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

Just figured we could collect this mess in one thread.

Keldar wrote:

(Yes, I'm taking an extremely limited selection out of context, changing the meaning of it by reinterpreting one of the words, and completely ignoring the rest of the available data. That's how these people do it, right?)

That's exactly what they do. I've had arguments over on a Christian forum with people who believed that all the "holy city" verses in various parts of Jewish and Christian scripture applied directly to the U.S. and (white Christian) citizens of the U.S. as God's chosen people because they cherry-picked all these things out of context. That whole "Manifest Destiny" thing.

When Jesus spoke of loving our neighbors, he was talking about EVERYONE, even people we don't like or people who are not like us in some way or even those who are our enemies. Everyone. No exception.

bekkilyn wrote:

When Jesus spoke of loving our neighbors, he was talking about EVERYONE, even people we don't like or people who are not like us in some way or even those who are our enemies. Everyone. No exception.

43“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ 44 But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 that you may be children of your Father in heaven.

Not that I expect the Sermon on the Mount to convince people who are ignoring the rest of it.

Gremlin wrote:

Not that I expect the Sermon on the Mount to convince people who are ignoring the rest of it.

Careful, you might get accused of "feminizing" Jesus like I did not long ago for pointing that one out.

Can't imagine where people who read the bible get the idea that intolerance is ok.

I responded to the poster by saying that any god that was responsible for his moral philosophy didn’t deserve to be worshipped as much as eradicated.

He has since stopped posting.

"If he commands you to burn children, your lord is evil"
-Davos (not the trump appointment the onion knight)

Baron Of Hell wrote:

"If he commands you to burn children, your lord is evil"
-Davos (not the trump appointment the onion knight)

I mean, the list of ones that don't would be shorter.

Mixolyde wrote:
Baron Of Hell wrote:

"If he commands you to burn children, your lord is evil"
-Davos (not the trump appointment the onion knight)

I mean, the list of ones that don't would be shorter.

"If they can make you believe absurdities, they will make you commit atrocities".

Voltaire

Paleocon wrote:

"If they can make you believe absurdities, they will make you commit atrocities".

Voltaire

While I think people basically just believe what they want to believe and then backfill with a convenient explanation, I've always smiled at that quote because I hear it in my head as a Rage Against the Machine lyric.

Seems like the thread this article belongs in

Cutting aid and closing ports: Here's what's happening at the southern border

It is just a general summary but it is sometimes good to get a summary because so much is said it is hard to keep track of what is real.

For example.

Overall, illegal immigration across the southern border remains lower than the peak years throughout the 1990s and 2000s, when Border Patrol regularly apprehended more than one million undocumented immigrants a year crossing the southern border.
But the makeup of people crossing that border has changed dramatically in recent years. Back then, single, Mexican males looking for work and trying to evade Border Patrol agents used to make up the vast majority of illegal border crossers. Now, most crossers are Central American families seeking out Border Patrol agents and turning themselves in to request asylum.

For example, in February, Border Patrol agents apprehended 66,450 people illegally crossing the southern border. A record high 36,174 of those (54%) were members of families and 6,825 (10%) were unaccompanied minors, according to Border Patrol data.

And I think that is what is more frightening to republicans. These are not single men that can be exploited for hard labor but families and children that can't be made to work to keep our lawns mowed, beef slaughtered, etc.

NYT: We Fled the Gangs in Honduras. Then the U.S. Government Took My Baby. I still don’t know where or in whose care my daughter was when we were apart. She’s still traumatized.

SAN FRANCISCO — I am an asylum seeker from Honduras and a mother of three children. For over a month my youngest daughter was separated from her father and me by the United States government. I still don’t know where she was during that time or who took care of her.

She’s a toddler, so she can’t tell me if something bad happened to her. I don’t know if she thinks we chose to abandon her. All I know is she came back pounds thinner, with lice and a hacking cough, and she cried for days, traumatized by a government that keeps children from their parents because they are migrants.

Harper's Bazaar: The U.S. Is Tracking Migrant Girls' Periods to Stop Them From Getting Abortions: This is some really weird Handmaid's Tale stuff.

