This past weekend Sen. Jeff Merkley attempted to visit an HHS child detention center in Brownsville TX only to be turned away and have the police called on the “guy who claimed to be a U.S. Senator” hanging around the building.
Merkley who has visited centers such as these describe them as being like “dogs held in a kennel.”
“I think it’s unacceptable that a member of Congress is not being admitted to see what’s happening to children whose families are applying for asylum,” Merkley told the cameras while he waited. “Can you imagine? You come to this strange land.… You’re seeking asylum, and the first thing that happens when you get here is you’re torn away from your parents?… America has never done this before!… The intention is to hurt the children, cause the children trauma and discourage people from seeking asylum in the United States of America.”
Eventually, the site supervisor came out—to get the local police to tell Merkley he had to leave the property. Merkley politely complied.
Not surprisingly, the White House quickly trashed the Oregon Democrat. “Senator Merkley is irresponsibly spreading blatant lies about routine immigration enforcement while smearing hard-working, dedicated law enforcement officials at ICE and CBP,” read a statement from Deputy Press Secretary Hogan Gidley. “No one is taking a public safety lecture from Sen. Merkley,” it added, “whose own policies endanger children, empower human smugglers and drug cartels, and allow violent criminal aliens to flood into American communities.” The statement went on to blame Merkley for crimes committed by an immigrant in Oregon that took place before Merkley was even elected to the Senate.
So that’s about par for the oppressive course for the Trump administration — but yet, it gets worse.
That was the third visit to a child facility that Merkley had been to that very day. This was the only one managed by HHS, but he was able to describe in a phone call with Joan Walsh what he saw in the others.
Walsh: You actually visited at least two detention sites over the weekend. Your Facebook Live broadcast from the converted Walmart in Brownsville went viral, but you also visited a child-immigrant-processing center in McAllen, Texas, where you couldn’t take photos. But it seems as though your visit there was more harrowing.
Merkley: The makeup of that processing center is shocking when you see it, but let me go to the heart of the issue. The issue is this new policy of, when families are seeking asylum, their children are torn away from them and sent who knows where. The parents are beside themselves not knowing what happened to their kids, and they never know if they’ll see them again. The kids are going through the second version of trauma. Families seeking asylum have by definition experienced trauma abroad, and perhaps trauma en route. So finally they get to the border, and they think “finally, we’re safe.” But instead they’re put into this prison-like facility, and separated, and put through this new drama.
The argument is if we deter families from seeking asylum, then they won’t take on this arduous journey, so they won’t be exposed to smugglers. They’re inflicting trauma on children, to influence parents. Who does that? What civilized society does that? What faith tradition in the world would inflict trauma on children to influence their parents?
Walsh: Can you describe to me what you saw there?
Merkley: I’ll tell you what was very difficult to see. One room had smaller cyclone fences—they look like the way you construct a dog kennel. They’re larger, but that’s the thought that comes to mind when you see them. Then they have these space blankets [light foil blankets], which is a very strange sight, to see kids using a space blanket as a cushion—but they don’t provide any cushion—or as a cover for privacy. There’re no mattresses in that section.
After they go through interviews, they go into a big warehouse. I called them cages, and the White House said that’s unfair, they aren’t cages. Well, call it a cell, then. It’s a cyclone-fence-constructed area. There were all these boys in this big enclosure, maybe three to four dozen boys, and they lined up, from smallest to largest, to get ready to go eat. The tiniest kid at the front of the line, he was knee-high to a grasshopper; he was 4, maybe 5 years old. They go up to age 16 or 17.
Massive demonstrations have been planned against this, but there needs to be more pressure. In this episode of Chris Hayes they describe one asylum seeking migrant woman from the Congo who presented herself at the boarder — legally — but was still arrested and had her child taken. She’s been released for 8 months now, but her 6 year-old daughter is still being held in Chicago.
