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

Just figured we could collect this mess in one thread.

I'm not sympathetic to the shop owner, if given the choice I would have tried to turn a blind eye. That said, they aren't refugees by definition because the UNHCR hasn't made that determination. They are asylum seekers and asylum seekers that appear for entry without visas have always been detained for variable amounts of time. Like you said earlier in the thread, there would need to a significant change in the INA for this type of immigration to be within the law.

I spoke to an AILA member that I'm on good terms with about the situation. She suggested a temporary solution similar to the Lautenberg legislation from the early 90s, where people denied refugee status could be paroled in on a humanitarian basis. At the end of the day though, this administration isn't up for that, and the general population probably isn't either. It could result in the population of El Salvador being halved or worse.

OG_slinger wrote:
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:

“She came running in from the streets,” said the owner of Gonzalez Auto Center in Homestead, Fla. “She was crying.”
...
Gonzalez said nobody from the shop called the police, but he eventually flagged down an officer and pointed to where the girl had hidden.
...
“It broke my heart to see the girl panicked and scared, not knowing where her father or mother was,” Gonzalez said.
...
“She said, ‘Please don’t punish me, don’t touch me, don’t hold my hand,’” he said. “They put handcuffs on her, but not like a criminal, like a human being.”
...
“They were going around and around, they knew she was close by,” he said. “It’s safer for her in detention than out on the streets with no family. It was a hard decision.”
...
Still, he says he supports Trump’s general immigration policy, adding, “Let’s make America great again.”

"She was scared, it broke my heart, so I turned her over to the people that terrified and terrorized her, who put handcuffs on her like a person." Yeah, f*ck that guy.

I saw on twitter the someone in the shop owners family had already called a local advocacy and they were sending someone over who could at the very least make sure the cops handled it the right way BUT he went out and found a cop BEFORE the advocate arrived so f him.

In other "Yes, we really are the baddies" news:

Trump administration must stop giving psychotropic drugs to migrant children without consent, judge rules

U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee in Los Angeles ordered the Trump administration to obtain consent or a court order before administering any psychotropic medications to migrant children, except in cases of dire emergencies. She also ordered that the government move all children out of a Texas facility, Shiloh Residential Treatment Center in Manvel, except for children deemed by a licensed professional to pose a “risk of harm” to themselves or others.

Staff members at Shiloh admitted to signing off on medications in lieu of a parent, relative or legal guardian, according to Gee’s ruling. Government officials defended this practice, saying they provided these drugs only on “an emergency basis” when a child’s “extreme psychiatric symptoms” became dangerous.

The judge didn’t buy this explanation, pointing to testimony from children who said they were given pills “every morning and every night.” Officials “could not have possibly” administered medications to children on an emergency basis every day, Gee wrote.

The Shiloh Residential Treatment Center, the judge ruled, violated a long-standing settlement that set strict standards for detaining immigrant children, including those who crossed the border unaccompanied and those who were separated from their parents. The 1997 Flores agreement requires the government to place children in the “least restrictive” setting appropriate to their age and any special needs.

Plaintiffs on behalf of immigrant children showed Shiloh violated this standard in part because it is a locked facility with 24-hour surveillance and monitoring and engages in practices that are “not necessary for the protection of minors or others,” the judge wrote. Shiloh is one of many shelters contracted by the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement to house immigrant children.

There is evidence that several children were not allowed to have any private telephone calls at Shiloh, Gee wrote. One minor, identified as Julio Z., said Shiloh staff refused to let him and other children leave their living areas to get drinking water. When Julio tried to step out to get water on one occasion, a staff member allegedly threw him to the ground, injuring his elbow.

The judge ordered Shiloh to stop using any unessential security measures, such as denying children drinking water, and demanded officials allow children at Shiloh to speak privately over the phone.

The facility also has a history of troubling practices, including allegations of child abuse, according to the Center for Investigative Reporting. A local congresswoman called for Shiloh to be shut down four years ago after the Houston Chronicle reported on long-running allegations of physical violence, excessive use of physical restraints and several deaths of children in custody.
Numerous sworn testimonies in court affidavits indicated children at Shiloh were regularly given psychotropic medication without the proper parental consent. Sometimes they were told these were vitamins.

In an April 16 court filing, lawyers wrote that “psychotropic drugs can seriously and permanently injure children.”

“The importance of oversight when giving psychotropic medications to children is well established,” the lawyers wrote. “Without it, the potential for abuse — including using drugs as ‘chemical straight-jackets’ to control children, rather than to treat actual mental health needs — is unacceptably high.”

Julio Z., another minor held at Shiloh, said he “never knew exactly what the pills were.” Court documents list Clonazepam, Divalproex, Duloxetine, Guanfacine, Latuda, Geodon, and Olanzapine among his medications.

