Border Patrol Disasters

[AmazonGrace]

 

[candygirl200413]

This is just...

Separated immigrant children are all over the U.S. now, far from parents who don’t know where they are

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Their mothers are missing, their fathers far away. They get pizza, maybe cold cuts. They are exhausted; they cannot sleep. There are other children around, but they had never seen those kids before, and those kids are crying or screaming or rocking or spreading the feeling that everything is not okay.

The children who were forcibly separated from their parents at the border by the United States government are all over the country now, in Michigan and Maryland, in foster homes in California and shelters in Virginia, in cold, institutional settings with adults who are not permitted to touch them or with foster parents who do not speak Spanish but who hug them when they cry.

The separations have stopped and the Trump administration has said that it is executing a plan to reunify the children with their parents before deporting them. Still, more than 2,000 children remain spread around the United States, far from their parents — many of whom have no idea where their sons and daughters have been taken.

The children have been through hell. They are babies who were carried across rivers and toddlers who rode for hours in trucks and buses and older kids who were told that a better place was just beyond the horizon.

And now they live and wait in unfamiliar places: big American suburban houses where no one speaks their language; a locked shelter on a dusty road where they spend little time outside; a converted Walmart where each morning they are required to stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance, in English, to the country that holds them apart from their parents.

Why must they say those words, some of the children ask at the shelter in Brownsville, on the Mexican border in Texas?

“We tell them, ‘It’s out of respect,’ ” said one employee of the facility, known as Casa Padre, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of losing their job.

U.S. authorities are compiling mug shots of the children in detention. Immigration lawyers who have seen the pictures say some of them show children in tears.

At a facility in Crofton, Md., run by Bethany Christian Services, 10 children separated from their parents arrived in recent days. Half were younger than 5, according to Tawnya Brown, a regional director of the organization. Most appeared to be from Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.

Each child got a drawstring “arrival bag” containing a change of clothes and other necessities. The little ones got a teddy bear, too. They got to leave the shelter promptly, going to a new home with foster parents who speak to the children in “love language,” Brown said.

In Bristow, Va., about 15 boys and girls between the ages of 10 and 17 arrived in recent weeks after being separated from their parents. Now they stay in some of the 10 modern, $600,000 single-family houses on the sprawling green campus of Youth for Tomorrow, a residential facility for at-risk children.

At some facilities, there are so many children that the staff conduct prison-style head counts. In Brownsville, where the wings of the sprawling building are named for U.S. presidents, that can take hours. A few days ago, a frantic search ensued when one child appeared to be missing from the Reagan wing. He was later found in the ­Truman wing.

'I'm not crying anymore'

These are the places where the children wait. All around them, and all around the country, people are doing things for them. Caseworkers, lawyers and volunteers work the phones, searching for parents and other relatives.

At first, the kids believe they will soon be back with their families.

“One of them said: ‘I’m not crying anymore. Tomorrow, I’ll be with my dad,’ recalled an employee at the Brownsville shelter. But as it became clear that their release was not imminent, the children continued their routines — karaoke on Monday, cake for those celebrating a birthday, occasional group discussions about their future.

“Some say, ‘I’m going to be the most famous singer’ and others say, ‘I’m going to be a soccer star,’ ” the employee said. Others share a different expectation: “Remember that we don’t have papers,” an older child said. “We’ll probably work in construction.”

The people who devote their work lives to helping immigrant children at shelters are mostly low-level employees, working 12-hour shifts at $12 an hour. They are accustomed to young people arriving unaccompanied, mostly teens who knew that they would be on their own and came at least somewhat prepared. They might have had crucial bits of information pinned to their clothing or in their pockets or backpacks — birth certificates, names and phone numbers of relatives in the United States.

The forcibly separated children, in contrast, usually arrive with nothing. And the younger ones often know nothing.

“It was never anticipated that they were going to be totally on their own,” said Nithya Nathan-Pineau, director of the children’s program at the Capital Area Immigrants’ Rights Coalition.

But mostly, from the children’s perspective, people do things to them. At Bethany Christian Services in Maryland, for example, the children get vaccinations and treatment for their physical ailments — “Stomach issues, skin issues, things of that nature,” Brown said. Vigilant for lice, Bethany dispenses shampoo and combs. It also has teachers who instruct the kids in English, colors, letters, numbers. There’s “playtime, nap time, snack, recess,” Brown said.

Antar Davidson, who worked at Southwest Key’s Estrella del Norte shelter in Tucson from February until he quit in early June, described a tense environment that grew worse as the number of separated kids soared.

“People were yelling at the kids all the time” in Spanish, said Davidson, 32. He said supplies were rationed so tightly that kids were given hair gel one spoonful at a time.