The facility that Merkley tried to view is for long term handling of immigrant children without parents which are handled by HHS, however before the reach the detention center — or DETENTION CAMP just to be honest about it — they are process at border patrol stations which are apparently overflowing and where hundreds are being held for more than 72 hours in violation of the law.
As of Sunday, nearly 300 of the 550 children currently in custody at U.S. border stations had spent more than 72 hours there, the time limit for immigrants of any age to be held in the government's temporary facilities. Almost half of those 300 children are younger than 12, according to the document, meaning they are classified by the Department of Homeland Security as "tender age children."
The stations, run by the Border Patrol and meant only as the first stop for children detained at the border, often lack adequate bedding or separate sleeping rooms for children.
"It would be highly inappropriate and even unsafe to hold children for extended periods in these short-term border facilities because they often lack the adequate medical and nutritional resources for these young people," said Greg Chen, director of government relations for the American Immigration Lawyers Association. "It would place these children at risk of harm if they are housed with adults without the proper privacy that children should have."
So that’s against law and what’s even worse is that the person in charge of this process, and the center that Merkley attempted to visit recently lied to Congress about the process claiming that they are only arresting those who entered illegally when in reality they have actually been arresting people who are surrendering themselves at the normal boarder crossing points in accordance with proper procedure when seeking asylum legally and still took their children away from them.
Testifying before a House committee on Wednesday, Azar said “individual children are separated from their parents only when those parents cross the border illegally and are arrested.”
“We can’t have children with parents who are in incarceration, and so then they’re given to me,” Azar told Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR), who asked about the family separation policy. “If one presents at an actual border crossing and presents a case to come into this country, one is not arrested and one’s children are not separated from them.”
But it isn’t that simple.
The new zero-tolerance policy applies to everyone crossing the border without documentation — and that includes people seeking asylum. While the family separation isn’t indefinite, it is still happening. Parents are separated from their kids, who are then considered to have crossed the border as “unaccompanied minors.”
The administration hopes this blanket policy will deter people from crossing the border without documentation in the future.
But even before Sessions announced the new policy in May, there were cases of asylum-seeking families being separated at official ports of entry specifically. The American Civil Liberties Union sued the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency for separating hundreds of immigrant families, many of whom were asylum-seekers at those official ports. One such person was a Guatemalan woman, identified as Ms. M.M.A.L., who entered at the San Ysidro Port of Entry, with her son, seeking asylum. They were immediately separated
So John Kelly has lied. DHS Secretary Kirstjen Neilsen has lied. HHS Secretary Alex Azir had lied. People are being arrested at the border even when the enter legally to apply for asylum, and are then having their children yanked from them. Those children are being held at border stations for longer that the law permits, and then shuffled off to blacked-out detention centers and held in cages and kennels like dogs for months, apparently indefinitely.
And we’re talking about not just about teenagers but toddlers as young as four, and even infants.
This is a clear human rights outrage.
Also it has to be mentioned that this was a policy changed implemented by Trump after he cancelled an Obama era program meant to prevent people from showing up at the border this way. Obama program allowed them to apply for refugee status at the embassy and consulate in their own native countries.
The Trump administration on Wednesday formally terminated an Obama-era program that granted Central American minors temporary legal residence in the United States, shutting the door on 2,714 people who had won conditional approval to enter the country.
President Barack Obama’s administration established the “CAM parole” program in 2014 to respond to a massive spike in the number of unaccompanied minors and families entering the country illegally from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Under the terms, minors who failed to win refugee status could enter on a two-year, renewable parole if they had a parent already legally present in the country.
But the program’s future was put in doubt in February when the Department of Homeland Security froze it and announced an internal review as part of President Trump’s executive orders aimed at tightening immigration controls.
So there goes that option, and instead we get what we have now is not necessary to prevent and deter “crime” or for “national security" or anything. This is just cruelty for it’s own sake. “Toughness” just to be tough, and heartlessness because these people don’t have a heart.