year-old boy in a green button-up shirt drank milk from a bottle, played with a small purple ball that lit up when it hit the ground and occasionally asked for “agua.”

Then it was the child’s turn for his court appearance before a Phoenix immigration judge, who could hardly contain his unease with the situation during the portion of the hearing where he asks immigrant defendants whether they understand the proceedings.

“I’m embarrassed to ask it, because I don’t know who you would explain it to, unless you think that a 1-year-old could learn immigration law,” Judge John W. Richardson told the lawyer representing the 1-year-old boy.

...

Critics have also seized on the nation’s immigration court system that requires children — some still in diapers — to have appearances before judges and go through deportation proceedings while separated from their parents. Such children don’t have a right to a court-appointed attorney, and 90 percent of kids without a lawyer are returned to their home countries, according to Kids in Need of Defense, a group that provides legal representation.

In Phoenix on Friday, the Honduran boy named Johan waited over an hour to see the judge. His attorney told Richardson that the boy’s father had brought him to the U.S. but that they had been separated, although it’s unclear when. He said the father, who was now in Honduras, was removed from the country under false pretenses that he would be able to leave with his son.

For a while, the child wore dress shoes, but later he was in just socks as he waited to see the judge. He was silent and calm for most of the hearing, though he cried hysterically afterward for the few seconds that a worker handed him to another person while she gathered his diaper bag. He is in the custody of the U.S. Health and Human Services Department in Arizona.

Richardson said the boy’s case raised red flags over a looming court-ordered deadline to reunite small children with their families. A federal judge in San Diego gave the agency until next Tuesday to reunite kids under 5 with their parents and until July 26 for all others.

Richardson repeatedly told the Immigration and Customs Enforcement attorney who was acting as the prosecutor that he should make note of the cases involving young children because of the government’s obligation to meet the reunification deadline. The attorney said he wasn’t familiar with that deadline and that a different department within ICE handled such matters.

ICE spokeswoman Jennifer Elzea said the attorney was familiar with the injunction but didn’t know the specifics of the timeline requirements off the top of his head “and did not want to misspeak about any timeline commitments without that knowledge.”

In the end, Johan was granted a voluntary departure order that would allow the government to fly him to Honduras so that he could be reunited with his family. An attorney with the Florence Project, an Arizona-based nonprofit that provides free legal help to immigrants, said both his mother and father were in Honduras.

The boy’s case was heard on the same day that the Trump administration said it needed more time to reunite 101 children under 5 years old to ensure the children’s safety and to confirm their parental relationships. The two sides had a hearing on the matter Friday in San Diego and will determine over the weekend which cases merit a delay. Justice Department attorney Sarah Fabian stressed to the judge that the government is deploying significant resources to ensure that children are being reunited with parents in timely fashion.

Around the same time as the San Diego hearing, other kids who had been separated from their parents made their way to court in Phoenix.

A boy from Guatemala dressed in a vest and tie was asked by the judge how old he was, and the child simply put five fingers up.

His attorney said his father had brought him to the country and had been returned two weeks ago to their home in Guatemala. He asked for a voluntary departure to be issued for the boy.

“What do you think about going back to Guatemala?” Richardson asked the boy.

...

Honduran immigrant Christian Granados has been separated from his 5-year-old daughter Cristhy for more than a month after they were detained in El Paso, Texas, attempting to enter the U.S.

She was taken to a holding facility in Chicago, while he was released pending an asylum request on June 24.

He has been in the midst of one bureaucratic hassle after another in trying to get his daughter back, responding to intermittent requests for identification documents and biographical information from government social workers who are attending to his daughter.

Granados sought out a suitable home to help reclaim his child by moving in with relatives in Fort Mill, S.C. — but now fears he won’t be able to afford airfare for his girl to be reunited with him. He said authorities requested $1,250 to fly her from Chicago.

“I haven’t felt the happiness I should feel with being here in the United States,” said Granados. “Happiness is when I have my daughter with me.”

