updated 11/06/2019
Remember “the good Samaritan”. Jesus said “Go and do likewise.” – and Jesus parable of the Day of Judgement:
“Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these my brethren, you did for me.”
“…countless stories of the rape, torture and murder that forced them to flee their home countries.”
“the effects of detention are uniquely traumatizing for children and can cause irreparable, lifelong harm.”
“Some of the children, who range from toddlers to teens, have been torn from their mothers and fathers at the border in spite of the government’s pledge to end separations,”
tRump’s Republican administration is considering circumventing the will of the courts and disregarding the will of the people by re-implementing this horrific practice.
tRump’s Republican scheme, “binary choice.”: either be separated from your children indefinitely or waive your child’s rights so they can be sent to jail with you.
the children now arriving at their five shelters are exhibiting “behaviors consistent with trauma like heightened anxiety, and fearfulness” and have described to staff “horrible and inhumane conditions” at border facilities.
“Last summer, after the courts ordered an end to the family separation policy, I watched more than 300 mothers and fathers be reunited with their children at the shelter where I work. Many were toddlers who regarded their parents with wariness and uncertainty instead of recognition and relief.
“children and parents alike appeared shellshocked as they tried to adjust to the new normal. I listened to a 5-year-old girl, coloring furiously, tell me in a singsong voice how her “papi” had left her all alone because she thought he didn’t love her enough. Some brooding kids wouldn’t look their parents in the eye, angry and blaming them for a separation that was far beyond their parent’s control. Other children clung to their parent’s legs, refusing to let them out of their sight.
“Family detention exists in a limited capacity now. But allowing the Trump administration to implement “binary choice” as a policy would greatly expand the practice — placing more children in detention camps, probably for longer periods.
“At a family detention camp in New Mexico, I met a suicidal 4-year-old whose face was covered in bloody, self-inflicted scratches. Every time she and her mother walked past the drainage ditch — running along the chain-link and barbed-wire fence that enclosed them — this little girl would beg her mother to get in the water. She didn’t want to swim. She wanted the “crocodillos” to eat them so they could go to heaven and escape that place. Another young child had to be restrained by his mother because he kept running full-speed into metal lockers. He was covered in bruises.
“I have seen numerous heartbroken mothers break down in family detention camps and give up on their asylum cases, despite knowing they’d be deported back to danger. They couldn’t face spending one more day, let alone months, with their children subjected to the psychological torture of family detention.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/pb/outlook/2019/05/20/trump-is-planning-cruel-twist-border-policy/?nid=menu_nav_accessibilityforscreenreader&outputType=accessibility
Immigrant children sent to shelters are traumatized and sick
The kids were unresponsive, feverish and vomiting, yet receiving no medical care.
A Justice Department attorney [Republican!] argued in court that the government should not have to provide detained children with soap, toothbrushes or beds. – Republicans in congress are despicable for condoning this!
Aired April 12, 2019
Today, CNN was first to learn that the president of the United States asked a top border official to break the law and promised him a pardon if he did. We also learned from the president himself who tweeted and spoke about it today that he wants his immigration authorities to do something that they have already told him would be unlawful and that others have called inhumane and extreme, whether it’s legal or not. That’s on top of new reporting that just days after telling the country he would not close the border for a year, he told officials in private to close it now.
Is this a president who doesn’t know the difference between what’s legal and what’s not? Is this a president who simply acts as if he’s above the law? Or is this a president who will do and say anything to cater to his base …
http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1904/12/acd.01.html
“What Trump should do is increase foreign aid to decrease violent crime in those countries”
– Al Cardenas, a former chairman of the Republican Party of Florida
Remember, Trump’s goal is to be so cruel as to dissuade approaching immigrants from crossing the border . . . and since he knows nothing about how the government works, all the cruelty has been planned, orchestrated, and enabled by the Republicans around him.
“Trump is responsible for these deaths.”
