Tag: Internments

  • He’ll be doing something

    Trump now says, no doubt sullenly, that he’ll sign “something” to end family separations at the border.

    He’ll do the least he can get away with, and meanwhile we’ll be accepting all the lesser evils because he made this one concession. If he does in fact make it.

    Trump, whose administration weeks ago began separating hundreds of children from their parents at the border, did not describe the specifics of the order.

    “I’ll be doing something that’s somewhat pre-emptive but ultimately will be matched by legislation I’m sure,” Trump told reporters at the White House.

    And the ogre strolled away, picking bits of human flesh out of his teeth.

  • He enjoys it

    Here’s a striking detail from a piece by Gabriel Sherman on rifts in Team Trump over the whole kidnapping babies thing:

    Trump’s decision to double down on the family-separation policy is sowing chaos in the West Wing, two sources close to the White House told me. For the second day in a row, Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders—already eyeing an exit, though not for months—did not hold an on-camera briefing with reporters. “She’s tired of taking on water for something she doesn’t believe in,” a friend of Sanders told me. “She continues to have a frustration that the policies are all over the map,” another person close to her said. “It’s not a good look for Sarah.” According to sources, if Sanders were to leave earlier than expected, Trump is high on former Fox & Friends anchor Heather Nauert, who’s currently the State Department spokesperson, to be his next press secretary. “Trump loves her,” one former administration official said. (The White House did not respond to a request for comment.)

    Meanwhile, as the border crisis spirals, the absence of a coordinated policy process has allowed the most extreme administration voices to fill the vacuum. White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller has all but become the face of the issue, a development that even supporters of Trump’s “zero-tolerance” position say is damaging the White House. “Stephen actually enjoys seeing those pictures at the border,” an outside White House adviser said. “He’s a twisted guy, the way he was raised and picked on. There’s always been a way he’s gone about this. He’s Waffen-SS.”

    He enjoys seeing the pictures.

  • Just sign on the line

    All they have to do is rescind the order. It’s on them.

  • Tender age shelters

    It’s ok, the Administration is taking care of it.

    Trump administration officials have been sending babies and other young children forcibly separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border to at least three “tender age” shelters in South Texas, The Associated Press has learned.

    Lawyers and medical providers who have visited the Rio Grande Valley shelters described play rooms of crying preschool-age children in crisis. The government also plans to open a fourth shelter to house hundreds of young migrant children in Houston, where city leaders denounced the move Tuesday.

    Why aren’t city leaders thanking Trump for the new jobs?

    Decades after the nation’s child welfare system ended the use of orphanages over concerns about the lasting trauma to children, the administration is starting up new institutions to hold Central American toddlers that the government separated from their parents.

    It seems odd that people haven’t always known that, but they haven’t. It took research to find it out.

    On a practical level, the zero tolerance policy has overwhelmed the federal agency charged with caring for the new influx of children who tend to be much younger than teens who typically have been traveling to the U.S. alone. Indeed some recent detainees are infants, taken from their mothers.

    Doctors and lawyers who have visited the shelters said the facilities were fine, clean and safe, but the kids — who have no idea where their parents are — were hysterical, crying and acting out.

    “The shelters aren’t the problem, it’s taking kids from their parents that’s the problem,” said South Texas pediatrician Marsha Griffin, who has visited many.

    Remember Harry Harlow’s studies? On infant Rhesus macaques removed from their mothers? Given the choice of a wire “mother” with milk and a fuzzy “mother” with no milk they would choose the fuzzy one every time? “Clean and safe” is necessary but so very not sufficient.

  • Bad to worse

    Jesus. My Twitter feed is filled to the rafters with grim news about the state-orphaned children including infants. That’s the algorithm because I was paying a lot of attention to it yesterday, but still, there’s so much of it. And it’s so god damn grim. The tent city being prepared on the Texas border where it’s going to be 106 F. today for instance.

    I saw the clip of Corey Lewandowski jeering yesterday but I put off posting it.

    As the country’s blood pressure continues to rise over the separation of migrant children from their parents at the border, tempers flared Tuesday night on Fox News.

    On the cable news giant’s evening newscast, former senior Democratic National Committee adviser Zac Petkanas began relating an anecdote of a “10-year-old girl with Down syndrome who was taken from her mother and put in a cage.”

    In the middle of his comments, fellow guest Corey Lewandowski cut in.