ProPublica has uncovered multiple incidents of sexual assault and molestation at privately run shelters for immigrant children.

The biggest one is involves an HIV-positive youth care worker who molested eight unaccompanied immigrant boys over the course of a year at Southwest Key Programs, a Texas-based non-profit that runs immigrant shelters throughout California, Arizona, and Texas. The incident happened at Casa Kokopelli, one of the eight facilities the organization runs in Arizona.

Arizona Department of Health Services cited Casa Kokopelli last year for failing to complete background checks on its workers to ensure they hadn't previously committed sex offenses or other crimes. The worker who molested the children worked four months without a completed background check.

Over the past five years taxpayers have given Southwest Key Programs $1.3 billion, including over $500 million so far this year.

ProPublica discovered this incident because it came across a vague reference to a molestation case in Arizona inspection records. ProPublica had asked federal officials about the conditions of the shelters last week, but they failed to mention this molestation case and others. Those federal officials also failed to inform Congress when questioned about the shelters.

We are a f*cking sh*thole country.

I don't know what's worse:
the detention
the crimes
or the fact that we are paying half a billion dollars to detain, abuse and illicit criminal activity

Who needs Guantanamo and foreign black list sites when we can have them right here in the country and on the books!
I am so glad we shut down all those Planned Parenthoods to boot!

NPR: Federal Judge Calls Government Plan To Reunify Migrant Families 'Disappointing'

A federal judge said the Trump administration's plan for reunifying hundreds of migrant families who were separated at the Southern border under its "zero tolerance" immigration policy is disappointing.

U.S. District Judge Dana M. Sabraw said that he will order the government to appoint a single point person to oversee the reunification process. He indicated that his order will come no later than Monday.

Sabraw's comments came in a status conference between lawyers from the Justice Department and the American Civil Liberties Union, the group that successfully sued the government to stop it from separating families.

In uncharacteristically blunt language, the judge said that it is "just unacceptable" that only 12 or 13 parents out of close to 500 parents who have been deported from the U.S. have been located thus far.

"The reality is that for every parent who is not located there will be a permanently orphaned child and that is 100 percent the responsibility of the administration," Sabraw said.

So I have been holding off on posting this because It is hard to face it long enough to put even a short post together, but I think this is very important and I have only seen it discussed in one place. We all knew that the "zero tolerance policy" was an excuse to be cruel to brown people, but now it comes out that there never was a zero tolerance policy, just an abuse children policy; less than 1/3 of adults crossing the border "illegally" (ignoring treaty obligations to accept asylum seekers who cross away from official crossings for the moment) were actually prosecuted during the "zero tolerance" policy, and instead parents crossing with children were selectively targeted. This is completely unconscionable.

While the project was premised on the idea that everyone eligible for prosecution would be charged — an embrace of the law and order rhetoric Trump bellowed about on the campaign trail — government data published last week by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University indicated that, in fact, many adults who crossed the border without children during the height of “zero tolerance” were not prosecuted. “Since less than a third of adults apprehended illegally crossing the border were actually referred for prosecution, the stated justification does not explain why this administration chose to prosecute parents with children over prosecuting adults without children who were also apprehended in even larger numbers,” the analysis noted.

I'm pretty sure it was posted back when this started that they were deliberately targeting families to discourage other refugee families from trying to make the trip in the first place.

Stengah wrote:

I'm pretty sure it was posted back when this started that they were deliberately targeting families to discourage other refugee families from trying to make the trip in the first place.

Yeah, that's Stephen Miller's grand plan, aided by Kelly et al. I didn't expect them to be so nakedly transparent about it, though. Silly me, I thought that they actually meant the "zero tolerance" thing and were also locking other people up.

Turns out they're deliberately committing crimes against humanity and torturing children without even the fig leaf of pretending otherwise.

Gremlin wrote:
Stengah wrote:

I'm pretty sure it was posted back when this started that they were deliberately targeting families to discourage other refugee families from trying to make the trip in the first place.

Yeah, that's Stephen Miller's grand plan, aided by Kelly et al. I didn't expect them to be so nakedly transparent about it, though. Silly me, I thought that they actually meant the "zero tolerance" thing and were also locking other people up.

Turns out they're deliberately committing crimes against humanity and torturing children without even the fig leaf of pretending otherwise.

yeah, that's the new thing I saw; there never was a zero-tolerance policy that accidentally-on-purpose resulted in abusing children, there was just a policy of abusing children that resulted in abusing children.

Texas Observer: ICE Crashed a Van Full of Separated Mothers, Then Denied It Ever Happened
"The crash was really strong, like maybe we were going to flip," said one mom. "There was no crash," said ICE.