“It really wears on these kids, the level of institutionalization,” he said.

Youth-care workers were told to discourage children from speaking their indigenous Central American languages, he said, before the policy was reversed. And when the number of separated kids rose from a handful to more than 50 in the 300-person shelter, employees were given a “refresher” course in how to use physical holds on kids, Davidson said.

Lawyers show up at the centers, sometimes bringing toys or stress balls for the children to play with. Some lawyers try to teach the kids about their predicament, offering “Know Your Rights” presentations, explaining the U.S. legal system to older kids, drawing stick-figure sketches of courtrooms for younger ones.

“You draw someone and say, ‘Okay, this is going to be the government attorney,” said one lawyer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of some of her cases.

Some kids engage. Some remain silent. Some have not spoken for weeks.

Going to 'summer camp'

The children clung to their parents through the terrifying journey north. They rode flimsy rafts across the rain-swollen Rio Grande. They hiked sun-bleached paths under the broiling sun. They were transported in “trucks, on top of railroad trains, in buses,” and on foot, said Gary Jones, chief executive of Youth for Tomorrow.

They crossed the border and were picked up by federal agents and placed in cavernous holding centers. In many cases, that’s where the separation happened. Parents were put in one cell, children in another.

At Customs and Border Protection stations, such as the massive Central Processing Center on Ursula Avenue in McAllen, Tex., some families were divided immediately, especially fathers and daughters, because girls can’t be detained with men. Children were often sorted by country, gender and age, to keep older and younger ones apart.

For some, the separation did not come until the morning they were brought to court on big silver buses. Border officials told parents they’d see their children when they got back from court.

But when they returned, their children were gone, taken to federal shelters. Some parents were told that their children were being taken for a bath, but then the kids did not come back.

At a shelter in McAllen, as word spread that children were being pulled from their parents, some mothers and ­fathers took to sleeping with their legs wrapped around their children so they couldn’t be snatched.

Sometimes, it fell to lawyers from the Texas Civil Rights Project to break the news, said Efrén Olivares, a lawyer with the organization, which has interviewed 381 immigrant parents who were separated from more than 400 children.

The parents who did know the separations were coming had to tell their kids something. A ­father from El Salvador said goodbye to his daughter before she was taken to a shelter by telling her that she was going to summer camp.

The scenes of trauma take a toll on everyone — parents and children, but also guards and advocates. Olivares came to the United States legally from Mexico at age 13. He knew no English. His mother stayed at home and his father drove a school bus. Olivares became valedictorian of his high school class and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and Yale Law School. Now, he’s 36, running on coffee and adrenaline to meet parents and try to reunite families.

“I’m going to crash sooner or later,” he said.

Last week, he had his own taste of the trauma of separation. His wife took their toddler to summer camp. There were tears. After an hour, she had to return because the child couldn’t be without her.

“An hour they lasted without one another,” Olivares said. He had tears in his eyes.

The road to reunification

At a shelter for the tender-aged near Los Angeles, one little child, overwhelmed, panicked. The hysteria set off the rest of the group, unleashing a contagion of crying that left the staff at a loss.

“The trauma for these children is significant,” said Brown, of Bethany Christian Services in Maryland. “You don’t always see the trauma. You don’t always see it in their faces. But you can see it in their physical reactions.”

At some facilities, there are mental health counselors who try to talk to the kids. But some immigration lawyers caution the children against disclosing too much to the therapists, worried that information might get passed on to the government, possibly affecting the child’s asylum claim.

At the cavernous Central Processing Center in McAllen, known as the “dog kennel” for its rooms made of chain-link fencing, children slept on mats on the concrete ground. With no parents around, some children suddenly found themselves changing the diapers of strangers.

The children sometimes don’t know their parents’ names or don’t know their own birth dates or how to spell their names.

“There’s just a lot of disconnect,” said Nathan-Pineau of the Capital Area Immigrants’ Rights Coalition, which has two centers in Maryland and four in Virginia serving as shelters for migrant children. Some kids can’t communicate the “basic information that the staff would need to even start looking for their parents.”

Meanwhile, outside the shelter network, along the country’s southern border, lawyers working on behalf of bereft parents struggle to locate their clients’ children.

Rochelle Garza, an immigration lawyer in Brownsville, tried a toll-free phone number for the Office of Refugee Resettlement on Friday afternoon.

“We are experiencing high call volume,” said a recorded message. “Please stay on the line for the next available case manager.”

The man who finally answered told Garza that he could offer nothing more than an email address, the same generic one listed on the flier distributed to some parents.

“Right now,” the man said, “with the high volume of minors entering the United States, it’s a little complicated for them.”

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced Saturday that it is doing what it can, “bringing to bear all the relevant resources of the department in order to assist in the reunification or placement of unaccompanied alien children and teenagers with a parent or appropriate sponsor.”