Buzzfeed: Pregnant Women Say They Miscarried In Immigration Detention And Didn't Get The Care They Needed

Two weeks after arriving in the US seeking asylum, E, 23, found herself in a detention cell in San Luis, Arizona, bleeding profusely and begging for help from staff at the facility. She was four months pregnant and felt like she was losing her baby. She had come to the US from El Salvador after finding out she was pregnant, in the hopes of raising her son in a safer home.

“An official arrived and they said it was not a hospital and they weren’t doctors. They wouldn’t look after me,” she told BuzzFeed News, speaking by phone from another detention center, Otay Mesa in San Diego. “I realized I was losing my son. It was his life that I was bleeding out. I was staining everything. I spent about eight days just lying down. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t do anything. I started crying and crying and crying.”

The Independent: Trump administration fails to meet deadline to reunite migrant children with their parents

Just over half of the 100 migrant children that a US court ruled should be released from detention centres and reunited with their parents will be able to do so, a US government lawyer has confirmed.

At least 54 children under the age of 5 would join their parents by the court-ordered deadline of 11 July, Justice Department attorney Sarah Fabian told a San Diego court.

“My 5-yr-old client can’t tell me what country she is from,” Laura Barrera, an immigration advocate, tweeted. “We prepare her case by drawing pictures with crayons of the gang members that would wait outside her school. Sometimes she wants to draw ice cream cones and hearts instead. She is in deportation proceedings alone.

Help the Feds, get deported.

Miami grandma targeted as U.S. takes aim at naturalized immigrants with prior offenses

The United States government has long reserved its power to revoke citizenship for the rarest of cases, going after the likes of war criminals, child rapists and terrorist funders.

Norma Borgono is none of those. The 63-year-old secretary who immigrated from Peru in 1989 volunteers weekly at church, raised two children on a $500-a-week salary and suffers from a rare kidney disorder. But a week after her baby granddaughter came home from the hospital, Borgono received a letter from the U.S. government: The Department of Justice was suing to "denaturalize" her as part of an unprecedented push by the Trump administration to revoke citizenship from people who committed criminal offenses before they became citizens.

"I don’t know what’s going to happen if she goes to Peru," said her daughter, Urpi Ríos. "We have nothing there."

Borgono, a Miami resident for 28 years, is being targeted based on her minor role in a $24 million fraud scheme in the previous decade. As the secretary of an export company called Texon Inc., she prepared paperwork for her boss, who pocketed money from doctored loan applications filed with the U.S. Export-Import Bank.

When the feds caught wind of the scheme, Borgono cooperated. The secretary never made any money beyond her regular salary and helped the FBI make a case that put her former boss behind bars for four years. On May 17, 2012, Borgono took a plea deal and was sentenced to one year of house arrest, four years of probation and $5,000 of restitution.

That is one way to get all those conservative hispanics in FLA to vote for you...

The Guardian: Officials admit they may have separated family – who might be US citizens – for up to a year: ACLU calls revelation ‘horrific’ and blames administration’s poor execution of family separation policy

The Department of Justice told a federal judge Tuesday that it may have mistakenly separated a father and toddler who could both be US citizens for as long as a year, in the process of enforcing the Trump administration zero-tolerance immigration policy.

The Guardian: Judge rejects US government request for long-term detention of immigrant children

CBS: Feds miss deadline to reunite all immigrant children under 5 with families

A running theme of Trump's executive orders is that they are almost universally never well-thought out and he has never really taken the time to determine little things, like if the order is Constitutional or where the money is going to come from to carry out the order.

That last bit was the focus of internal budget documents from the Office of Refugee Resettlement obtained by Slate. The TL;DR is that the Trump administration never considered the cost of its "zero tolerance" immigration policy so now the ORR and its parent organization DHS are "re-allocating" funds for HIV/AIDS programs as well as programs designed to help refugees who survived torture to pay for locking children up.

Slate wrote:

In the documents obtained by Slate, ORR officials describe the budget implications of a potential surge in immigrant minors over the next three months. The ORR’s budgeting exercise is premised on the possibility that the agency could need as many as 25,400 beds for immigrant minors by the end of the calendar year. The documents do not indicate that ORR officials have specific knowledge that family separations will increase but do show that the agency is preparing for the possibility.

