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

Just figured we could collect this mess in one thread.

U.S. Loses Track of Another 1,500 Migrant Children, Investigators Find

New York Times wrote:

The Trump administration is unable to account for the whereabouts of nearly 1,500 migrant children who illegally entered the United States alone this year and were placed with sponsors after leaving federal shelters, according to congressional findings released on Tuesday.

The revelation echoes an admission in April by the Department of Health and Human Services that the government had similarly lost track of an additional 1,475 migrant children it had moved out of shelters last year.

In findings that lawmakers described as troubling, Senate investigators said the department could not determine with certainty the whereabouts of 1,488 out of 11,254 children the agency had placed with sponsors in 2018, based on follow-up calls from April 1 to June 30.

The inability to track the whereabouts of migrant children after they have been released to sponsors has raised concerns that they could end up with human traffickers or be used as laborers by people posing as relatives.

Since 2016, officials at the Department of Health and Human Services have called sponsors to check on children 30 days after they were placed there. But the department has also said it was not legally responsible for children after they were released from the custody of its office of refugee resettlement.

Yahoo News: Exclusive: With more immigrant children in detention, HHS cuts funds for other programs — like cancer research

The Department of Health and Human Services is diverting millions of dollars in funding from a number of programs, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health, to pay for housing for the growing population of detained immigrant children.

In a letter sent to Sen. Patty Murray, D.-Wash., and obtained by Yahoo News, HHS Secretary Alex Azar outlined his plan to reallocate up to $266 million in funding for the current fiscal year, which ends on Sept. 30, to the Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) program in the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR).

Nearly $80 million of that money will come from other refugee support programs within ORR, which have seen their needs significantly diminished as the Trump administration makes drastic cuts to the annual refugee numbers. The rest is being taken from other programs, including $16.7 million from Head Start, $5.7 million from the Ryan White HIV/AIDS program and $13.3 million from the National Cancer Institute. Money is also being diverted from programs dedicated to mental and maternal health, women’s shelters and substance abuse.

I think it is horrible but I don't see how this is shocking or odd.

People voted for a specific agenda with trump and they are getting that agenda.

Now it up to the majority of people to get out and vote to stop this agenda because the majority doesn't want that agenda but they don't vote.

farley3k wrote:

Now it up to the majority of people to get out and vote to stop this agenda because the majority doesn't want that agenda but they don't vote.

More accurately: the majority doesn't want that agenda and voted against it, but our wacky-ass electoral system over-ruled them. Don't ignore or forget that Trump lost the popular vote by a sizeable margin; those votes were just in the "wrong" places to have an impact.

Fair enough.

ClockworkHouse wrote:
farley3k wrote:

Now it up to the majority of people to get out and vote to stop this agenda because the majority doesn't want that agenda but they don't vote.

More accurately: the majority doesn't want that agenda and voted against it, but our wacky-ass electoral system over-ruled them. Don't ignore or forget that Trump lost the popular vote by a sizeable margin; those votes were just in the "wrong" places to have an impact.

Even more accurate.. I blame white people for this sh*t.

I blame then because they caused it but at the same time I don't blame them because I think it is exactly what any animal would do when it feel threatened. The hubris is imagining that humans will act better.

ICE arrested undocumented immigrants who came forward to take in undocumented children

CNN wrote:

Federal officers have arrested dozens of undocumented immigrants who came forward to take care of undocumented immigrant children in government custody, and the Trump administration is pledging to go after more.

The news will serve as confirmation of the worst fears of immigrants and their advocates: that a recent move by President Donald Trump's administration to more fully vet people who come forward to care for undocumented immigrant children who are alone in the US has been a way for the administration to track down and arrest more undocumented immigrants.

On Tuesday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement senior official Matthew Albence testified to Congress that, after Health and Human Services and ICE signed a memorandum of agreement to background-check and fingerprint potential "sponsors" of immigrant children, ICE arrested 41 people who came forward.

In response to an inquiry from CNN, an ICE official confirmed that 70% of those arrests were for straightforward immigration violations -- meaning they were arrested because ICE discovered they were here illegally.

The individuals could have been the children's parents or family members, and they also could have merely been fellow members of the homes of adults who applied to care for the children as they fight for a legal right to stay in the US.