“As his administration refuses to follow our laws — preventing refugees from presenting themselves for asylum at our ports of entry — they cause families to cross between ports, ensuring greater suffering & death. At the expense of our humanity, not to the benefit of our safety,
in an June 2012 interview with CNBC’s Squawk Box reviewed by CNN’s KFile, Trump said he didn’t believe in deporting undocumented immigrants who, he said, “had done a great job.”
Asked about his views on immigrant labor, Trump said, “You know my views on it and I’m not necessarily, I think I’m probably down the middle on that also. Because I also understand how, as an example, you have people in this country for 20 years, they’ve done a great job, they’ve done wonderfully, they’ve gone to school, they’ve gotten good marks, they’re productive — now we’re supposed to send them out of the country, I don’t believe in that, [and, remember, Trump has undocumented immigrants, cheap labor, working in his hotels]
https://www.cnn.com/2016/10/23/politics/trump-2012-immigration/index.htmldemonizing immigrants is purely an inhuman scam to get votes.
‘Children Were Dirty, They Were Scared, and They Were Hungry’
Elora Mukherjee, a professor at Columbia Law School and the director of the school’s Immigrants’ Rights Clinic. …
She was at the Clint detention facility in Texas last week, along with a group of lawyers and doctors, to interview the children held there.
Elora Mukherjee: I have been representing and interviewing immigrant children and their families in detention. Most recently, I was in Brownsville, Texas, interviewing children detained at Casa Padre last July. In March of this year, I was in Homestead, Florida, interviewing children detained there. Both of those facilities were very controversial and have received a lot of coverage. Last week I was in Clint, and the conditions we found were appalling. In 12 years representing immigrant children in detention, I have never seen such degradation and inhumanity. Children were dirty, they were scared, and they were hungry.
An overwhelming number of children who I interviewed had not had an opportunity for a stable shower or bath since crossing the border [days or weeks earlier]. They were wearing the same clothing that they had crossed the border in. Their clothing was covered in bodily fluids, including urine and breast milk for the teenage moms who are breastfeeding.
Nearly every child I spoke with said that they were hungry because they’re being given insufficient food. The food at Clint is rationed on trays. Everyone gets an identical tray regardless of if you’re a 1-year-old, or you’re a 17-year-old, or a breastfeeding teenage mother who has higher caloric needs. The same food is served every single day, and none of the children receive any fruit and vegetables or any milk.
All the children I spoke with had been detained in other CBP facilities prior to living in Clint. So Clint was their second or third stop in CBP custody. And we need to know where these children are going.
O’Leary: How was Clint compared with Homestead or some of the other facilities you’ve visited? Was it noticeably worse?
Mukherjee: Yes, it was noticeably worse. When I interview children in detention, I try to sit near them so that we can have a better conversation about very traumatic, sensitive, difficult topics. Usually that leaves the children crying. At Clint, I found that hard to do because there was a stench emanating from some of the children. It was filthy and disgusting and there was, as of last week, a flu epidemic at Clint and a lice infestation. And children do not have the ability to wash their hands with soap at Clint.
We repeatedly begged for access to the medical-quarantine area. We wanted to see the children who were the most vulnerable there. All of our efforts to seek access to the quarantine were denied. We were only permitted to make phone calls to the children there and there was a guard hovering, listening to what the children were saying on the other end of the line when they spoke to us by phone. Obviously it is nearly impossible to conduct an interview with a very young child who is very sick by phone.
The previous week my colleagues from the Flores team were in Ursula [a detention center in McAllen, Texas] interviewing children, and the lawyers and doctor on that team identified multiple infants who were extremely sick and who needed to be hospitalized. Those infants were admitted to the hospital, and some to the intensive-care unit.
It’s worth noting that over the last year, seven children have died in federal immigration custody. When you look at the data for nearly the previous decade, there was not a single death.
Actually, they’re not asking; they’re ordering that 7-, 8-, or 9-year-old children take care of 2-year-olds and 3-year-olds.