On July 18, a cargo van transporting eight Central American mothers separated from their children under Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy crashed into a pickup truck in San Marcos. An ICE contractor was taking the women from a detention center near Austin to the South Texas Detention Complex in Pearsall to be reunited with their kids. Even though police said the van was too damaged to continue driving and the women reported injuries, ICE repeatedly denied the crash ever took place.

According to a police report obtained by the Observer and individual interviews with four of the passengers, the crash occurred as the group was leaving a Sunoco gas station just off Interstate 35. The van’s driver was an employee of Trailboss Enterprises, an Alaska-based company that provides transportation for ICE in Central and South Texas. The driver failed to come to a stop and T-boned an F-250 that was entering the gas station, police said. The mothers told the Observer the impact slammed them against the seats in front of them, resulting in headaches, dizziness, nausea and injury to one woman’s leg, which began swelling immediately.

“The crash was really strong, like maybe we were going to flip,” said Dilcia, a Honduran mom who requested that the Observer not publish her full name, out of fear of angering government officials. “We were all trembling with shock from the accident; my whole body hurt,” added another passenger, Roxana, who also did not want her full name published.

The four women said they were not instructed to wear seat belts. In the accident report, a San Marcos Police Department officer assessed the damage to the van as a 4 on a 0-to-7 scale, and said the vehicle was towed. An ambulance was dispatched to the scene, but no one was taken to the hospital. (The mothers said they refused to go to the hospital because they feared it would delay or prevent them from being reunified with their children).

The Guardian: Judge orders US to bring back asylum seekers deported while court was hearing case Judge calls it ‘outrageous’ that family was sent to Central America, threatening to hold Jeff Sessions in contempt if case isn’t resolved

A federal judge ordered the government to return an asylum-seeking mother and her daughter to the US after the Trump administration revealed in a Thursday court hearing that they had sent the migrants to Central America while the court was still considering their case.

The judge, Emmet Sullivan, said it was unacceptable the government had deported the family and threatened to hold the US attorney general, Jeff Sessions, in contempt if the situation was not resolved.

“This is pretty outrageous,” Sullivan said. “That someone seeking justice in US court is spirited away while her attorneys are arguing for justice for her?”

IMAGE(https://rlv.zcache.com/lock_him_up_sessions_poster-rd1209c56330047f2a99c3af18884afb0_wvw_8byvr_324.jpg)

Gremlin wrote:
Stengah wrote:

I'm pretty sure it was posted back when this started that they were deliberately targeting families to discourage other refugee families from trying to make the trip in the first place.

Yeah, that's Stephen Miller's grand plan, aided by Kelly et al.

Speaking of which.

Border arrest data suggest Trump’s push to split migrant families had little deterrent effect
https://wapo.st/2vu4DZU

Good news everybody! Tying children to chairs and putting bags over their heads isn't abuse! Wait, what's the opposite of good news?

AP: State probe finds immigrant teens not currently being abused

WASHINGTON (AP) — A state review into the treatment of immigrant teens held at a Virginia detention center confirmed the facility uses restraint techniques that can include strapping children to chairs and placing mesh bags over their heads.

Investigators concluded the current treatment of detainees at the Shenandoah Valley Juvenile Center did not meet the state’s legal threshold of abuse or neglect, according to a copy of the findings issued Monday by the Virginia Department of Juvenile Justice and obtained by The Associated Press.

But a top state regulator conceded in an interview that investigators did not attempt to determine whether serious allegations of past abuse at the locally run facility are true.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

Border arrest data suggest Trump’s push to split migrant families had little deterrent effect https://wapo.st/2vu4DZU

They're fleeing some of the worst violence on the planet right now, so that's not really surprising. Even the worst stuff the US government is throwing at them right now doesn't compare.

I worry that'll be seized on as an excuse to escalate the deterrent...fortunately right now they seem to be in denial about the real dynamics of the situation.

Gremlin wrote:

Good news everybody! Tying children to chairs and putting bags over their heads isn't abuse! Wait, what's the opposite of good news?

AP: State probe finds immigrant teens not currently being abused

It's amazing how you can clear a facility of allegations of abuse if you simply don't talk to the people who said they were abused.

The Catholic Church should have thought about doing that with Pennsylvania.

CNN: Hundreds of separated children not reunited amid slow progress

Washington (CNN)There are still roughly 700 children who were separated from their parents at the border that were not reunified with those parents by the Trump administration, as new court filings reveal the slow pace of reuniting the trickiest family separation cases.

That figure includes more than 40 children who are 4 years old and younger.
While the administration maintains there is a suitable explanation for each of those cases, the filing makes clear that a large share of those children remain separated because their parents were deported without them.

The New Yorker: Will Anyone in the Trump Administration Ever Be Held Accountable for the Zero-Tolerance Policy?