Michelle Ortiz, a lawyer with Americans for Immigrant Justice in Miami, represents a 3-year-old girl who was separated from her father at the New Mexico border. The father was deported, but the details of the case are not clear, Ortiz said, because “she’s 3. She can’t tell us exactly what happened. She can hold up her fingers to tell us how old she is, but not much more.” The girl is living with extended family in South Florida, her future uncertain.

The kids have come mainly from Central America. In the past year, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, based in Baltimore, has found temporary places for 148 children who had been separated from their parents. Half of the children were younger than 5, the youngest 18 months, according to spokeswoman Danielle Bernard. About two-thirds were from Guatemala, a quarter were from Honduras, and the rest came from El Salvador or Mexico.

In a residential section of Harlingen, Tex., a man in a gold pickup truck guarded the front gate of a shelter for young children run under a federal contract by Southwest Key. The shelter is a white frame house with a spacious yard covered with a thick layer of grass.

A worker leaving the shelter in her truck is asked how the kids inside are faring.

“They’re eating better than you,” she said Friday. “For lunch, they had fish, carrots, broccoli, a dinner roll. They’re being treated very well.”

A colorful jungle gym and a volleyball net sit in the front yard, which is shaded by tall trees. Neighbors said the facility has an indoor pool. One neighbor recently saw several little girls dressed in pink tops and shorts playing on the swings in the front yard. There are small basketball courts and two red tricycles for little kids.

Several neighbors expressed concern that the children are rarely outside. Neighbors said the children at Southwest Key can watch television and are taught arts and crafts, such as creating paper flowers.

“As a mother, I don’t like it,” said neighbor Liliana Barajas, 36. “They don’t bring them out enough. They’re kids. The last thing you want is for them to feel what they are in. It’s like a home prison to them. It’s heartbreaking.”

5

I just read stories fo people's grandparents who were native americans who had the same experiences and I'm just so disgusted. 

Sorry for the double post but ugh:

Kids in exchange for deportation: Detained migrants say they were told they could get kids back on way out of U.S.

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HOUSTON — Central American men separated from their children and held in a detention facility outside Houston are being told they can reunite with their kids at the airport if they agree to sign a voluntary deportation order now, according to one migrant at the facility and two immigration attorneys who have spoken to detainees there.

A Honduran man who spoke to The Texas Tribune Saturday estimated that 20 to 25 men who have been separated from their children are being housed at the IAH Polk County Secure Adult Detention Center, a privately-operated U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility for men located 75 miles outside Houston. He said the majority of those detainees had received the same offer of reunification in exchange for voluntary deportation.

The 24-year-old detainee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity and requested the Tribune use the pseudonym Carlos because he feared retaliation, told the Tribune that he abandoned his asylum case and agreed to sign voluntary deportation paperwork Friday out of “desperation” to see his 6-year-old daughter, who was separated from him after the pair illegally crossed the border in late May. The man said two federal officials suggested he’d be reunited with his daughter at the airport if he agreed to sign the order, which could lead to him being repatriated to his violence-torn home country in less than two weeks.

“I was told I would not be deported without my daughter,” said Carlos, adding that he's now hoping to revoke the voluntary deportation order he signed and get legal help to fight his case. “I signed it out of desperation… but the truth is I can’t go back to Honduras; I need help.”

 

Carlos said he’s only spoken to his daughter once — on June 21 — since the pair were separated three weeks ago in McAllen. He said he paid a smuggler $7,000 for the 10-day journey from Honduras because he feared being caught up in the violence waged by organized crime syndicates and gangs in the country. They turned themselves into Border Patrol officers shortly after illegally crossing into the United States on a raft that pushed off from the banks of the Rio Grande on the Mexico side near Reynosa, Carlos said.

He said he wanted a better life for his only daughter and hoped U.S. officials would grant them asylum. He was told he did not pass the first hurdle — proving he had "credible fear" of persecution or torture in Honduras — but volunteer attorneys have instructed him to revoke the paperwork he signed and appeal his credible fear ruling before an immigration judge.

Anne Chandler, Houston director of the Tahirih Justice Center, a national organization that advocates for immigrant women and girls, said she’s heard an almost identical account from another Central American migrant detained at the Livingston facility, a taupe-and-blue building surrounded by two chain link fences lined with coils of razor wire.

Carl Rusnok, an ICE spokesman, said Saturday evening that the agency "cannot research vague allegations," but would do so if given specific details about the migrants who made the claims.

"It is unprofessional and unfair for a media outlet to publish such allegations without providing names, dates and locations so that these allegations can be properly researched," Rusnok said. The Tribune declined to give Rusnok the detainees’ identifying information.