Mukherjee: The children are terrified. Many of the children I spoke with have not been permitted to make a single phone call to any of their family members or loved ones since crossing the border. Many of them are being held incommunicado. Everyone who we interviewed, and I anticipate nearly every child who was detained at Clint, has family members in the United States who are desperate to be reunited with their beloved children.
https://www.govexec.com/management/2019/06/children-were-dirty-they-were-scared-and-they-were-hungry/158003/
Trump’s erratic decisions and inflammatory rhetoric, have caused a surge of crossings at the Mexico border.
Apr 11, 2019
Of course, Trump blames all his mistakes on everyone else as usual.
“It’s not going well for him, and it hasn’t been going well for a long time,” said Al Cardenas, a former chairman of the Republican Party of Florida who came to this country as a refugee from Cuba. “Things have gotten worse. And it’s on the back of the president.”
Sarah Pierce, an analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, said Trump’s “policies and rhetoric” both are driving Central Americans who have considered coming to the United States to do so sooner rather than later.
“They’re really creating an urgency among migrants to appear at the border as quickly as possible before the next hammer comes down,” she said. [ex: like he actually gets his wall built]
The president has taken a series of dramatic steps to get funding for his border wall, from forcing a government shutdown in December to declaring a “national emergency” in February to raid Defense Department money to, most recently, threatening to shut down the entire Mexican border ― and in so doing, putting at risk the entire U.S. economy.
Blame shifting is exactly what Trump is trying to do, said Rick Tyler, a political consultant who worked for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) in his 2016 presidential primary campaign.
“It’s not his fault. Because it’s never his fault,” Tyler said.
But it’s also exactly that tone that is helping to worsen the problem, Cardenas said, along with Trump’s threats to close the southern border entirely and to end foreign aid to the Central American countries that many of the migrants are trying to flee. What Trump should do is increase foreign aid to decrease violent crime in those countries and even open more consulates there to let people apply for asylum without traveling through Mexico and gathering at the U.S. border, said Cardenas.
“He’s making the wrong decision each and every time,” Cardenas said of the president.
from https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-illegal-immigration-record_n_5caf9020e4b098b9a2d0d281
Administration lying about and to immigration victims
Judge blocks administration from deporting asylum seekers
Sick:
“only 12 or 13 of over 500 parents have been located, which is just unacceptable at this point. And it appears that there is not a plan in place,” federal judge Sabraw said on the conference call with lawyers from the government and the ACLU, noting that many of those parents had been “removed from the country without their child.”
Trump and the Republicans {who control Congress} are doing nothing to re-unite immigrant families!
Immigration experts who are working to reunite parents with their children say the government has no system in place to solve a problem of its own making.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/process-reunite-immigrant-children-families-chaos_us_5b2c4b4ae4b0321a01cf80b5
It’s ‘100 Percent’ On Trump Administration To Locate Separated Parents, federal judge Sabraw Says.
Earlier this week, judge Sabraw ordered the government to detail its plan for reuniting kids with parents who were deported or released.
“All of this is the result of the government’s separation and … failure to track and reunite,” Sabraw said.
In discussing the government’s plan to locate parents, the judge repeated: “This responsibility, of course, is 100 percent on the government. It has the sole burden and responsibility and obligation to make this happen.”
“Every day the government has sat on this information has been another day of suffering for these families,” he added.
see full report at
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/judge-immigrant-family-separations-aclu-trump-administration_us_5b64c57de4b0b15abaa3344a
‘THEY SHOULDN’T BE ALLOWED TO DO THIS’
ABC News, HOUSTON – Aug 3, 2018
Sick:
… a man who had his 2-year-old daughter taken because agents didn’t believe he was the father, forcing him to submit DNA evidence to prove he was the parent.
The Associated Press interviewed immigrants who remain separated from their children in multiple countries as well as their lawyers to capture the variety of ways the government has been unable to meet court-ordered deadlines to reunite families.
Even though the Trump administration had officially ended its policy of separating families at the border, Perez was arrested and charged with improperly entering the United States.
