This all could have been foreseen. It could have been predicted. It was all the way back in June 2018 that the United Nations declared the separation and detention of migrant children as torture.
Human rights office spokeswoman Ravini Shamdasani said Friday that “children should never be detained for reasons related to their or their parents’ migration status”.
Shamdasani urged the US to overhaul its migration policy, such as by relying on “non-custodial and community-based alternatives” under the “logic of care” rather than that of law enforcement.
Also Friday, a group of nearly a dozen independent human rights experts commissioned by the UN said the new US policy “may lead to indefinite detention of entire families in violation of international human rights standards”.
Last week, people were shocked at an AP report of 250 migrant kids being locked up for weeks without adequate food and sanitation at the Border Patrol station in Clint, Texas, near El Paso. "Somebody is going to die,” said attorney Warren Binford, who had interviewed children at the station.
Well, yeah, somebody died. As a matter of fact, a lot of people have died and are going to die before this is all over and done with.
El Salvadoran father Oscar Alberto Martinez and his 2-year-old daughter Valeria drowned in the Rio Grande while trying to cross it, after waiting months in Mexico for a chance to apply for asylum with a legal visa. Also, the body of a woman and several children including a toddler were found in the desert near the border.
MCALLEN, Tex. — The bodies of what appeared to be a migrant woman in her 20s and three children — two infants and a toddler — were found Sunday night near the edge of the Rio Grande outside the South Texas city of McAllen, the authorities said.
Migrant deaths happen with grim regularity along parts of America’s southwestern border, largely when adults and unaccompanied teenagers succumb to harsh desert conditions or a lack of water, and die of dehydration, heat stroke or hypothermia. The discovery on Sunday was unusual — it is rare for officials to discover dead migrant children on the American side of the border, and rarer still for the bodies of three children to be found together.
“Most of the time, we usually find either adults or teenagers, but this is the first time we’ve actually found infants and toddlers, and it is pretty shocking for us,” said the Hidalgo County sheriff, J.E. Guerra, who broke the news of the discovery on Twitter late Sunday night.
This shouldn’t be shocking, and this shouldn’t be surprising in the least. But I’m slightly encouraged that people are shocked, and that they are gobsmacked by reports such as the one from attorney Warren Binford, who spoke with Anderson Cooper about the conditions of children being held at the Clint, Texas, Border Patrol station without soap, toothpaste, and diapers, while there was an outbreak of lice and flu among those held in the station.
Let's also recall that the CBP officers punished the kids for losing one of the lice combs by taking away their blankets for a night.
So, on Wednesday, we received reports from children of a lice outbreak in one of the cells where there were about twenty-five children, and what they told us is that six of the children were found to have lice. And so they were given a lice shampoo, and the other children were given two combs and told to share those two combs, two lice combs, and brush their hair with the same combs, which is something you never do with a lice outbreak. And then what happened was one of the combs was lost, and Border Patrol agents got so mad that they took away the children’s blankets and mats. They weren’t allowed to sleep on the beds, and they had to sleep on the floor on Wednesday night as punishment for losing the comb.
Even people who were held by Somali pirates say that they got toothpaste and soap.
Reacting Sunday to a now-viral clip of Justice Department lawyer Sarah Fabian suggesting toothpaste and soap were not necessary for migrant children held in detention centers, journalist Michael Scott Moore responded “Somali pirates gave me toothpaste and soap.”
Moore was abducted by pirates in 2012 and held for more than two years before American and German diplomats paid nearly $2 million to secure his release.
After the initial report went out, people in the area went to the Clint, Texas, CBP station to
donate soap and toothpaste but were rejected because of “security concerns.”
U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials have been rejecting donations of soap, diapers, and other necessities to the child migrant detention centers that’ve been exposed as filthy and devoid of basic humanitarian supplies.
The Texas Tribune reported that a group of six people tried to donate soap, diapers, toys and wipes to a detention center in Clint, Texas, only for Border Patrol officials to turn them away. Attempts to donate supplies to other child migrant facilities were also rejected.
CBP moved 249 children out of the unsanitary CBP station to ORR custody. Then they moved 100 of them right back into the very same station, because they now have “space.”
