Tag: immigration

7-year-old migrant girl taken into Border Patrol custody dies of dehydration, exhaustion

plaidadder:

porticos:

I’ve seen more than one person write that she was already starving and dehydrated when ICE took her into custody, but how is it that ICE took this badly sick child into their custody and immediately didn’t get her the help she needed? Immediately upon taking her into custody, she became their charge, and they should have assessed her health and got her the help she needed immediately. The fact that they didn’t, shows profound negligence. Was this negligence because they do not have adequate in-take procedures in place, is it because they have too many people incarcerated to tend to their needs, is it because they just don’t care about these vulnerable people? Whatever the case, there is no shifting the blame; when they chose to take her into custody, she immediately became their responsibility and yet it was eight hours before anyone tried to help this child. ICE is an abomination, and so are any who choose to work for it.

This. By their own account, she was in their custody for 8 hours before the seizures started. The signs of dehydration and starvation are not hard to spot. Either she was never examined by a nurse or doctor, or whoever did examine her didn’t realize she needed treatment (or didn’t care). At any rate, as porticos says, once someone is in your custody they become your responsibility–because at that point nobody else has the ability to care for them.

In my earliest posts about the family separation debacle I predicted that this administration’s “policies” would lead to the deaths of children in their custody. I hoped I would be wrong about that. But I was not, because this kind of death is an entirely forseeable result of this administration’s “immigration policy.” And that is one of many reasons why this administration’s “policies” are abhorrent, intolerable, and atrocious.

7-year-old migrant girl taken into Border Patrol custody dies of dehydration, exhaustion

DHS plans to use credit-scores to judge who may become a citizen

mostlysignssomeportents:

image

The US Department of Homeland Security has published a new proposed rule that would make people ineligible for US citizenship if their credit-scores were poor.

Notionally, the rule-change is meant to prevent immigrants from becoming
burdens on the welfare system (migrants do not make disproportionate
use of any public welfare system).

However, the credit reporting bureaus are notoriously inaccurate and
arbitrary in the credit-scores they assign; if you have a lot of assets
but do not borrow money, you will have a much lower credit-rating than
if you unwisely enroll in a number of high cost/high fee store cards and
pay them off after running up debts on them and paying significant
interest (I am allergic to debt, and with the exception of my mortgage
have no debts at all; because of this I have a fairly low credit-score,
despite the fact that both my wife and I earn very good livings).

What’s more, the credit-reporting sector is riddled with security holes; notoriously, Equifax doxxed the entire adult population of America
by breaching more than 150 million residents’ financial data.
Integrating credit scores into the immigration process will grant the
bureaux a permanent government contract and funnel tax-dollars to them
forever, despite their routine errors, racial bias, and spurious
guilt-by-statistical-association.

Finally, the DHS’s change is an appeal to selfishness and cruelty: if
America is unwilling to accept migrants who are indigent or who need
assistance, what does it say about us as a nation?

It’s a Made-in-America version of China’s notorious Citizen Scores.

https://boingboing.net/2018/11/25/equifax-america.html

Judge tells US officials, ACLU to come up with asylum plan

A federal judge on Friday called on the U.S. government and the American Civil Liberties Union to come up with a plan to address the rights of parents and children separated at the U.S.-Mexico border to seek asylum.

The request was made during a hearing a day after U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw extended a freeze on deportations of recently reunified families, giving a reprieve to hundreds of children and their parents who want to remain in the United States…

Lee Gelernt, an ACLU attorney representing separated families, said some deported parents should be allowed to return to accompany their children through the asylum process. He told the judge others should be let back in because they were misled into believing that if they agreed to be deported, they would be reunited with their children…

He [the judge] said claims of people persecuted in their homelands should at least be heard as they seek asylum… 

“The court is upholding the rights provided to all persons under the United States Constitution, rights that are particularly important to minor children seeking refuge through asylum,” Sabraw wrote.

Judge tells US officials, ACLU to come up with asylum plan

Migrant Kids Choose Between Possible Death And Never Seeing Parents Again

In a shelter on Long Island, Nico has been forced to make a decision much too traumatic for any 14-year-old: return to Guatemala and risk death, or stay in the U.S. to pursue relief and potentially never see his parents again.