    “Womp womp,” President Trump’s former campaign manager said, making a dismissive trombone-like sound effect.

    To me it sounds more like “wa wa” aka “waah waah” which is akin to “boo hoo” rather than a trombone, but everyone’s calling it womp womp so whatever.

    “Did you just say ‘womp womp’ to a 10-year-old with Down syndrome?” Petkanas shot back.

    “How dare you,” he repeated as Lewandowski attempted to speak. “How dare you. How dare you. How absolutely dare you, sir.”

    How he dares is by being a Trumpian. This is who they are.

    Lewandowski’s appearance immediately went viral. CNN’s Brian Stelter called the words “dismissive, despicable” in his nightly newsletter, Reliable Sources.

    “There is no low to which this coward Corey Lewandowski won’t sink,” former Fox News star Megyn Kelly tweeted. “This man should not be afforded a national platform to spew his hate.”

    And yet such national platforms exist and flourish.

    https://twitter.com/waltshaub/status/1009260156574724096

  • Anthony was sent to a shelter for migrant children

    This is happening:

    They’d had a plan: Elsa Johana Ortiz Enriquez packed up what little she had in Guatemala and traveled across Mexico with her 8-year-old son, Anthony. In a group, they rafted across the Rio Grande into Texas. From there they intended to join her boyfriend, Edgar, who had found a construction job in the United States.

    Except it all went wrong. The Border Patrol was waiting as they made their way from the border on May 26, and soon mother and son were in a teeming detention center in southern Texas. The next part unfolded so swiftly that, even now, Ms. Ortiz cannot grasp it: Anthony was sent to a shelter for migrant children. And she was put on a plane back to Guatemala.

    “I am completely devastated,” Ms. Ortiz, 25, said in one of a series of video interviews last week from her family home in Guatemala. Her eyes swollen from weeping and her voice subdued, she said she had no idea when or how she would see her son again.

    The Feds are so eager to put Trump’s plan into action that they’re generating chaos in which children get lost altogether.

    Critics say that Ms. Ortiz’s saga is the latest indication that the administration’s new enforcement strategy was rolled out without adequate planning. The processing and detention of migrant families can involve three Homeland Security agencies — Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Citizenship and Immigration Services — as well as the departments of Justice and Health and Human Services. Poor coordination among them has made it hard to track children and parents once their paths diverge in the labyrinthine system.

    Whoops! Sorry! You know how these things go – like when you can’t find your glasses so you sign away all your rights. Sorry but we can’t fix it now; bye bye!

  • How our government is treating children at the border

  • Moths to the flame

    Trump’s lies get crazier by the day.

    President Trump remained resistant on Monday in the face of growing public outcry over his administration’s policy of separating children from their parents at the border, repeating the false assertion that Democrats were the ones to blame for it, and suggesting that criminals — not parents — were toting juveniles to the United States.

    “They could be murderers and thieves and so much else,” Mr. Trump said of the people crossing the border, as he delivered somewhat incongruous remarks during a meeting of the National Space Council on Monday. “We want a safe country, and it starts with the borders, and that’s the way it is.”

    “Somewhat incongruous”…aka batshit insane arbitrary off the wall off topic.

    Not to mention the irony of a snakepit of crime like Trump pretending to think immigrants are mostly murderers. We do want a safe country: a country safe from the venom and hatred fomented by this pestilent angry baby.

    In a series of tweets and speeches on Monday, Mr. Trump instead relied on fear to curry support for a “zero tolerance” policy that refers for criminal prosecution all immigrants apprehended crossing the border without authorization. The president used the threat of gang violence and other crime, and a change in the fabric of American culture as a means to stoke support among supporters and push Congress into figuring out a way to drum up funding for his long-promised border wall.

    “Children are being used by some of the worst criminals on earth as a means to enter our country,” he wrote. “Has anyone been looking at the Crime taking place south of the border. It is historic, with some countries the most dangerous places in the world. Not going to happen in the U.S.”

    Not joined-up thinking but just a series of furious barks. Crimnalz! CCCrime! South! Most dangerous!

    Across the country, senior administration members echoed his message, equating a rise in border crossings with a rise in crime and suggesting that the people who were separated at the border were not families at all.

    In a speech at a law enforcement conference in New Orleans on Monday, Kirstjen Nielsen, the secretary of homeland security, piggybacked on the president’s claim, and said that between October and February, there was a 315 percent increase in the number of undocumented immigrants “fraudulently” using “unaccompanied alien children” to pose as a family unit in order to enter the United States.