We still don’t know where 1,488 migrant children are. The U.S. government lost them. They admit as much. Even though the court ordered a halt to the policy of family separation, 245 more children have been taken from their parents. So they can’t figure out where children separated from their parents are, but by God, they can keep track of teenage migrant girls' menstrual cycles.

There are 28 pages detailing the periods, pregnancies and reason for the pregnancy (whether by rape or not) of teen girls in custody, some of whom are as young as 12. There may well be reasons for the government to track whether or not a woman is pregnant, and how far along in her pregnancy she is, but there’s no reason to track the cause of her pregnancy. It’s pretty fair to assume that they’re not doing this because they want to ensure women know all the options regarding their pregnancy. It’s almost certainly an attempt to bar them from getting abortions.

We know that, because the tracking was done by the anti-abortion advocate Scott Lloyd, the head of refugee resettlement at the height of the children separation (he has since been removed from that post). Lloyd declared he needed to sign off on all abortion requests (this was previously not the case) and in one instance, attempted to use a migrant girl as a way to test an “abortion reversal” method.

WP: Trump reportedly wants to revive one of his least-popular policy proposals: Family separation

In the wake of the firing of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen on Sunday, NBC News reported her relationship with President Trump became tense in part because of one specific issue: Trump’s support for reinstating a policy of separating children from their families when arriving at the U.S. border with Mexico.

NBC: Trump's support of renewed child separation policy led to collision with Nielsen: A senior administration official believes Trump is convinced family separation has been the most effective policy at deterring asylum-seekers.

President Donald Trump has for months urged his administration to reinstate large-scale separation of migrant families crossing the border, according to three U.S. officials with knowledge of meetings at the White House.

Trump's outgoing Homeland Security secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, resisted — setting her at odds with the president.

Eleven-year-old ordered deported without her family

Houston Chronicle wrote:

Dora Alvarado felt something was off when she arrived at immigration court in Houston March 12 with her two daughters. A court translator told her that she and her 15-year-old, Adamaris Alvarado, were listed on the docket that day. Her 11-year-old, Laura Maradiaga, was not.

Days later, Alvarado received a letter in English — a language she cannot speak or read — bearing Laura’s name. It wasn’t until the trio returned to court this week that a different translator told her the letter was the 11-year-old’s removal order.

“I don’t want to leave my mom,” Laura said Thursday. “I want to stay with her.”

At a news conference Thursday led by FIEL, a local immigration advocacy group, the family’s lawyer, Silvia Mintz, said she will file a motion to re-open the case. Mintz said immigration officials were at fault for the girl’s missed court appearance, which led to her deportation order.

The family entered through the southern border in early October, telling U.S. government officials that they feared returning to their native El Salvador. They were released to pursue their asylum case in the backlogged civil immigration courts, and since then have complied with court orders and appearance dates.

...

Mintz blamed the Executive Office for Immigration Review, a branch of the Justice Department overseeing immigration courts, for the error resulting in the 11-year-old’s deportation.

“This mistake done by the immigration court has put this family in jeopardy,” Mintz said. “They will be separated if this is not stopped.”

The Executive Office for Immigration Review confirmed the removal order was issued and said it was looking into the case.

The official order states that Laura is subject to deportation because she was not present for the March 12 court appearance. Whether the court translator available that day provided incorrect information, or the girl’s case fell through the cracks, is unclear.

...

Maradiaga’s fate, should she be deported without her family, could be dire.

Her home in a rural area of El Salvador’s La Paz region became a death trap when a relative testified against a local gang member, Alvarado said. Uncles, nephews, classmates and others have been kidnapped or murdered in retaliation, she added. At the news conference, she held up a photo of a young girl, a neighbor, left for dead on a dirt road close to her home.

Glad to know that ICE is focusing on arresting and deporting all the rapists, drug dealers, and murderers and totally not deporting the husband of a US soldier who died in combat, leaving their daughter--an American citizen--parentless.