TheGameguru wrote:
ClockworkHouse wrote:
farley3k wrote:

Now it up to the majority of people to get out and vote to stop this agenda because the majority doesn't want that agenda but they don't vote.

More accurately: the majority doesn't want that agenda and voted against it, but our wacky-ass electoral system over-ruled them. Don't ignore or forget that Trump lost the popular vote by a sizeable margin; those votes were just in the "wrong" places to have an impact.

Even more accurate.. I blame white people for this sh*t.

The millions of us white people that voted against Trump and donated against and campaigned against... come on Guru you're better than this generalization.

Why is the money to care for the children not coming from the budget of Homeland Security that imprisoned them? Why do they just get to say oh well it's your problem now go pay for it to the DHHS?

Probably a memorandum of understanding or something.

LeapingGnome wrote:

The millions of us white people that voted against Trump and donated against and campaigned against... come on Guru you're better than this generalization.

And millions and millions and millions of white people did vote for Trump. Seriously. Just take the hit. White people were like 90% of all the votes cast for Trump. It's been that way for many elections. The GOP is the party of white people.

That maybe a third of white people--mostly college educated, mostly living in cities--didn't vote against Trump doesn't change the fact that a healthy majority of us did.

LeapingGnome wrote:

Why is the money to care for the children not coming from the budget of Homeland Security that imprisoned them? Why do they just get to say oh well it's your problem now go pay for it to the DHHS?

Because the Trump administration pushed through their executive order to detain children in June, nine months after Homeland Security's budget had been set and authorized. They simply didn't plan for the financial impact of the order just like they didn't plan for what to do with thousands of detained children. And because they kept the details of the order to themselves until the last minute, no one was able to warn them about petty details like budgets.

NYT: Hundreds of Migrant Children Quietly Moved to a Tent Camp on the Texas Border

In shelters from Kansas to New York, hundreds of migrant children have been roused in the middle of the night in recent weeks and loaded onto buses with backpacks and snacks for a cross-country journey to their new home: a barren tent city on a sprawling patch of desert in South Texas.

Until now, most undocumented children being held by federal immigration authorities had been housed in private foster homes or shelters, sleeping two or three to a room. They received formal schooling and regular visits with legal representatives assigned to their immigration cases.

But in the rows of sand-colored tents in Tornillo, Tex., children in groups of 20, separated by gender, sleep lined up in bunks. There is no school: The children are given workbooks that they have no obligation to complete. Access to legal services is limited.

These midnight voyages are playing out across the country, as the federal government struggles to find room for more than 13,000 detained migrant children — the largest population ever — whose numbers have increased more than fivefold since last year.

I can't bring myself to thumbs up your posts, but thanks to those of you who keep us informed throughout this tragedy.

As I saw elsewhere this was posted, they are not losing their kids to adoption. They are losing them to abduction. We are monsters.

Jayhawker wrote:

As I saw elsewhere this was posted, they are not losing their kids to adoption. They are losing them to abduction. We are monsters.

What's worse is that the AP article was about what happened to a child under the Obama administration when it *wasn't* US policy to detain kids.

Now detaining children is our official policy and we've done so to thousands and thousands of times. There's so many that the government is stripping funds from other departments to pay for their detention because no one in the Trump administration actually planned for any of this.

And it's all made worse because DHS is working its ass off to deport parents without knowing where their children are in the system and making it harder for family member or friends to get those children out of detention.

OG_slinger wrote:

What's worse is that the AP article was about what happened to a child under the Obama administration when it *wasn't* US policy to detain kids.

It's been US policy to detain and separate children for a very long time - long before Obama. The lawsuit that resulted in the Flores decision was initially brought in 1985, and the Flores decision was handed down in 1997. The reason that lawsuit was brought was because US policy at the time was to imprison the children along with their parents. The only significant difference between the Obama-era policy and the Trump policy is that Trump started arresting everyone, which caused a huge surge in detentions, and thus separations - a surge the system was not equipped to handle.

Technically speaking it was their policy to release the family, together, and say to come back to court at their court date. Which, you know, is basically the same as kidnapping children and adopting them out to strangers.