    They always say something like that. That’s the prelude to “ethnic cleansing” and genocide. There are always accusations and generalizations of that kind. It’s an excuse for herding, selecting, segregating, isolating, detaining, interning, and if nothing interrupts, killing. That’s the ticking bomb Kirstjen Nielsen is batting around.

    The large percentage that Ms. Nielsen cited refers to a sliver of overall data: During that time frame, there were 191 cases of fraudulent family claims reported, up from 46 cases for all of 2017, when more than 303,000 crossing attempts were recorded. Still, Ms. Nielsen, who on Sunday said that the administration did not actually have a policy of separating families, held firm.

    “We do not have the luxury of pretending that all individuals coming to this country as a family unit are in fact a family,” Ms. Nielsen said. “This administration has a simple message: If you cross the border illegally, we will prosecute you.”

    It’s not a “luxury.”

    We’re well on the way to becoming an outlaw pariah state like South Africa at this rate. It’s taken him only a year and a half to get this far.

    In another tweet, Mr. Trump looked to Germany, one of America’s closest allies, to warn the public about what might happen if the policy [were] relaxed. The president falsely claimed that crime in Germany is on the rise, and railed against immigration policies in Europe

    “The people of Germany are turning against their leadership as migration is rocking the already tenuous Berlin coalition,” Mr. Trump wrote. “Crime in Germany is way up. Big mistake made all over Europe in allowing millions of people in who have so strongly and violently changed their culture!”

    …

    While Mr. Trump’s assessment of Germany’s crime problems is not accurate — crime in the country is the lowest since 1992, according to the most recent German data available — the brutal murder of a 14-year-old German girl has fueled Ms. Merkel’s opponents who are against the country’s migration policies that provide entry to some 10,000 asylum seekers each month.

    Over the weekend, Mr. Trump spoke with Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister who is known for his anti-immigration rhetoric. Both men agreed that strong borders are needed, according to the White House.

    It’s our heritage.

    Image result for xenophobia

  • One cage had 20 children inside

    What’s it like for children separated from their parents and held by the Border Patrol? Oh it’s very nice.

    Inside an old warehouse in South Texas, hundreds of children wait in a series of cages created by metal fencing. One cage had 20 children inside. Scattered about are bottles of water, bags of chips and large foil sheets intended to serve as blankets.

    One teenager told an advocate who visited that she was helping care for a young child she didn’t know because the child’s aunt was somewhere else in the facility. She said she had to show others in her cell how to change the girl’s diaper.

    They get bags of chips. And nice big pieces of foil.

    More than 1,100 people were inside the large, dark facility that’s divided into separate wings for unaccompanied children, adults on their own, and mothers and fathers with children. The cages in each wing open out into common areas to use portable restrooms. The overhead lighting in the warehouse stays on around the clock.

    That’s ok. They can just pull the foil over their heads to block out the overhead lighting.

    An advocate who spent several hours in the facility Friday said she was deeply troubled by what she found.

    Michelle Brane, director of migrant rights at the Women’s Refugee Commission, met with a 16-year-old girl who had been taking care of a young girl for three days. The teen and others in their cage thought the girl was 2 years old.

    “She had to teach other kids in the cell to change her diaper,” Brane said.

    Brane said that after an attorney started to ask questions, agents found the girl’s aunt and reunited the two. It turned out that the girl was actually 4 years old. Part of the problem was that she didn’t speak Spanish, but K’iche, a language indigenous to Guatemala.

    “She was so traumatized that she wasn’t talking,” Brane said. “She was just curled up in a little ball.”

    Brane said she also saw officials at the facility scold a group of 5-year-olds for playing around in their cage, telling them to settle down. There are no toys or books.

    But one boy nearby wasn’t playing with the rest. According to Brane, he was quiet, clutching a piece of paper that was a photocopy of his mother’s ID card.

    I can’t add anything to that.

  • Liar

    https://twitter.com/waltshaub/status/1008480784670486528

    https://twitter.com/waltshaub/status/1008489436886261761

    https://twitter.com/NormEisen/status/1008498588593385474

    https://twitter.com/Susan_Hennessey/status/1008493942197891072

    https://twitter.com/JeffSharlet/status/1008482923228663808

  • The first lady expressed empathy for affected families

    No, don’t go thinking Melania Trump is distancing herself from Don the Punk on the grabbing children from their parents question. Of course she’s not.  She’s got a nice comfortable life being Don the Punk’s most recent wife, and those children aren’t her problem.