The Department of Homeland Security has moved 100 migrant children back to a Border Patrol facility in Clint, Texas, where infants and toddlers have been locked up without adequate food, water, sanitation or medical care, with older children having to care for the younger ones. Around 300 kids were removed from the facility Monday following widespread outrage over the reports, but Customs and Border Protection said some of the children are being sent back, claiming that the facility is no longer overcrowded. Lawyers who recently visited the facility described a scene of chaos and sickness, with children unable to shower or change into clean clothes for weeks on end. We speak with Clara Long, senior researcher at Human Rights Watch. She was part of the monitoring team that visited Border Patrol facilities last week, including Clint.
They apparently even managed to find some soap from somewhere, and maybe even toothpaste.
This situation was so bad that Fox News’ Shepard Smith unloaded on Vice President Mike Pence for defending the squalor of the migrant camps, and comparing it to a war crime.
“Soap and toothbrushes are not optional for children in detention. They are necessary,” Smith said.
“Were these particular children prisoners of war rather than innocent children, failure to provide those necessities would be a violation of the Geneva Conventions. Yet President Trump claims his administration is doing a fantastic job under the circumstances.”
But frankly, the truth is worse than all this, because as Binford noted in the interview with Anderson Cooper, this problem of children being held in unsanitary conditions in this very same station happened two years ago, even before Trump “zero tolerance” policy was established. Children aren’t supposed to be held by CBP for more than 48 hours. They’re supposed to be handed off to ORR, the Office of Refuge Resettlement, in that time, but for some reason they were remaining in CBP custody for weeks when they don’t have the proper facilities because kids are not supposed to even be there.
The problem here is chronic and systemic. Propublica reported the Border Patrol discipline system has been broken for years and is still broken.
CBP is a relatively new creation. It was formed in the aftermath of 9/11, in 2003, when federal officials took two distinct organizations — the U.S. Customs Service and the Border Patrol — and fused them into a single agency operating beneath the umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security. (Several smaller agencies were also part of this reorganization.) It is now the nation’s largest law enforcement agency, a behemoth far larger, in both budgetary terms and personnel numbers, than either the FBI or the Drug Enforcement Administration.
Over the past 16 years, CBP employees have earned a reputation for both heroism and misconduct. Working under challenging conditions, they have disrupted dangerous smuggling rings and saved the lives of desperate migrants stranded in the scorching deserts of the American Southwest. But customs officers and Border Patrol agents have also run afoul of the law, often in extreme fashion. Every year, approximately 250 CBP employees are arrested, many on suspicion of serious felonies; dozens have been jailed in recent years on corruption charges, including weapons trafficking and collaborating with Mexican drug cartels.
During the Obama years, critics decried a series of incidents in which Border Patrol agents shot civilians, many of them Mexican nationals, often under questionable circumstances.
There was even a CBP agent who was arrested last year on suspicion of being a serial killer. No, really, I’m not kidding even a little.
A supervisory US Border Patrol agent who authorities are calling a serial killer was arrested Saturday in the deaths of four people after a would-be fifth victim narrowly escaped harm and alerted a police officer.
Juan David Ortiz, 35, confessed to killing four people between September 3 and September 15, according to a criminal complaint filed in Webb County, Texas. Ortiz was charged with four murder charges and one unlawful restraint with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, according to Webb County District Attorney Isidro R. "Chilo" Alaniz.
The bodies of four victims were found over the past two weeks, sheriff's spokesman Eduardo Chapa told CNN. Chapa said investigators are not ruling out the possibility of more victims. An affidavit originally described the victims as three women and one man but the sheriff's office later said that the victim identified as male was a transgender woman.
So it’s fair to say CBP has a lot of problems and frankly, until these discipline issues are resolved, these people shouldn’t be in charge of overseeing the custody of children, like, ever.
After returning from the Faith & Freedom Coalition Conference, Trump spoke to reporters on the White House lawn about the photo of a father and daughter who drowned while trying to cross the Rio Grande.
“If they fix the laws, we wouldn’t have that,” Trump reportedly quipped. “If we had the right laws that the democrats are not letting us have those people wouldn’t be coming up.”
“It can be a very rough river,” Trump said in explaining the immigrants’ deaths.