Aetius wrote:

The only significant difference between the Obama-era policy and the Trump policy is that Trump started arresting everyone, which caused a huge surge in detentions, and thus separations - a surge the system was not equipped to handle.

Not "everyone" everyone, to be clear. The "zero tolerance" policy specifically targeted parents. There was no surge in arrests for adults without children.

Aetius wrote:

a surge the system was not equipped to handle.

More than not equipped to handle: they deliberately neglected to do any of the planning necessary to handle it.

June 25, Slate: The Government Had No Intention of Reuniting Separated Families: There’s also no plan to do so now.

Jayhawker wrote:

As I saw elsewhere this was posted, they are not losing their kids to adoption. They are losing them to abduction. We are monsters.

This does fit the official ICC definition of genocide: "(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."

We're not a signatory anymore, but "the genocide is technically legal" is an argument that indicates we've already lost our moral center.

Yonder wrote:

Technically speaking it was their policy to release the family, together, and say to come back to court at their court date. Which, you know, is basically the same as kidnapping children and adopting them out to strangers.

At the border, usually. But not at the border ...

“When we violate that commitment to keeping families together, when we take kids away from loving families, the result not only runs counter to the values that Americans place on families themselves,” said ARC President Rinku Sen. “It also starts to look a little too much like abduction to be tolerable.”

That story is from 2011. The Obama administration was particularly fond of deporting the parents of children born in the United States, and then dumping the leftover orphans into the system - 46,000 parents were deported in the first six months of 2011 alone, and we don't know the number of kids put into the system because they didn't bother to track it.

The Flores settlement in 1997 actually lays out the process for putting separated kids into the adoption system - all that was required was that there was no immediate family who could take them. If you examine the agreement carefully, you'll find that it sounds good ... until you realize that it's leaving out a bunch of really important things. For example, there is no stipulation on how hard the INS (and later CBP/ICE) had to look for valid custodians ... so they simply don't look very hard.

Here's a story from Miami in 2000 that lays out an even grimmer picture - some immigrant kids that were separated from their parents were supposed to be in foster care and getting green cards, but didn't due to the bureaucratic nightmare of immigration.

Canada says hi. The Canadian Indian residential school system.

We had a shameful period - removing aboriginal children from their families, funded by the federal government, administered by Christian churches. The school system was created for the purpose of removing children from the influence of their own culture and assimilating them into the dominant Canadian culture (they mean “European,” of course).

An amendment to the Indian Act in 1884 made attendance at day schools, industrial schools, or residential schools compulsory for First Nations children.
The schools were intentionally located at substantial distances from Indigenous communities to minimize contact between families and their children. Indian Commissioner Hayter Reed argued for schools at greater distances to reduce family visits, which he thought counteracted efforts to civilize Indigenous children. Parental visits were further restricted by the use of a pass system designed to confine Indigenous peoples to reserves.

Where these children were exposed to a laundry list of physical and sexual abuses.

I had thought this was all “ancient history,” but

The last federally operated residential school closed in 1990.
On June 11, 2008, Prime Minister Stephen Harper offered a public apology on behalf of the Government of Canada and the leaders of the other federal parties in the House of Commons of Canada.

Those who don’t learn from history... (either that, or someone thought it was a “great idea”)

I grew up alongside kids from the 60s Sweep.

And once those border agents "protect" immigrant children by taking them away from their "criminal" parents, they're handing them over to detention camps staffed by people who haven't been properly vetted by the FBI for child abuse or neglect according to a Health and Human Services inspector general memo released today.

According to the AP, the report found that the Trump administration waived the requirement for at least one camp in Tornillo, Texas to have its 2,100 staffers background checked by the FBI.

This camp was opened back in June to hold 360 migrant children. There are now over 2,300 kids there.

I'm sure the group running the camp has been super careful to vet its staff and they totally haven't just been throwing any warm body they could hire to fix the problem the Trump administration created.

The HHS report also found that the Trump administration also waived federal rules requiring one mental health clinician for every 12 kids. Instead, the contract allows for just one mental health clinician for every 100 children. I mean it's not like being stripped from your parents and imprisoned in the middle of a desert in a foreign country is stressful for kids or anything.

And in 10-15 years when gang / terrorist activity is worse than ever people will wonder what we could have done to prevent it...