Agents thought Perez was the uncle and not the father, and the Texas Civil Rights Project intervened to present evidence the government was wrong.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection issued a statement that under questioning, Perez admitted that the child was actually his niece and that a smuggler had given him a false document in their native Guatemala.
But the project says Perez is from an indigenous community and has a poor command of Spanish. After the group obtained documents from the Guatemalan consulate showing he’s the parent, the U.S. attorney dismissed the case against Perez on July 12.
On Wednesday, the group received word that DNA testing confirmed Perez was the girl’s father. But Perez still remains in a detention facility, and his daughter is at a government shelter in Texas.
the Trump administration lies to them!
Many parents say they signed deportation papers after being told they would get their children back in their home country, only for that promise to be broken.
Selvin Argueta Caal says he left Guatemala after his son received several death threats from gang members at his school. They wanted Selvin Jr. to sell drugs, but the 17-year-old refused.
They were detained and separated at the border on May 19th, one day after their arrival. While detained by the government, the father requested asylum and told the immigration officials that he feared for his son’s life in Guatemala, but the request was denied.
Caal says he waived reunification, but didn’t know exactly what he was signing because he did not read or speak English, and nobody translated the document to him.
07/25/2018
Immigrant Parents Unwittingly Signed Away Right To Reunite With Children
Trump administration lying to victims:
Some signed forms thinking they would reunite with their children. Instead, they agreed to be deported without them.
Indeed, some individuals were adamant that they had signed a paper that said they chose to be reunited with their children.”
Additionally,
immigrant parents who the government claimed had waived their right to reunite with their children told attorneys they felt pressured to do so, didn’t understand what they were signing or did not recall it at all, according to a series of declarations filed in court on Wednesday as part of a lawsuit over the Trump administration’s separation of migrant families.
Multiple parents told attorneys they had been asked to sign a form that would allow their children to be released to family in the U.S. rather than continuing to be held in government custody, according to the declarations. One Guatemalan father said he signed the form “under enormous amounts of stress and confusion” but wanted to be reunited with his child, Reichlin-Melnick wrote.
Many of the families are so traumatized that it takes hours to establish a rapport and begin gathering information, attorneys said. They described families who could only focus on whether they would remain together.
Some of the fathers said they were taken into a room with as many as 50 other men and given less than 5 minutes to hear about and sign the form, which they did not fully understand. They said they weren’t given an opportunity to ask questions and believed they had no alternative but to sign the form, attorney Luis Cruz said in a declaration. None of them were given the option to talk with their children before signing the form, he said.
Another lawyer, Sofia Reive, met with nine fathers the government identified as consenting to deportation. All of them told her, contrary to the government’s assertion, that they wanted instead to be reunited with their kids. None of them realized they had signed away that right and agreed to be deported without their children, Reive wrote.
One of the fathers had passed a credible fear interview, the first major step in presenting an asylum claim to the immigration court, according to a declaration. Another, a speaker of the Mam language of Guatemala, thought the form he signed without an interpreter present meant that he could reunite with this daughter.
“Even benign questions ― like the question asking mothers to list the names and locations of their children on our intake form ― produce tears and paralysis,” Shalyn Fluharty, managing attorney of the Dilley Pro Bono Project helping detained families, wrote in a declaration.
see full report at
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/immigrant-parents-right-to-reunite_us_5b58f9d0e4b0fd5c73cb6599
06/30/2018
Separated Parents Are Failing Asylum Screenings Because They’re So Heartbroken
Immigration lawyers say separated parents are too grief-stricken to focus on their cases.
BROWNSVILLE, Texas ― Jodi Goodwin has spent the past month helping grief-stricken parents with their asylum cases.
she says, those mothers and fathers are too devastated to prepare for their court hearings.
Instead, they replay the moment their kids were taken away by Border Patrol, worry about their children’s well-being, and ask repeatedly where their sons and daughters are. In some cases, they simply weep.