Some excerpts:

Yet the government never had a plan for keeping track of the separated parents and children once they were in custody, and, even after a federal judge in San Diego, Dana Sabraw, ordered the government to reunite them, it struggled to comply. “I definitely haven’t seen contrition,” an Administration official, who told me about the weekly meetings, said. “But there was frustration with the incompetence of how zero tolerance got implemented. From the perspective of the political leaders here, there’s recognition of how badly the policy failed.” The lesson, according to the official, didn’t seem to be that the Administration had gone too far in separating families but, rather, that “we need to be smarter if we want to implement something on this scale” again.
To date, no one in the Trump Administration has been held accountable for its family-separation policy, even after evidence has steadily mounted as to its immense human costs and administrative failures. The government’s own data show that it has had no appreciable effect on migration patterns throughout the summer, but the Administration pursued the policy anyway, targeting immigrant families.
I asked the current Administration official whether the outcry over family separation had caught the government by surprise. It had, the official said. “The expectation was that the kids would go to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, that the parents would get deported, and that no one would care.” Yet, when it became clear that the public did, the Administration chose not to change course.

NPR: DHS Asks For 'Positive Gems' About War-Torn Countries To Justify Returning Immigrants

In court documents released this week, internal emails from the Department of Homeland Security show that federal officials tried to prove countries were becoming safer, even when that was not the case, in order to justify ending Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of people fleeing war or natural disasters.

The American Civil Liberties Union sued the Trump administration in an attempt to restore protected status to immigrants from Sudan, Nicaragua, Haiti, and El Salvador. Thousands from those four countries were given safe haven in the U.S. following crippling natural disasters and civil conflict, but earlier this year the Trump administration officially ended their protected status.

As part of the case, which has a key hearing in front of a judge in San Francisco next month, lawyers for the ACLU and the National Day Laborer Organizing Network convinced the court to order the federal government to disclose communication between DHS officials and other federal agencies, including with officials at the Pentagon and the State Department.

The messages reveal that DHS asked staffers to find "positive gems" about war-torn countries to justify sending more than 300,000 people back to their homelands. The internal back-and-forths also demonstrate more subtle ways DHS sought to downplay the severity of conditions in volatile countries, like using the word "challenges," instead of "disasters" in talking points to the public.

That's a feature, not a bug.

BREAKING: Trump administration says it will sidestep court agreement that limited detention for immigrant children

— The Associated Press (@AP) September 6, 2018

NBC: Trump admin wants ability to hold migrant kids indefinitely, upending decades-old ban: Since 1997, authorities have been barred from holding migrant kids more than 20 days, but a new rule would change that.

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration announced a new rule Thursday that would allow immigrant children with their parents to be held in detention indefinitely, upending a ban on indefinite detention that has been in place for 20 years.

The rule, proposed by the departments of Homeland Security and Health and Human Services, goes into effect in 60 days and will allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to keep children with their mothers in detention facilities while their cases for asylum play out in court.

A DHS official speaking on the condition of anonymity said the purpose of the rulemaking is to terminate the 1997 Flores settlement agreement that said children could not be held in detention longer than 20 days. The result may mean the issue is taken to appellate courts or even the Supreme Court.

indefinite detention

for children

what the f*cking f*ck

muttonchop wrote:

indefinite detention

for children

what the f*cking f*ck

It's fine, it's fine. It's only for foreign children.

Jonman wrote:
muttonchop wrote:

indefinite detention

for children

what the f*cking f*ck

It's fine, it's fine. It's only for foreign children.

IMAGE(http://americablog.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/mitchell-and-webb-nazi.jpg)

ProPublica Illinois: As Months Pass in Chicago Shelters, Immigrant Children Contemplate Escape, Even Suicide
Internal documents reveal despair and tedium in one of the nation’s largest shelter networks for unaccompanied minors.

One 16-year-old from Guatemala said he wanted to “quitarme la vida,” or “take my life away,” as he waited to be released from a Chicago shelter for immigrant children. He was kept there for at least 584 days.

A 17-year-old from Guinea went on a hunger strike, telling staff members he refused to eat until he saw evidence they were trying to find him a home. He was released nearly nine months after he entered a shelter.

And a 10-month-old boy, forcibly separated from his father at the U.S.-Mexico border in March, was bitten repeatedly by an older child and later hospitalized after falling from a highchair. He was detained for five months.

ProPublica Illinois has obtained thousands of confidential records about the nine federally funded shelters in the Chicago area for immigrant youth operated by the nonprofit Heartland Human Care Services — some dating back years, others from as recently as last week.

The documents provide a sweeping overview of the inner workings and life inside one of the country’s largest shelter networks for unaccompanied minors, including children separated from their parents under the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy.

People should have started being indicted for kidnapping after the court's deadline lapsed.