They're also not deporting someone who doesn't have a criminal record and was granted a parole in place, which allowed him to remain in the country without the threat of deportation. And they most certainly didn't deport him because they refiled his case and sent the notification to the wrong address so the judge would order his deportation when he failed to show up for a hearing he knew nothing about.

Abolish ICE.

Emails show Trump admin had 'no way to link' separated migrant children to parents

LOS ANGELES — On the same day the Trump administration said it would reunite thousands of migrant families it had separated at the border with the help of a "central database," an official was admitting privately the government only had enough information to reconnect 60 parents with their kids, according to emails obtained by NBC News.

"[I]n short, no, we do not have any linkages from parents to [children], save for a handful," a Health and Human Services official told a top official at Immigration and Customs Enforcement on June 23, 2018. "We have a list of parent alien numbers but no way to link them to children."

In the absence of an effective database, the emails show, officials then began scrambling to fill out a simple spreadsheet with data in hopes of reuniting as many as families as they could.

Prosecute ICE for crimes against humanity (Geneva Convention, Article 2).

Gremlin wrote:

Prosecute ICE for crimes against humanity (Geneva Convention, Article 2).

That would require the US to accept international law as binding US citizens. America's government will literally invade the Netherlands before they allow that to happen.

The Trump administration has separated hundreds of children from their families since 2018, when a judge barred the practice

From the Rio Grande Valley in Texas to the Southern California coast, the Trump administration carries on in separating migrant families at rates that alarm immigration attorneys and advocates, even though a federal judge has barred family separations as a systemic policy.

Separations have slowed significantly since a federal judge in San Diego ordered the administration to halt the practice in June 2018. But U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw allowed separations to persist in rare, specific circumstances, and the Trump administration has exploited those openings at a worrying clip, according to groups that work with migrants along the border.

"We are alarmed," said Jennifer Nagda, policy director at the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights, a Chicago-based national human rights group. "In March and April, we again saw a notable increase."

Some examples include:

Advocates at the Young Center's Harlingen, Texas, office say one in every five families they see at local migrant shelters have been separated at the border for questionable reasons, with children ranging in age from 18 months to 15 years old.
Attorneys with the Texas Civil Rights Project say they've counted more than 40 separated families a month in the McAllen area in Texas alone since the June injunction, or more than 350 total separated families.
Officials at Al Otro Lado, which advocates for immigrants in California, say dozens of families are being separated each day throughout the San Diego metro area.
The official government count is at 389 separated families since last summer's injunction, according to data received by the American Civil Liberties Union in court filings. One-fifth of the newly-separated children are younger than 5 years old, according to the figures.

At this point, he is going to find it impossible to travel to several latin american countries. And I am sure that goes for practically anyone in his administration. There is absolutely no way there isn't going to be violence against them there.

And this is on top of how much they look like complete buffoons in how they are handling Venezuela.

A friend posted on Facebook quote

Interestingly, migrant children have heartbeats too.

Trump’s pick for ICE director: I can tell which migrant children will become gang members by looking into their eyes

Politico wrote:

Mark Morgan, the White House choice to lead Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said during a Fox News interview earlier this year that he can judge the likelihood that an unaccompanied minor will become a gang member by looking into that child's eyes.

“I’ve been to detention facilities where I’ve walked up to these individuals that are so-called minors, 17 or under,” Morgan said on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” in January. “I’ve looked at them and I’ve looked at their eyes, Tucker — and I’ve said that is a soon-to-be MS-13 gang member. It’s unequivocal.”

...

The view that unaccompanied minors are more likely to become criminals is unsupported by statistical evidence. Studies have shown immigrants — legal and undocumented — are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans.

'So-called' minors? They're called so because they f*cking ARE minors, you racist piece of sh*t!

NBC: Trump administration identifies at least 1,700 additional children it may have separated
The children were separated from their parents before the government's "zero tolerance" policy went into effect in May 2018.

The Trump administration has identified at least 1,712 migrant children it may have separated from their parents in addition to those separated under the “zero tolerance” policy, according to court transcripts of a Friday hearing.