A Homeland Security and Health and Human Services fact sheet released Saturday said parents ordered removed from the U.S. can "request that his or her minor child accompany them," but that "many parents have elected to be removed without their children."

More than 2,500 migrant children have been separated from their parents since early May, after the federal government cracked down on border-crossers and began pressuring federal prosecutors on the southwest border to pursue charges against anyone alleged to have entered or tried to enter the country without authorization.

Homeland Security said Saturday that 522 unaccompanied minors have been reunified with family members since the zero tolerance policy began, and that they have a reunification plan for those who remain in federal custody.

But both Chandler and Cynthia Milian, a private attorney working with Tahirih, questioned whether the offers that the immigrants have reported receiving could be honored by the government, given the sprawling and slow-moving nature of the nation's immigration bureaucracy.

While migrant adults are prosecuted by the Justice Department and then detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, their children are placed in shelters funded and overseen by the Department of Health and Human Services.Chandler said it could take between one to two months to secure the release of an unaccompanied migrant child.

Many immigrant parents have been placed in removal proceedings and some have already been deported without their children.

Milian, who has spoken to Carlos, said his situation is a “parent’s worst nightmare” and that it was highly unlikely he would be met at the airport by his daughter. “I doubt they would put his child on a plane to get her to where he would get deported out from, especially if she’s in Arizona,” where Carlos was told she is being held. “I just don’t see that happening.”

Carlos said he worries about the conditions in the facility where his daughter is being held, whether she’s receiving proper care for her asthma, and how she will find her way to an aunt in Los Angeles if he is deported back to Honduras without her.

When they spoke on Thursday, Carlos said his daughter was “very sad … and wanted me to get her out of there.”

Carlos is one of the thousands of migrants impacted by the zero tolerance directive announced by Attorney General Jeff Sessions in April, which requires federal prosecutors along the U.S.-Mexico border to prosecute nearly all allegations of unauthorized border crossings. The policy inundated already-backlogged federal courts; several courtrooms, including one in McAllen where Carlos was charged in May, have held mass hearings where dozens of migrants plead guilty to illegal entry charges at once — a scene critics have likened to assembly-line justice.

After the new crackdown sparked bipartisan outrage, President Donald Trump signed a hastily-written executive order Wednesday that keeps most families together through the pendency of their cases. But there are divisions within the Trump administration about whether it’s possible to continue pursuing every case of illegal entry.

Despite assurances that there are reunification plans in place, confusion and chaos reign on the ground about how families separated at the height of the zero tolerance policy will be put back together.

An MSNBC correspondent tweeted Sunday morning that a Homeland Security official said "separated parents were quickly given the option to sign paperwork leading to deportation. Many chose to do so."

Bob Etnyre, a Houston-based attorney and immigration law expert, said Carlos’ case highlights a "particularly diabolical aspect" of the family separations — dangling reunification as an incentive to drop an asylum claim.

Carlos said his daughter was taken away from him on the day he went to the McAllen courthouse to plead guilty to illegal entry. He said officials at the detention facility he knew as “la hielera,” or the “ice box,” told him she would be taken to an aunt in California — “pure lies,” he said.

“She’s a prisoner,” he told the Tribune through a plexiglass partition in the facility’s visitation room. “She can't talk, she cries because she's locked up.”

“The kids aren't to blame for what's going on,” he added. “We only came because we can't live in our country. We are looking for somewhere to live where our children can have a better future. In our country we can't do it.”

Carlos' mother, reached by phone in Honduras, said she hasn't been able to speak to her son or granddaughter since they were detained. She's been told her granddaughter was ill with an upper respiratory ailment. "We've been worrying and suffering over this," she said.

The aunt of 6-year-old Alison Jimena Valencia Madrid, another Central American girl separated from her parent and currently being held in an Arizona facility, said she can imagine the distress both Carlos and his daughter are feeling.

Madrid garnered national attention when she was heard on audio, surreptitiously recorded in a Customs and Border Protection facility and provided to ProPublica, persistently asking authorities to call her aunt – whose phone number she’d memorized. “Are you going to call my aunt so that when I’m done eating she can pick me up?” Madrid can be heard saying, as other Central American children weep and sob “Mami” and “Papá” in the background.

“It’s inhumane for them to be separated,” said the aunt, who lives in Houston and spoke to the Tribune on the condition of anonymity. “And that’s a pain she will always have. That little creature will grow up with that forever. It’s a psychological and emotional wound for both of them, because people don’t come here to lose their children.”