He then went on to blame Democrats for the drowned immigrants on the grounds that changing asylum laws would purportedly deter people fleeing violence in their home countries from trying to enter the United States.
“That father, who probably was this wonderful guy with his daughter, things like that probably wouldn’t happen [with different asylum laws],” he said.
Those so-called “loopholes” happen to be the part that says it’s COMPLETELY LEGAL to enter the U.S. from any point in order to apply for asylum, because that's a part of the U.N. refugee protocols the U.S. ratified 50 years ago.
(a) Authority to apply for asylum
This means that Trump is demanding that Congress eliminate a “loophole” that he’s been completely ignoring and violating by detaining and charging everyone who crosses the border the “wrong way” between normal points of entry as “criminals" who need to be held, or else they’ll disappear like lint into the hinterlands. Both he and Mike Pence falsely claim that “90 percent” of asylum seekers don’t appear for their court dates, but it just so happens that Human Rights Watch documents that it’s actually the opposite: 85 to 99% of those with representation do make their court dates.
Recent data shows that asylum seekers continue to appear for immigration court proceedings at high rates. In fiscal year 2018, Department of Justice (DOJ) figures show that 89 percent of all asylum applicants attended their final court hearing to receive a decision on their application. When families and unaccompanied children have access to legal representation, the rate of compliance with immigration court obligations is nearly 98 percent.
Despite statistics showing that asylum seekers appear in immigration court at high rates, President Trump Administration has repeatedly falsely claimed that only 3 percent of asylum seekers and 2 percent of immigrants attend immigration court. Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen stated that asylum seekers “more than not” fail to appear in immigration court.
The Trump Administration erroneously claims asylum seekers skip court hearings in an attempt to further their deceptive narrative of the asylum system as a “loophole” exploited by individuals with meritless claims to enter the United States and “disappear into the economy.” Indeed, the administration’s so-called Migration Protection Protocols plan, also known as ‘Remain in Mexico,’ is premised upon the idea that asylum seekers do not show up to court. These false claims ignore the political repression and violence that forces people to flee their countries amidst the world’s worst refugee crisis.
So 90 percent of migrants and asylum seekers actually do appear for their court dates and do complete the process ,and it’s legal to enter the country from any point in order to seek asylum. In the case of Oscar Martinez and his family, who were kept from applying for asylum at a standard point of entry by Trump’s “metering” protocol for months, there should have been no good reason why he should have felt forced to take the risk of trying to cross the Rio Grande river. And if he had succeeded in crossing, he shouldn’t have had to worry about being jailed and having his daughter placed in the Clint, Texas, CPB station.
Julian Castro, the former HUD secretary, said he would eliminate Trump-era immigration policies including “metering,” which he blamed for the drowning deaths of the Salvadoran father and 23-month-old girl in the photo that circulated widely Wednesday.
Metering is practice of limiting the number of people allowed to approach U.S. border crossings to apply for asylum. CBP officials implemented the practice widely when the number of asylum seekers surged last year, insisting that CBP officers are too busy with their standard tasks — inspecting cars, cargo and passports — to process thousands of asylum claims each day.
With tens of thousands of migrants waiting on the Mexican side to cross, delays now span months in several border cities. But U.S. officials say it is unrealistic to expect CBP officers to provide on-demand asylum processing to everyone who arrives.
Trump’s acting head of USCIS, Ken Cuccinelli, has said that Oscar Martinez and his daughter died simply because they “didn’t want to wait.”
In an interview with Acting USCIS Director Ken Cuccinelli, an immigration hardliner, CNN’s Erin Burnett asked if he was worried that the image of Ramírez’s and his daughter’s bodies would come to represent the administration’s border policies.
“No, in fact just the opposite,” Cuccinelli replied. “The reason we have tragedies like that on the border is because those folks— That father didn’t want to wait to go through the asylum process in the legal fashion and decided to cross the river and not only died but his daughter died tragically as well.”
“Until we fix the attractions in our asylum system, people like that father and that child are going to continue to come through a dangerous trip,” he added.
Despite Cucinelli’s claims the DHS Inspector General’s office has said specifically that the “metering’ process implemented by CBP — which is what caused the two month delay for Oscar Martinez — is specifically causing more people to cross “illegally.”