After crossing the border a few months ago he was separated from his father, who was then deported in mid-July. Nico, whose name has been changed because he is underage, is now left to make an impossible choice without any parental guidance.

When Alexander Holtzman, an attorney at the Safe Passage Project, talks to his client about his future, the 14-year-old looks at the ground while tears well in his eyes. After discovering his father had been deported, Nico drew stick figures of his parents and himself standing under rain clouds on opposite sides of the page, Holtzman said.

“I think the decision was hard for him to make,” said Holtzman. “He’s a 14-year-old kid trying to make a very adult decision about what his future will be … and trying to navigate a complex legal system that doesn’t have his or his father’s best interest at heart.”

Like Nico, most of the 559 children who are still separated from their parents ― the majority of whom have been deported ―will also be forced into this decision. They will need to choose between seeking safety in the U.S. or reuniting with their mother and fathers back home in potentially life-threatening situations.

Though many parents say Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers coerced them into signing deportation forms, the government has no plans to allow them back into America to seek due process. Lawyers and advocates are now scrambling to locate deported parents in Central America to ask if they want their children to stay in the U.S. or return home.

But because of inadequate government contact information, these parents have been extremely difficult to find. And so many children who expected to seek relief alongside their families will have to make a colossal decision about their future by themselves.

…While older kids might recognize the danger of returning home, younger ones often don’t fully understand or know the horrific details of why they fled. Lawyers say small children are so traumatized from the being forcibly separated from their mothers and fathers that all they can do is cry and ask to see their families again. “Maybe a teenager can tell you what happened [back home] and form an asylum claim,” said Amalie Silverstein, an immigration attorney at Catholic Charities. “[But] kids this small cannot.”

.

Migrant Kids Choose Between Possible Death And Never Seeing Parents Again

The Trump Administration’s Census Cover Up

Last month, we challenged the Trump administration’s decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census — essentially a door-to-door federal inquiry of the citizenship status of every member of every household in the country.

…  The Official Story

Here’s the official story, according to the Trump administration, of how a citizenship question came to be added to the census, in three parts.

First, on December 12, 2017, Arthur Gary, a Trump appointee in the Department of Justice, wrote a letter to the acting head of the Census Bureau, Ron Jarmin, requesting that a question on citizenship be included in the 2020 Decennial Census. The ostensible reason was that such information “is critical to the Department’s enforcement of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and its important protections against racial discrimination in voting.”

The Census Bureau is part of the Department of Commerce, which leads to the second step in the story. On March 22, 2018, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross testified before Congress under oath that this December 2017 request was the beginning of the process for considering the inclusion of a question on citizenship in the Decennial Census, stating that “[t]he Department of Justice, as you know, initiated the request.”

…The Real Story

[after several emails back and forth with Wilbur Ross about follow through on placing a citizenship question on the 2020 Census form starting 9 months prior to the DOJ letter, in March 2017]  … On May 2, 2017, Secretary Ross wrote an email to an aide stating that he was “mystified why nothing have [sic] been done in response to my months old request that we include the citizenship question.”

The aide responded with an email that amounts to a smoking gun. He reassured Ross that they “will get that in place” and explained the plan: They would plant a request with the Justice Department: “We need to work with Justice to get them to request that citizenship be added…”

Two months later, Secretary Ross received an email, solving the mystery of whom Steve Bannon sent to talk to Ross about the census. It was none other than the Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who has long pushed an anti-immigrant agenda.

On July 14, 2017, Kobach sent an email to Ross “following up on our telephone discussion from a few months ago… we talked about the fact the US census does not currently ask respondents about their citizenship.”

By August 8, Ross was growing impatient and indicated in an email to an aide that he was prepared to call Attorney General Jeff Sessions directly…

The following day, the aide assured Ross that a memo on the citizenship question was coming his way:

A month later, the pressure appeared to have paid off. On September 18, a Justice Department aide wrote to Commerce official Wendy Teramoto stating that “we can do whatever you all need us to do…. The AG is eager to assist.” Ross and Sessions then met.

… All of this took place months before the Justice Department requested that the Census Bureau add a question on citizenship to the 2020 Census — which appears to be nothing more than a cover-up for the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant agenda. And Secretary Ross appears to have personally participated in that cover-up when he misled Congress by testifying on March 22, 2018, that “[t]he Department of Justice, as you know, initiated the request.”