 

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Edited June 25, 2018 by candygirl200413

[AmericanRose]

This just convinces me that there was never a plan to return the child to their parent(s) to begin with. :\

[AmazonGrace]

 

Accidentally schmaccidentally

[Imagine20]

16 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

 

Accidentally schmaccidentally

I used to adjudicate green cards for asylees. Their stories were heartbreaking. Especially those being persecuted based on sexual orientation. I remember one had notes from their psychiatrist, and what happened to them was chilling. These people are fleeing for their lives. 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[samira_catlover]

OK, posting here in FJ (and will repeat a whole lot in the next couple days) and in mult-other social forums:  HELP US fight for justice and mercy!  Barring disaster, WILL be in DC on 30 June with picket sign in hand---and there's a place on it for "here in spirit" for your names/nicks if you can't do a physical rally for whatever reason.  (If you want in, send me a PM with your chosen name or nick.) Everybody, **please**  feel free to share this, here or on other media.  FWIW, you/helpers can contact me at e-mail: samira_catlover@yahoo.com.  (Please make me carry a YUGE sign, because so many others come along in protest!)   #FreeTheHostages #KeepFamiliesTogether   #VOTE  

[AmazonGrace]

 

 

[AmazonGrace]

 How long until Gorsuch overturns this

[candygirl200413]

I'm also curious about how they're going about this?

[Howl]

 

[samira_catlover]

OK, posting here in FJ (and will repeat a whole lot in the next couple days) and in mult-other social forums:  HELP US fight for justice and mercy!  Barring disaster, WILL be in DC on 30 June with picket sign in hand---and there's a place on it for "here in spirit" for your names/nicks if you can't do a physical rally for whatever reason.  (If you want in, send me a PM with your chosen name or nick.) Everybody, **please**  feel free to share this, here or on other media.  FWIW, you/helpers can contact me at e-mail: samira_catlover@yahoo.com.  (Please make me carry a YUGE sign, because so many others come along in protest!)   #FreeTheHostages #KeepFamiliesTogether   #VOTE  

[AmazonGrace]

 

 

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I'm not surprised to read about Ethel Kennedy. She's a tough woman. If you haven't seen it, the documentary, "Ethel" by her daughter, Rory, is excellent.

[AmazonGrace]

 

[samira_catlover]

Just a reminder, y'all: marching in DC tomorrow and have room on signs for "here in spirit".  If you want your name or nick listed, please send me a private message here--will check about 10 pm Eastern US time and will TRY to recheck in the morning.  #FIGHT

[GreyhoundFan]

This MAGAT screaming at a child makes me sick:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump admin ran 'pilot program' for separating migrant families in 2017"

Spoiler

EL PASO, Texas — The government was separating migrant parents from their kids for months prior to the official introduction of zero tolerance, running what a U.S. official called a "pilot program" for widespread prosecutions in Texas, but apparently did not create a clear system for parents to track or reunite with their kids.

Officials have said that at least 2,342 children were separated from their parents after being apprehended crossing the border unlawfully since May 5, when the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" policy towards migrants went into effect.

But numbers provided to NBC News by the Department of Homeland Security show that another 1,768 were separated from their parents between October 2016 and February 2018, bringing the total number of separated kids to more than 4,100.

More than 1,000 children were separated between October 2016 and September 2017, and 703 were separated between October 2017 and February 2018, according to DHS.

It's unclear how many of those 1,768 children were separated after President Donald Trump's inauguration in January 2017. NBC repeatedly asked DHS for comprehensive data, but the agency declined to provide month-by-month figures, did not provide data prior to October 2016 and did not supply any numbers for March and April 2018.

A DHS official told NBC News that the practice of dividing parents and kids predates the Trump presidency. "DHS has continued a long-standing policy by the previous administration," said the official, listing risk to the child and criminal prosecution of the parent as among the reasons for separation.

But the DHS official also confirmed to NBC that, from July 2017 to October 2017, the Trump administration ran what the official called a "pilot program" for zero tolerance in El Paso.

Court records and interviews with migrants show that during that period federal prosecutors began to criminally charge any adult who crossed the border unlawfully in the El Paso sector, which spans from New Mexico to West Texas. Parents arriving with young children were not exempt.

"This was happening in El Paso before it was news," said Linda Rivas, executive director of Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center. "People didn't believe it."

Records and interviews indicate that mothers and fathers, most from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, went to jail on charges of misdemeanor illegal entry or felony re-entry. Their children were reclassified as "unaccompanied" and sent into a network of shelters scattered across the country run by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the care of unaccompanied migrant children apprehended by the government.

Even those families who crossed the border hoping for asylum were caught up in the El Paso experiment. A mother named Jocelyn, whom Rivas represents, was apprehended crossing with her son last August near El Paso. Although Jocelyn said she sought asylum, she was prosecuted for illegal entry, court documents show. Her son was taken from her and sent to a shelter in Chicago. She told NBC News that nearly two months passed before she had any news of him, and she waited nine months before they were reunited.