Under the "zero tolerance" policy, the administration encouraged migrants to present themselves at official ports of entry to seek asylum in the U.S. But at the same time, the OIG report found that U.S. Customs and Border Protection was limiting the number of asylum-seekers it would admit through those ports under a practice known as metering.
"CBP managed the flow of people who could enter at those ports of entry through metering, which may have led to additional illegal border crossings," the report concluded.
And also that at other detention centers conditions are sub par, and treatment is unnecessarily punitive.
The Adelanto detention facility, owned and operated by the GEO Group, Inc., houses nearly 2,000 immigrant detainees. During a May inspection, the OIG found nooses made out of sheets in detainee cells, overly restrictive segregation practices and inadequate medical care for detainees.
The report, separate from the one on family separation, highlighted the suicide of a detainee in March of 2017 after he was found hanging by bedsheets. In all, the report found at least seven attempted suicides at the facility. "ICE's lack of response to address this matter at the Adelanto Center shows a disregard for detainee health and safety," the report concluded.
The inspectors also found that the Adelanto Center was improperly disciplining detainees by segregating them from the rest of the population without finding them guilty of a rule or regulation violation. Detainees did not have timely access to medical or dental care, according to the report.
With regard to dental care, the inspectors found that no detainees had received fillings for cavities identified by dentists in the last 4 years. "One detainee we interviewed reported having multiple teeth fall out while waiting more than 2 years for cavities to be filled," wrote the inspectors.
None of this should have happened. But it did, and it will again.
The bottom line, which I first mentioned last week, is that people like Oscar Martinez and his daughter have been losing their lives in this process for decades.
The number of migrants who died near the US-Mexico border rose in 2017 even as the number of attempted border crossings fell dramatically, according to the United Nations’ migration agency.
Last year, 412 migrant deaths were recorded on either side of the border, up from 398 a year earlier, the International Organization for Migration said, adding that 16 migrant deaths had already been recorded in the area so far in 2018.
“The increase in deaths is especially concerning, as the available data indicate that far fewer migrants entered the US via its border with Mexico in the last year,” Frank Laczko, head of IOM’s Global Migration Data Analysis Centre, said in a statement.
Back-of-the-napkin math shows that’s been about 9,000 deaths in the desert since 1995, when the border barriers first started being built, consequently forcing migrants to travel further and further into the desert to circumvent them. Adding more walls, as Trump intends, on top of blocking asylum seekers at the border so that they cross “illegally” and are taken into detention, while at the same time cancelling the USCIS programs that had been bringing down crime in the Northern Triangle while also threatening to veto the House version of the border bill that just passed because it restores funding for those programs, will only make that situation worse and cause more and more deaths in the desert and in the Rio Grande.
Nobody is dying because of the asylum laws: Migrants are dying because of Trump’s metering policy and the continued extension of the walls. We could and should handle the asylum process in a sane rational way and provide enough resources for intake and judges to handle things ... but we don’t.
Trump doesn’t want that. Trump doesn’t want anyone coming into the country, and he doesn't want people who are already here to be able to stay.
“We’re full,” he says.
He's given up on the false claim that “immigrant bring crime” because they don’t. He’s given up on the false claim that ISIS is crossing at the Southern Border because they aren’t, or that all of these people applying for asylum as family units are secretly drug smugglers and human traffickers who can only be stopped by "the wall” because that’s bullshit. We’re just “full” now.
We’re so full he’s been trying to throw out hundreds of thousands of Haitians and other migrants who were granted Temporary Protective Status because of their earthquake, most of whom have been here for more than 15 years and now have American-born children.
In 2015, shortly after starting that job, Elarabi—who hails from the city of Wad Medani in southeast Sudan—decided to follow through on a long-standing dream of running a restaurant, so she took out loans and opened a chicken-wing joint in her hometown of Brighton, Massachusetts. When the New England Patriots were playing, she’d put the game on TV, and customers would flock in to buy wings and watch the home team.
[...]