[click the link to see the redacted emails mentioned above]

The Trump Administration’s Census Cover Up

‘Turn the Plane Around’: Government Wrongfully Deports Asylum Seekers

The ACLU and the Trump administration squared off in court on Thursday over Jeff Sessions’ new policy that denies asylum protections to immigrants fleeing domestic violence and gang violence. The hearing focused on whether U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan would issue an emergency order to block the deportation of our plaintiffs, many of whom are women and children fleeing extreme sexual and gang violence, while the case proceeds.

As the judge deliberated the stay, disturbing news came to light: Early Thursday morning the government had pulled two of our clients—a mother and her young daughter—out of their detention rooms and put them on a deportation flight back to El Salvador. This directly violated government promises in open court the previous day that no one in the case would be removed before 11:59 p.m. Thursday night.  

Judge Sullivan was outraged, saying “it was unacceptable” that someone who had alleged a credible fear and was “seeking justice in a U.S. court” would be “spirited away” while her attorneys were literally arguing on her behalf.

He ordered the government to “turn the plane around.” Further, the judge suggested that if the situation was not fixed, he would hold contempt proceedings for those responsible—starting with Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

Our clients on that deportation flight, Carmen* and her daughter, fled El Salvador to escape two decades of horrific sexual abuse by her husband and death threats from a violent gang. Carmen was repeatedly raped, stalked, and threatened with death by her abusive husband, even when they were living apart. In June 2018, she and her daughter escaped, seeking asylum in the United States. Despite asylum officers finding that their accounts were truthful, they were ultimately denied them asylum protection because they did not have a “credible fear of persecution.”

This disconnect is the direct result of new policies issued by Attorney General Jeff Sessions that wrongly instruct asylum officers to deny whole categories of asylum claims, specifically gutting protections for immigrants fleeing domestic violence and gang brutality.

Sessions has now characterized these types of persecution as insufficient to invoke asylum protections, despite decades of settled domestic and international law which recognize gender-based persecution as a basis for asylum. Federal courts have also recognized asylum claims in a variety of circumstances involving gang brutality.

The ACLU and the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies filed a lawsuit on Tuesday challenging the new policies. At the conclusion of Thursday’s hearing, Judge Sullivan issued the stay, temporarily blocking the deportation of any of the plaintiffs while the case proceeds.

What happened to Carmen embodies exactly why the stay is necessary: This administration has shown time and time again that in its rush to deport as many immigrants as possible, they will flout the law and callously put the most vulnerable people’s lives in danger.

‘Turn the Plane Around’: Government Wrongfully Deports Asylum Seekers

Judge slams Trump admin for suggesting ACLU, others should find deported parents

[T]he administration argued that immigrant advocacy groups – not the government – should be responsible for tracking down the more than 500 parents it had separated from their children at the border and deported without them…

“The reality is there are still close to 500 parents that have not been located, many of these parents were removed from the country without their child, all of this is the result of the government’s separation and then inability and failure to track and reunite,” Sabraw said.

“And the reality is that for every parent who is not located, there will be a permanent orphaned child, and that is 100% the responsibility of the administration,” he added….

In a court document Thursday, the Justice Department had suggested the American Civil Liberties Union should use its “network of law firms, NGOs, volunteers and others” to find the parents, using information the administration will provide.

“Plaintiffs’ counsel [ACLU] should ascertain whether each possible class member wishes to be reunified with his or her child, or whether he or she wishes to waive reunification,” the filing continued, adding that the ACLU would be “responsible for ensuring” the parents have the opportunity to get legal advice and consult with their children, with the government helping to “facilitate” those family communications. The ACLU “would then be responsible for providing Defendants with a final, unequivocal, written confirmation of whether each possible class member wants to be reunified with his or her child,” the filing said….

The ACLU argued that shifting the responsibility from the government is unacceptable….

The administration has maintained that any parents deported without their children willingly left without them. Attorneys and immigrant advocates, however, have questioned whether the parents fully understood what they were agreeing to. The ACLU filed a lengthy collection of sworn statements from attorneys who say some parents were asked to sign documents they didn’t understand, felt coerced to sign or believed they were agreeing to something to get their children back.

Judge slams Trump admin for suggesting ACLU, others should find deported parents