"It's something that it's difficult to forget," Jocelyn said. "It will be with us for a very long time. We looked for protection and then this horrible thing happened."

Jocelyn and another migrant mother detained in San Diego became plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed by the ACLU against the federal government. This week, U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw granted a preliminary injunction sought by the ACLU in the suit, mandating that all children affected by the "zero tolerance" policy be reunited with their parents within 30 days. He also ordered that within 10 days, parents be allowed a phone call with their children.

Prior administrations had avoided prosecuting parents who arrived with children, in particular mothers, because bringing criminal charges meant they would be jailed and their children sent to a shelter. But months before the pilot program launched in El Paso, Trump administration officials had indicated that breaking up parents and children could be an effective way to reduce the escalating numbers of families arriving at the border from the impoverished and violent countries in Central America's Northern Triangle.

The idea of separating migrant children from their mothers was discussed during the earliest days of the administration as a way to deter asylum-seekers, according to notes from an asylum officers' meeting.

At a town hall for Citizenship and Immigration Services asylum officers on Feb. 2, 2017, the agency's asylum chief, John Lafferty, told officers they might have to "hold mothers longer" and "hold children in HHR/ORR," an acronym for childrens' facilities run by HHS.

The next month, then-Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly told CNN he was considering separating families caught crossing the border "to deter more movement along this terribly dangerous network."

In a hearing before the Senate's Homeland Security Committee on April 5, 2017, Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, D.-N.D., asked Kelly if the agency planned to take children from mothers they apprehended crossing the border.

"Only if the situation at that point in time requires it," said Kelly. "Not routinely."

"If you thought the child was endangered, that's the only circumstance to which you would separate," Heitkamp said.

"Can't imagine doing it otherwise," Kelly replied.

But in July, as Kelly left his post at DHS to become President Donald Trump's chief of staff, the department launched its experiment in El Paso.

There was no official announcement. But late last summer, attorneys and advocates in this border city heard increasing numbers of migrants talk of their children being taken away — and having no idea where they were.

"It was just like a switch, you saw it happen overnight," said Jessie Miles, an immigration lawyer in El Paso and member of the Borderland Immigration Council, a coalition of immigration attorneys and advocates.

Attorneys with the Federal Public Defender's office in El Paso, which normally handles felonies, began to step in on misdemeanor illegal entry cases. Even on this part of the border, where immigration prosecutions have long been common, attorneys were stunned by how many shackled migrants began to shuffle into district court.

Typically, said Sandra Lewis, an El Paso federal public defender, the first question she'd get from her clients was about their own fate. Last fall, that changed.

"There was a shift from, 'What is going to happen to me,' to 'Where is my child?'" said Lewis.

Distress also grew among groups that care for unaccompanied children. Before last spring, staff at Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services, a nonprofit that runs foster care programs for unaccompanied migrant children in federal custody, had seen the occasional separation, often when parents could not prove that the child they traveled with was their own.

In May 2017, we started seeing cases of children who had been intentionally separated from people who were clearly their parents," said Danielle Bernard, director of communications at LIRS.

The numbers at LIRS started small, Bernard said. One case in May, another in June. In July, it spiked to seven. In August, it was 10, then 12 in November. In December, LIRS joined several other rights organizations to file a complaint with the DHS inspector general noting the "alarming" number of migrant families forcibly separated after crossing the border.

Back in El Paso, some began to wonder if the separations were a fluke, or a new policy.

On Oct. 24, advocates, attorneys and faith leaders in El Paso sat down with government officials for a meeting about immigration. More than two dozen people gathered around a large table at a meeting coordinated by local Rep. Beto O'Rourke's office, according to five people who were present.

Representatives from CBP, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and DHS attended. Maureen Franco, the head of the Federal Public Defender's office in El Paso, told the group her office had received a striking number of family separation cases. What, she asked the federal officials, was the current policy involving the prosecution and separation of parents arriving with children?

A Border Patrol agent fielded the question, according to Jessie Miles, who was there on behalf of the Borderland Immigration Council. "His response was, the new policy is that we can separate children as long as they are 10 or over," she recalled. "To which Maureen responded, 'What do you mean? I have a client with a four-year-old.'"

"The whole room collectively gasped," said Miles.

The following afternoon, those who'd attended the meeting got an email from Lisa Donaldson, an attorney in the Office of Assistant Chief Counsel for CBP. She wanted to clarify comments "pertaining to separation of family units" at the meeting.

"The Border Patrol does not have a blanket policy requiring the separation of family units," she wrote in the email, which was reviewed by NBC. "Any increase in separated family units is due primarily to the increase in prosecutions of immigration related crimes."