U.S. District Court Judge Dana Sabraw ordered the Trump administration to identify children separated before the zero tolerance policy went into effect in May 2018, resulting in the separation of over 2,800 children.

Sabraw previously ordered those migrant families to be reunited, but the additional children were identified more recently when the Inspector General for Health and Human Services estimated “thousands more” may have been separated before the policy was officially underway.

Other potentially separated migrant children could still be identified. The government has reviewed the files of 4,108 children out of 50,000 so far.

WP: ‘Mindless murdering savages’: Border agent used slurs before allegedly hitting migrant with his truck

In November 2017, U.S. Border Patrol Agent Matthew Bowen fumed about the humane treatment his agency was expected to give migrants who had illegally crossed into the country.

“PLEASE let us take the gloves off trump!” he texted another agent who, at the time, was facing criminal charges for shooting an unarmed Mexican teenager through the border fence. Migrants, Bowen suggested, are “disgusting subhuman s--- unworthy of being kindling for a fire.”

Less than two weeks later, prosecutors say, Bowen hit one such migrant with his truck, coming inches away from running the man over — and then lied about the incident in a report.

The texts came to light in filings last month in U.S. District Court in Tucson as Bowen’s attorney fought to suppress a flurry of messages in which the agent used slurs and made light of violence by agents. But Bowen’s views are hardly extraordinary, argued his attorney, Sean Chapman. Rather, his sentiments are “commonplace throughout the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector,” Chapman wrote, adding that such messages are “part of the agency’s culture.”

Teenager Is Latest Migrant Child To Die In U.S. Custody

NPR wrote:

A 16-year-old migrant boy has become the fifth migrant child since December to die after being apprehended at the U.S. border.

In a statement, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection said the boy, whose name was not released, was "found unresponsive" during a routine welfare check Monday morning at Weslaco Station, the facility where he was being held. The boy was taken into custody after crossing the U.S. border in Texas' Rio Grande Valley on May 13, and was due to be moved into custody of the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement, which oversees care of unaccompanied or separated migrant children after they are initially processed by immigration authorities.

The cause of death is unknown and the incident is being reviewed by CBP's Office of Professional Responsibility.

Acting U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner John Sanders said the agency "is committed to the health, safety and humane treatment of those in our custody."

A sixth migrant child died in custody, a 10 year-old girl. She passed from fever and respiratory distress.

The most disturbing thing, however, is that she died in September--months before the other deaths--and the Trump administration simply never told anyone.

Belgium just had elections last Sunday, and the racist Vlaams Belang party gained hugely in Flanders. Already the commentators are starting their usual 'we should listen to these voters, not judge' shtick - even the left-leaning outlets. This thread is a depressing reminder that while some grievances are legitimate these voters ARE racists and NOT victims. If they really care, where's the outrage among right-wing voters? All I see is cognitive dissonance and their overton window shifting to wherever it feels comfy.

When you keep pandering to these 'economically anxious' a-holes, you get this: children being treated like cattle because their skin is too dark.

On second thought: animal rights are usually more sacred for this scum than actual human beings. Nevermind.

WP: Hundreds of minors held at U.S. border facilities are there beyond legal time limits

MCALLEN, Tex. — Many of the nearly 2,000 unaccompanied migrant children being held in overcrowded U.S. Border Patrol facilities have been there beyond legally allowed time limits, including some who are 12 or younger, according to new government data obtained by The Washington Post.

Federal law and court orders require that children in Border Patrol custody be transferred to more-hospitable shelters no longer than 72 hours after they are apprehended. But some unaccompanied children are spending longer than a week in Border Patrol stations and processing centers, according to two Customs and Border Protection officials and two other government officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the unreleased data. One government official said about half of the children in custody — 1,000 — have been with the Border Patrol for longer than 72 hours, and another official said that more than 250 children 12 or younger have been in custody for an average of six days.

Because the crush of migration at the southern border in recent months has overwhelmed U.S. immigration infrastructure, initial incarceration for the tens of thousands of unaccompanied children who have arrived there has averaged four days, the officials said.