The public-health worker turned restaurateur lives in the United States under a federal initiative known as “temporary protected status,” or TPS, which was created as part of the Immigration Act of 1990. She is one of nearly half a million residents—people from Sudan, Haiti, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Nepal, and a handful of other countries—who arrived in the United States without documents, or who overstayed a tourist visa, at some point in the 1990s, and who were then allowed to live and work here because of catastrophically dangerous conditions in their home countries. In some instances, those conditions were linked to wars; in others, to natural disasters, economic collapse, or both.
Forcing these people to return was, the State Department and Congress agreed, too dangerous. Allowing them to work in the United States was seen as both the best humanitarian response and as a way of serving America’s own self-interest—drawing them out of the shadows, in which so many millions of undocumented people live, and into the taxable economy. It was a compromise similar to the one later put into effect by Barack Obama for a different group of immigrants with his executive order establishing the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
So the kids will stay and the parents will go, in a reverse separation plan. What exactly is the point of that other than being a racist dick?
Frankly, what should happen is that the Northern Triangle in Central America should be declared a disaster area, those from there should be granted TPS status, the U.N. Human Rights Commission and U.N. Refugee Commission should be brought into the situation, and an international effort should be put together to deal with the crumbling governmental infrastructure and growing violence and crime in the region. This idea is one that has been been pushed forward by Ana Navarro and Julian Castro, who calls it a “Marshall Plan” for Central America.
The US should launch a 21st-century Marshall plan in Central America to help stricken countries combat gangs and poverty to stem the flow of undocumented immigrants to America’s southern border, the Democratic presidential candidate Julián Castro has proposed.
Castro, a former mayor of the Texas city of San Antonio and cabinet member under Barack Obama, is calling for the US to emulate Harry Truman’s 1948 aid program that helped western Europe recover from the ravages of the second world war. In a modern echo, the US would inject resources and knowhow into the struggling societies of Central America as a humane alternative to Donald Trump’s proposed wall.
Obviously, nothing like this is going to happen with Trump in the White House.
Instead, we’re going to have more of his ridiculous political gamesmanship such as putting a two-week hold on his planned ICE raids against 2,000 non-criminal families because Nancy Pelosi asked him to by telling him he was “scaring the children of America.” [His hair does that.] Of course, he has since threatened to put the raids back on unless Congress “closes the loopholes in the asylum laws,” even though some GOPers are upset that Trump’s ICE raids against non-criminals and families might be covered by the media. [It turns out that Storm Troopers are allergic to cameras: Who knew?]
Meanwhile, hundreds of Wayfair employees walked out in protest of their company selling furniture to CBP for use in the child detention centers. Acting CBP commissioner John Sanders has abruptly resigned in the wake of the Clint, Texas, station revelations. Sanders had been “acting” in place of Kevin McAleenan, since he’s been “acting” DHS secretary following the departure of Kirsten Nielsen.
What a mess.
And then Trump said he’s never met or talked to former acting CBP head John Sanders. [Facepalm! Could you like, try doing ... your job?]
Oh, and speaking of Trump’s grand plan to have Mexico solve the problem for him: Mexico’s President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has said the 15,000 troops his government deployed to the U.S. border do not have orders to stop migrants from crossing, which is consistent with their non-agreement agreement. [So what exactly is the point here?]
Guess what else? The Washington Post reported that federal asylum officers working for USCIS are suing Trump, arguing his policy of holding refugees in Mexico is putting lives at risk. They told the court this is “fundamentally contrary to the moral fabric of our Nation and our international and domestic legal obligations.”
On Wednesday, the Washington Post reported that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services asylum officers are filing suit against the Trump administration, alleging that the president’s policy requiring asylum seekers be held in Mexico awaiting their hearing is a risk to their lives.
The officers told a federal court that the policy, which was implemented ostensibly to relieve overcrowding at U.S. detention facilities, is “fundamentally contrary to the moral fabric of our Nation and our international and domestic legal obligations.”
“Contrary to the moral fabric of our nation,” you say? Yeah—you bet it is.
Trump’s own people are now suing him for human rights violations. Ain’t that something? Could you imagine if members of the CIA had sued Bush for making them implement torture and human rights violations?
Lives are on the line here—literally. And the members of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service itself are the ones standing up for the moral fabric of our nation by filing suit against Trump.
Sometimes, there are no more words.