In response to questions from NBC, a spokesman for CBP reiterated that position. Prior to zero tolerance, he said, CBP had no policy of separating families for reasons other than medical need, fraud or criminal cases, which could include criminal immigration violations.

Three days after the meeting, the El Paso pilot program ended, according to a DHS official. It was deemed a success. A bar graph reviewed by NBC noted that in October 2017, the last month of the program, the El Paso sector saw a 64 percent drop in apprehensions compared to the prior October.

The El Paso experiment would be used by ICE, CBP and Customs and Immigration Services to encourage DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen to launch a zero-tolerance program across the entire Southwest border, according to an April memo obtained by the Washington Post. According to the Post, the memo attributed the 64 percent drop in apprehensions "to the prosecution of adults . . . for illegal entry," adding, "Of note, the numbers began rising again after the initiative was paused."

But at least one federal judge was troubled by consequences of the pilot program that he had seen in his courtroom.

On Nov. 1, six months before Attorney General Sessions officially implemented "zero tolerance," Magistrate Judge Miguel A. Torres expressed frustration from the bench in El Paso about the number of defendants who had been separated from their children and had no word of where they were.

In a hearing involving five such defendants, Judge Torres questioned the lack of information provided to parents.

"I've been troubled that by the time of their pleas they don't have this information," said Torres in audio obtained by NBC News. "It is an anxiety that looms large."

On June 8, more than six months later, another parent appeared before Torres.

The Guatemalan man had been separated from his 10-year-old daughter and charged with re-entering the U.S. illegally after being deported. Lewis, his federal public defender, was asking the judge to grant bail. She said the government had given her client no information about where his daughter was — not even the 1-800 number now given to parents searching for their children.

By that time, some 2,300 children had been separated from their parents since the implementation of zero tolerance in May. Torres was incredulous that parents continued to be locked in jail without any word of where their kids were.

"I cannot believe that the process isn't even explained," Judge Torres said. "[Y]ou don't get any kind of notification or any kind of explanation about what your process is. I don't understand that."

A week later, Judge Sabraw issued the injunction in Jocelyn's case, about ten months after she had been separated from her son in El Paso. His order echoed Torres's incredulity that the government had broken up families without any plan for putting them back together.

"The unfortunate reality is that under the present system migrant children are not accounted for with the same efficiency and accuracy as property," he wrote. "Certainly, that cannot satisfy the requirements of due process."

On June 20, Trump signed an executive order to "maintain family unity," effectively halting separations.

The government is now asking the Department of Defense to find space for 12,000 beds to detain families together along the border.

In that regard, El Paso may again be a pilot program — one of the bases being considered is Fort Bliss.

To advocates here, it was not an acceptable compromise.

"Family detention is not the solution," said Taylor Levy, the legal coordinator at Annunciation House, which houses and assists migrants in El Paso. "ChIldren do not belong in detention. Babies do not belong in detention."

 

[CTRLZero]

3 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

This MAGAT screaming at a child makes me sick:

I see she's been identified and Twitter is doing its thing, but what is wrong with these people?  Damn.

[AmazonGrace]

 

[Lillybee]

Some shelters are charging the children 85 cents a minute to talk to their parent on the phone. Can they collect? I don't think that the kids have any money.

[AmazonGrace]

 

 

[candygirl200413]

Trump Administration in Chaotic Scramble to Reunify Migrant Families

They never had a plan. They created this mess for evil reasons and could give no fucks. 

Quote

Faced with a court-imposed deadline to reunite families separated at the southwest border, federal authorities are calling in volunteers to sort through records and resorting to DNA tests to match children with parents. And they acknowledged for the first time Thursday that of the nearly 3,000 children who are still in federal custody, about 100 are under the age of 5.

The family separations, part of an aggressive effort by the Trump administration to deter illegal immigration, have produced a chaotic scramble as officials now face political and judicial pressure to reunite families.

Records linking children to their parents have disappeared, and in some cases have been destroyed, according to two officials of the Department of Homeland Security, leaving the authorities struggling to identify connections between family members.

The effort is complicated by the fact that two federal agencies are involved in detaining and sheltering migrants, and they did not initially share records with each other. On Friday, the leadership of the Department of Health and Human Services, which shelters the children and must now undertake reunifications, sent out a plea to federal public health workers for help with an exhaustive manual search of records.

The agency said it needed to read through original documents of all children in federal custody “to screen whether children in our facilities were separated from parents.” That involved scrubbing the documents of an estimated 12,000 children to determine which had been separated from their parents by the authorities, as opposed to arriving in the country without a parent or other relative.

“HHS is requesting volunteers over the weekend to review case records,” said one of the emails. “Everyone here is now participating in this process, including the Secretary who personally stayed until past midnight to assist.”