The internal documents estimate that if 25,400 beds are needed, ORR would face a budget shortfall of $585 million for ORR in fiscal year 2018, which ends on Sept. 30. Under this scenario, that shortfall would increase to $1.3 billion in the first quarter of fiscal year 2019, adding up to a total shortfall of $1.9 billion for the period between Oct. 1, 2017, and Dec. 31, 2018. The documents stress that these budget estimates represent maximum possible expenditures and that actual expenses may be lower. The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to multiple requests for comment about these figures or anything else relating to the documents.

To help cover these potential costs, the documents say, HHS will seek supplemental appropriations from Congress. The documents also indicate that HHS plans to pay for child separation by reallocating money from the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program, which, according to its website, “provides a comprehensive system of care that includes primary medical care and essential support services for people living with HIV who are uninsured or underinsured.” Per the documents, the process of transferring those HIV/AIDS funds has already begun.

In addition, HHS plans to reallocate $79 million from programs for refugee resettlement, a move that could imperil social services, medical assistance, and English language instructions for refugees in the U.S., as well as programs for torture survivors.

The internal budget documents show that ORR is planning on having to house an additional 9,000 children over the next month.

Former ORR employees have noted that the agency had $1.3 billion budgeted to care for unaccompanied alien children this year. Now the agency is asking for an additional $1.3 billion for the last fiscal quarter of the year.

Other former ORR officials have noted that those costs are likely to increase because in spite of the recent court order to keep children detained for only 20 days, the average length of detention for children under Trump was hitting 55 days. Additionally, those former officials warned that ORR shelters were specifically set up to care for children for the shortest amount of time possible and aren't designed to care for children who will be detained for months and months.

The thing that gets me is that they could totally just let them go. Many of the people being detained now would have, in previous years, been released and told to come back for their immigration hearings. And they would (and did) show up for the hearing, because they could trust that the US government wasn't waiting outside the court to kidnap them and steal their children.

OG_slinger wrote:

A running theme of Trump's executive orders is that they are almost universally never well-thought out and he has never really taken the time to determine little things, like if the order is Constitutional or where the money is going to come from to carry out the order.

Then the courts give them a mandatory deadline which they fail to meet because no one really planned out this snafu because the people in charge just wanted to scare foreign children and thought that could substitute for actual immigration policy.

It’s like that saying about if all you have is a hammer every problem looks like a nail.

The only tools Trump knows are cruelty and revenge and flattery. Guess which ones he uses on people who are different from him. Always.

Gremlin wrote:

The thing that gets me is that they could totally just let them go. Many of the people being detained now would have, in previous years, been released and told to come back for their immigration hearings. And they would (and did) show up for the hearing, because they could trust that the US government wasn't waiting outside the court to kidnap them and steal their children.

How much trust has been irreparably shattered? Potential immigrants would and did show up because that was how things worked. Now? If the current detainees were released, I wouldn't blame a single one of them if they all scattered to the winds and tried to disappear in the States. (As opposed to being disappeared _by_ the States, which is now disturbingly not that hard to imagine.)

So this just popped into my feed and I definitely had a "mind blown" moment. I take my kid to Chuck E. Cheese about once a week and I can't believe I didn't think of this sooner.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/aqF5g7b.png)

It's almost like Chuck-E-Cheese doesn't want to abduct children never to be seen again, and the Trump government can't say the same thing.

CptDomano wrote:

So this just popped into my feed and I definitely had a "mind blown" moment. I take my kid to Chuck E. Cheese about once a week and I can't believe I didn't think of this sooner.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/aqF5g7b.png)

But the ink won't last very long, maybe the government could use tattoos.
/s

ProPublica: Immigrant Shelters Drug Traumatized Teenagers Without Consent: Whether they came to the U.S. alone, or were forcibly separated from their families at the border, despondent minors are often pressured into taking psychotropic drugs without approval from a parent or guardian.