    Melania Trump urged “both sides of the aisle” on Sunday to come together to stop federal authorities from separating children from their parents when apprehended at the border, a rare public intervention in an issue that has generated enormous criticism of her husband.

    In other words she echoed Don the Punk’s lie about the Democrats forcing him to grab children away from their parents.

    In a statement issued by her office, the first lady expressed empathy for affected families, saying the country should be governed “with a heart,” but did not directly take issue with President Trump’s policy. Instead, by saying that “both sides” needed to agree, she adopted his argument that the situation was caused by political stalemate rather than a policy he initiated.

    Except that it’s not an argument but a lie.

  • If they don’t like their treatment, they should call Mr Trump

    Some people have been able to escape Trump’s gotcha, thanks to a court order, but others have not. Dahlia Lithwick on some details:

    The two named plaintiffs in a Massachusetts lawsuit, Mazdak Pourabdollah Tootkaboni and Arghavan Louhghalam, both associate professors at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, were also allowed to leave Boston’s Logan Airport Saturday night.

    But that isn’t the case for Tareq Aqel Mohammed Aziz and Ammar Aqel Mohammed Aziz. The two young men, citizens of Yemen and lawful holders of U.S. green cards, were refused entry to the United States at Dulles Airport on Saturday, and are now trapped in what their lawyer described as “Tom Hanks limbo” at the Addis Ababa airport in Ethiopia.

    People were detained at airports across the US yesterday.

    Between 50 and 60 people were held at Washington Dulles International Airport in Virginia, detained by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents. For most of the day they were forbidden [to meet] with their attorneys.

    At about 9 p.m. Saturday night, Leonie Brinkema, a federal judge in the Eastern District of Virginia, issued a temporary restraining order that expressly provided the U.S. government must “permit lawyers access to all legal permanent residents being detained at Dulles International Airport.” Despite that order, throughout the evening it was reported that attorneys still hadn’t been let into the areas in which the detainees were being held by CBP. By about 1 a.m. Sunday, it appeared that all but one of the people they were holding had been allowed to enter the country, in part because Sen. Cory Booker went to Dulles at midnight and demanded that he be allowed to communicate with the detainees. That was around the time that Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, legal director of the Legal Aid Justice Center’s Immigrant Advocacy Program, found out that his two clients, the Aziz brothers, had been sent to Addis Ababa. They’re from Yemen.

    The Virginia case wasn’t an ACLU one.

    Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, together with Andrew Pincus and Paul Hughes of Mayer Brown LLP, filed the suit on behalf of the Aziz brothers, who are 19 and 21 years old. The two were stopped at Dulles yesterday, entering the United States from Yemen, on lawful green cards to which they are entitled by their U.S. citizen father.

    Reports abound of lawful immigrants who have been turned away, denied access to medication, and prevented from speaking to counsel. The Aziz brothers’ story is particularly stunning because, says Sandoval-Moshenberg, not only were they handcuffed while they were detained by CBP at Dulles, and not only were they turned away and sent to Ethiopia, but they were also made to sign a form, known as the I-407. In doing so, they surrendered their green cards, under the threat of being barred from the U.S. for the next five years if they did not. Sandoval-Moshenberg tells me he couldn’t quite believe the two young men “were straight-up bullied into having their green cards taken away.” They were at no point given copies of any of the documents they had signed.

    Security in Addis Ababa are holding their passports, so they can’t even go back to Yemen.

    And immigration officials have told more than one detainee that if they don’t like their treatment, they should “call Mr. Trump.”

    It’s going to be a long and bumpy road before we even begin to get clear on the scope and meaning of Trump’s executive action, and on the stories of the tens of thousands of people who did nothing more than get on an airplane. Lawyers at Dulles on Sunday tell me that CBP is simply refusing to answer any of their questions anymore. The smug cruelty of the DHS statement that “yesterday, less than one percent of the more than 325,000 international air travelers who arrive every day were inconvenienced while enhanced security measures were implemented” transcends belief as applied to actual people left in horrific limbo. For Tareq and Ammar Aziz, the fact that their lawyers scored a big win in Virginia on Saturday night doesn’t change the fact that they are in an airport in Ethiopia today, stranded without passports, and still do not have a home.

    This has nothing to do with “enhanced security.”