The rushed attempt to confirm identities, locations and connections makes clear what immigrant advocates said from the beginning were potential pitfalls in the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” border enforcement policy, introduced in May. The crackdown, critics said, was announced with little advance notice and, apparently, little planning for how to deal with its far-reaching impacts.

In interviews with federal employees, immigration lawyers and shelter operators, those closest to the process raised questions about the initial assertions that federal authorities could account for the locations of both parents and children after they were separated.

In fact, the Health and Human Services agency charged with overseeing the care of migrant children, the Office of Refugee Resettlement, established such procedures, which included identification bracelets, the issuance of registration numbers and careful logs to keep the records of parents and children linked.

But those precautions were undermined in some cases by the other federal agency that has initial custody of apprehended migrants in the first 72 hours after they cross the border — Customs and Border Protection. 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.

As a result, the parents and children appeared in federal computers to have no connection to one another.

“That was the big problem. We weren’t able to see that information,” said one of the officials, who is directly involved in the reunification 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.

Over the past week, the Health and Human Services Department has been forced to undertake a herculean effort, deploying hundreds of federal workers, to comply with an injunction of a federal judge in San Diego, who ordered that all families separated under the policy must be reunited by July 26. The deadline for children under the age of 5 was set for Tuesday.

“I think it’s mission impossible,” said José Xavier Orochena, a lawyer in New York representing about a dozen parents whose children were taken from them. Mr. Orochena said that he met this week with the president of a shelter in New York where some of the children are being held. Neither one of them could imagine how the vetting that is required to bring families back together could be completed by the court’s deadline.

“Unless they waive all these requirements,” Mr. Orochena said.

Alex Azar, the secretary of Health and Human Services, said on Thursday that the agency was dealing with nearly 3,000 children separated from families, about 100 of them under the age of 5, but would make the reunifications happen in time.

“HHS is executing on our mission even with the constraints handed down by the courts,” he said, calling the judge’s time limits “extreme.”

He echoed President Trump, who has repeatedly placed blame for the separations outside the executive branch — pointing to policies and court decisions from earlier years that prevent migrant families from being held in detention for extended periods of time.

“Any confusion is due to a broken immigration system and court orders. It’s not here,” Mr. Azar said.

The problem that arose with the missing family identification numbers became apparent as soon as children were shipped away to shelters, agency employees said. Many were dropped off thousands of miles away from their parents and some were too young or scared to speak.

That left hundreds of federal employees, including Mr. Azar himself, to manually review the documents of each individual child over the weekend to look for any references to separation, including anything the child may have told agency employees or shelter workers.

But young children are often unreliable narrators, Mr. Azar said on Thursday, and there has been some confusion. For example, he said, some children might have told shelter workers they had traveled with a parent at some point, but they may not have actually crossed the border together. In those cases, while parent and child may indeed be in separate custody, they are not part of the group forcibly separated by immigration authorities, and thus are not subject to the court-ordered deadline for reunification.

The secretary added that steps could not be skipped in order to meet the court’s deadline, pointing to some parents who had already been weeded out of eligibility for sponsorship of children in the vetting process, which turned up histories of child cruelty and rape, he said.

The announcement Thursday that DNA testing would be used to help confirm family units drew some opposition from immigrant advocates, who said that the records could be used to track undocumented immigrants indefinitely.

Administration officials previously had said about 2,300 children had been separated from their parents. But over the weekend, the agency came up with its final accounting that showed nearly 3,000 in total.

Many questions remained unanswered Thursday about how the process of reunifications would unfold.

The rough plan is for a patchwork series of moves of both parents and children, according to the two immigration officials who described the process. Some of the parents under the plan are to be consolidated in those immigration jails that have extra room and children would be routed to meet them. Other parents, such as those of children who are under 5, have already been moved to the immigration jails nearest to the shelters where their children are being held.

But no pathway was in place as of Thursday for what will happen after the reunifications, for families released from immigration custody on bond or other conditions. Some parents and children will presumably have been moved several states away from their extended families or support networks, the officials said. They may not have the money for transportation back to their families, or even food.

But Mr. Azar insisted Thursday that his agency would meet the court’s deadline. A follow up to the email asking for volunteers to help with the reunification effort began, “Wow!”

Thanks to their efforts, “the mission will be accomplished,” it said. “And everyone should feel satisfied that we are doing our part to reunify the children with their families.”

4

 

[Ozlsn]

4 hours ago, candygirl200413 said:

Trump Administration in Chaotic Scramble to Reunify Migrant Families

They never had a plan. They created this mess for evil reasons and could give no fucks. 

 

I totally agree. And fuck this calling for volunteers - pay people overtime and roster them until this shit is sorted out.