Time: Cold, Hunger and Sleeplessness. Immigrant Children Describe Dire U.S. Detention Conditions

(SANTA ANA, Calif.) — Wet and muddy from their trek across the Mexican border, immigrant children say they sat or lay on the cold, concrete floor of the immigration holding centers where they were taken.

It was hard to sleep with lights shining all night and guards kicking their feet, they say. They were hungry, after being given what they say were frozen sandwiches and smelly food.

Younger children cried in caged areas where they were crammed in with teens, and they clamored for their parents. Toilets were filthy, and running water was scarce, they say. They waited, unsure and frightened of what the future might bring.

“I didn’t know where my mother was,” said Griselda, 16, of Guatemala, who entered the U.S. with her mother in the McAllen, Texas, area. “I saw girls ask where their mothers were, but the guards would not tell them.”

CNN: Trump's immigration policies were supposed to make the border safer. Experts say the opposite is happening.

(CNN)Before US immigration authorities detained him and took his son, the Honduran migrant said he spent three days in the hands of armed men who identified themselves as members of the Gulf Cartel.

Christian, who did not want his full name used, said he was traveling to the US border with his 7-year-old last month when the men stopped a bus full of migrants in the northeastern Mexican state of Tamaulipas. The demanded $300 from each family.

"They told us if we didn't pay that they were going to kill us," recalled Christian, who said he was freed three days later after relatives wired money to his captors.

"There were 30 of us. There was another building next to where we were being held and they said there were even more people there."

President Donald Trump has said that he wants immigration policy that secures the border. But his aggressive policy has instead resulted in organized crime groups preying on droves of desperate asylum seekers who have been turned away by US authorities, according to people familiar with the smuggling operations.

IMAGE(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DifKCbZU0AAsE87.jpg)

U.S. says 463 migrant parents may have been deported without kids

Reuters wrote:

More than 450 immigrant parents who were separated from their children when they entered the United States illegally are no longer in the country though their children remain behind, according to a joint court filing on Monday by the federal government and the American Civil Liberties Union.

The absence of the 463 parents, which U.S. government lawyers said was “under review,” could impede government efforts to reunite separated families by Thursday, the deadline ordered by a federal judge. The filing did not say why the 463 parents had left the country, but government officials previously acknowledged that some parents had been deported without their children.

As of Monday, 879 parents had been reunited with their children, according to the filing.

A 6-Year-Old Girl Was Sexually Abused in an Immigrant-Detention Center

The Nation wrote:

According to immigrant-rights advocates, a 6-year-old girl separated from her mother under the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” immigration policy was sexually abused while at an Arizona detention facility run by Southwest Key Programs. The child was then made to sign a form acknowledging that she was told to maintain her distance from her alleged abuser, who is an older child being held at the same detention facility.

The girl, who is only identified by the initials D.L., and her mother had been fleeing gang violence in their native Guatemala. According to the family, the pair entered the United States at a point of entry in El Paso, Texas, on May 24, where they presented Border Patrol authorities with paperwork claiming that they had “credible fear” that returning to Guatemala would result in harm. On May 26, government officials separated D.L. from her mother and sent her to Casa Glendale, a shelter outside of Phoenix operated by Southwest Key Programs. It was there that the alleged abuse occurred.

Before D.L. was taken away, her mother provided authorities with the phone number of D.L.’s father, an undocumented immigrant living in California. On June 11, D.L.’s father received a phone call from Southwest Key explaining that a boy had fondled his daughter and other girls. According to family spokesperson Mark Lane, D.L.’s father was told not to worry, because Southwest Key was changing some of its protocols and such abuse would not happen again. (Lane was connected with D.L.’s family through Families Belong Together, a coalition of civil-rights groups formed in response to the recent border crackdown.) Lane says that D.L.’s father asked to speak with a social worker, but, despite promises from the facility, he never heard from one.