President Donald Trump issued an executive order in June to end his own administration’s policy of separating families at the border. But there are still over 2,000 detained parents who haven’t seen, and in some cases spoken to, their children in over a month. And while a federal judge in San Diego ruled last week that the government must bring families back together within 30 days, lawyers told HuffPost they are not aware of any plan to reunite children with parents who decide to seek asylum in the U.S., a process that can take a few months.
In the meantime, they say, separated parents are too consumed with heartache to focus on their immigration cases. That puts them at a much higher risk of being deported back to countries where their lives are in danger.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/separated-parents-too-grief-stricken-to-seek-asylum-experts-say_us_5b379974e4b08c3a8f6ad5d9
Government-funded treatment center forcibly injected immigrant kids with drugs
Migrant children, traumatized from being detained under the Trump administration’s zero tolerance immigration policy, are being forcibly injected with powerful psychotropic drugs that can lead to movement disorders, cause obesity, and have other long-lasting, harmful effects on children, according to new legal filings.
Children held at Shiloh Treatment Center, a government-funded facility in Manvel, Texas, described being placed on multiple psychotropic medications without their parents’ consent.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny-news-drugging-immigrant-children-20180620-story.html
July 24, 2018
They legally asked for asylum.
Instead, they were sent to a prison and treated like criminals
Federal authorities have denied most of the allegations of mistreatment!
“A guy in the cell next to me has been requesting medical attention for a week and has not gotten it.”
“Detainees reported heart problems, a gunshot wound, a broken leg, rashes, allergic reactions and severe sore throats,” he said in a declaration. “Detainees reported trying to tell the prison guards about their medical concerns, but being unable to communicate adequately in English.”
“We were searched naked in front of everybody,” another said.
The Bureau of Prisons acknowledged it had little notice of the detainees’ arrival and initially had to treat them as part of the prison system for security reasons. “The prison had 24 hours’ notice,” Baxter-Neal, the ACLU attorney, told CNN. “All of a sudden, there were 130 mattresses delivered to the facility, and the next day, people were brought.”
improvements happened only after the ACLU and Innovation Law Lab, a nonprofit immigrant legal service, sued the Department of Homeland Security for permission to let their volunteer attorneys and interpreters speak with immigrants inside the facility.
A judge agreed and ordered the lawyers be allowed in.
Domestic and international law holds that immigrants who fear persecution in their home countries are legally entitled to seek asylum in the United States regardless of how they enter the country.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/24/politics/oregon-prison-asylum-detainees/index.html
Sessions said gang and domestic violence in most cases would no longer be grounds for receiving asylum. A lawsuit says Sessions’s ruling, is an “unlawful screening standard” that deprives them of their rights under federal law.
Attorneys for the civil rights organization and the Justice Department had agreed to delay removal proceedings
But the mother and daughter were being deported.
Carmen fled El Salvador with her daughter in June, according to court records, fearing they would be killed by gang members who had demanded she pay them each month or suffer consequences. Several co-workers at the factory where Carmen worked had been murdered, and her husband is also abusive, the records state.
August 9 2018
hypocrisy!
First lady Melania Trump’s parents became U.S. citizens in a naturalization ceremony in New York on Thursday, completing a years-long immigration process even as President Trump has called for new laws to bar Americans from sponsoring parents and other relatives.
“This is the most anti-immigration administration probably in the history of the country, except when it comes to this family, and the hypocrisy is just stunning,”
Melania Trump’s own immigration path also has been scrutinized. The first lady, formerly a model known as Melania Knauss, arrived in New York in 1996 and began dating Trump in 2000.
In 2001, she was granted a green card in the elite EB-1 program, which was designed for renowned academic researchers, multinational business executives or those in other fields, such as Olympic athletes and Oscar-winning actors, who demonstrated “sustained national and international acclaim.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/melania-trumps-parents-become-naturalized-us-citizens-amid-the-presidents-hostility-toward-chain-migration/2018/08/09/646a4f62-9bf9-11e8-b60b-1c897f17e185_story.html?utm_term=.c8aa0f446283