A Southwest Key Programs document obtained by The Nation confirms that D.L. was reported to have been sexually abused on June 4, 2018. On June 12, one day after D.L.’s father was contacted, the 6-year-old girl was presented with the form stating that, as part of the facility’s intervention protocol, she had been instructed to “maintain my distance from the other youth involved” and had been provided “psychoeducation,” described in the document as “reporting abuse” and “good touch bad touch.” The form, posted below, shows D.L’s “signature”—a single letter “D,” next to the characterization of her as “tender age”—which supposedly confirms that D.L understands “that it is my responsibility to follow the safety plan” reviewed with her.

When D.L.’s mother learned about the incident, she was still being detained in Texas and felt devastated. “I felt really horrible. I couldn’t do anything for her, because we were separated,” she said through a translator in an interview with The Nation. “It was a nightmare. When my husband told me what happened, I felt helpless. She was so little, she was probably so scared, probably afraid to say anything to anyone. It was a total nightmare for me.”

But the nightmare wasn’t over. On June 22, Southwest Key again contacted D.L.’s father and informed him that the same boy initially cited for abuse had hit and fondled D.L. again. According to Lane, D.L.’s father asked how the facility could allow this to happen, and the woman on the phone responded that she was only calling him to advise him that it had happened, that she didn’t have permission to say anything else, and he would have to speak with the director.

Southwest Key, a nonprofit based in Austin, Texas, is contracted by the federal government to house immigrant minors in 26 facilities across the United States, according to a report in Texas Monthly. The company’s shelters have come under increased scrutiny since the Trump administration began forcibly separating children from immigrant parents seeking asylum. In Texas, where the nonprofit operates a number of children’s shelters, facilities have been cited for hundreds of violations over the past three years. Southwest Key is expected to be paid $458 million by the federal government this year.

This is a horrifying failure on so many levels.

...

WP: Immigrant girl hides in auto shop after escaping attendants from Florida detention facility

The 15-year-old Honduran girl couldn’t take it anymore. She had been held in the Florida detention facility for three weeks, and it felt like a prison.

So when she saw an opportunity to escape during a trip to the doctor’s office, she ran.

The shop owner turned her in.

The shop owner turned her in.

There is no place in hell too hot for people like that.
And if they claimed to be Christian on top...

fangblackbone wrote:
The shop owner turned her in.

There is no place in hell too hot for people like that.
And if they claimed to be Christian on top...

I will draw near to you for judgment.
I will be quick to testify against the sorcerers,
the adulterers, those swearing falsely,
against those who cheat the day laborers out of their wages
as well as oppress the widow and the orphan,
and against those who brush aside the foreigner and do not revere me,
says the Lord of heavenly forces. - Malachi 3:5

The shop owner probably feared jail time for aiding and abetting. Yeah, it is a sh*tty thing to do, but generally I don't begrudge people that have everything to lose by not cooperating. That is their life on the line, too.

Mixolyde wrote:

The shop owner probably feared jail time for aiding and abetting. Yeah, it is a sh*tty thing to do, but generally I don't begrudge people that have everything to lose by not cooperating. That is their life on the line, too.

From reading the article, I don’t get that the owner “helped” out of self-concern. He came across as full Trumpist. f*ck him.

Chumpy_McChump wrote:

From reading the article, I don’t get that the owner “helped” out of self-concern. He came across as full Trumpist. f*ck him.

Naw, he's just a classic "f*ck you, I got mine" conservative.

WaPo wrote:

Gonzalez, who came to the United States from Cuba in 1971 with his family, said he supports the Trump administration’s tough stance on border security but disagrees with separating families.

“People who want to come here, and work for the American Dream, they should get papers and follow the rules,” Gonzalez said. “But it breaks my heart to see mothers and fathers divided from their children. Families should be together all the time.”

Him following the rules meant that he and his fellow Cubans got special consideration when immigrating as well as oodles of taxpayer funded bennies like welfare, Medicare, free English courses, and scholarships and low-interest college loans.

Funny how most of these refugees are following the rules but are still getting locked up and separated from their families. It's almost like the "rules" thing is just an excuse. But a convenient one, because people like the shop owner can still sleep at night, secure in their belief in (the appearance of) law and order.