HuffPost learned that the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law filed a report in a federal court in Los Angeles on Monday with more than 200 accounts from migrant children and their parents, detailing the horrific conditions they face in Border Patrol stations, Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities and detention centers.
Over the course of four days in June, Keylin says, U.S. Border Patrol guards would kick her body to keep her awake throughout the night. … According to a court filing, Keylin says the female guards also made girls “strip naked” in front of them before taking a shower, so they could leer at their bodies (her mother, Daise, corroborated her daughter’s account in a statement she gave to a lawyer). She adds that guards called the group of migrants “filthy” and “made fun of us.”
Keylin barely ate because she says the food was frozen, and she wasn’t given a toothbrush or toothpaste. Though she says the cells were so cold that she shivered and developed pain in her leg, the teen kept quiet. The guards said that anyone with an injury would be detained longer, and she couldn’t take that chance…
On July 27, the attorney will argue in federal court that the stations and facilities housing children are failing to meet the basic standards for hygiene, food, sleeping conditions and medical care, which are outlined in a 1997 court case called the Flores settlement.
Once migrants cross the border, they are put in short-term Border Patrol stations for a few days before being transferred to detention centers or shelters. While some kids have reported good conditions in longer-term shelters ― friendly staff, movie nights and field trips ― advocates and immigration experts have long considered Border Patrol facilities to be inhumane…
Ruth, the mother of a 7-year-old boy, says the Border Patrol station was so cold that children were crying and getting sick. While she was separated from her son, she watched other women’s children get fevers, vomit and cough, while the guards refused to provide medicine.
The Border Patrol stations also fail to meet basic hygiene standards, according to the court filing. Many of the children describe the guards giving them water that tasted like chlorine. “I only drank it twice because I didn’t trust it,” said Justin, a 13-year-old from El Salvador. “It made me feel funny in my stomach the times I drank it.“ One mother, named Yojana, said, “We had to drink water from the toilet to keep hydrated.”
Children described going more than five days without bathing and having limited access to soap, toothbrushes and toothpaste…
Since Sergio was separated from his father and taken to Casa Padre in early June, he’s become so consumed with worry he can’t sleep. The 16-year-old has only been able to speak with his dad for 20 minutes in the last 45 days, and he told a lawyer that his father is getting deported. When a guard found him crying in the bathroom one night, Sergio said the man accused him of being a “crybaby,” an insult he followed with an English phrase that another boy translated as “swear words.” “The way I have been treated makes me feel like I don’t matter,” he said, “like I am trash.”
So she was held by Customs and Border Protection for six days. And the conditions that she told me about – that she described were very similar to what you read about in these court filings. She talks about how freezing it was in the facility where they were held – her and her children – how there were bugs in the mats on the floor where they slept. She said her kids didn’t get enough food. They were given spaghetti with meat that smelled bad. She noticed that they were starting to lose weight. And her 1-year-old son was only being given formula while they were there. But he needed solid food, and he started to get sick. And so she asked an officer for solid food for the baby. And you can hear in the tape. She says that the officer responded, this isn’t a seven-star hotel. What do you want – dead kids or skinny kids?
What’s sad about this is the government isn’t taking into account what these families go through!It might’ve only been 2 months but he is physically disengaged with his dad,does not know what is happening,why it’s happening, and he’ll be stuck with those feelings/memories forever!
Shits so fucked man. That poor baby. I’m literally sick.
Pregnant Women Say They Miscarried In Immigration Detention And Didn’t Get The Care They Needed
Pregnant women in immigration detention under the Trump administration say they have been denied medical care, shackled around the stomach, and abused.
Two weeks after arriving in the US seeking asylum, E, 23, found herself in a detention cell in San Luis, Arizona, bleeding profusely and begging for help from staff at the facility. She was four months pregnant and felt like she was losing her baby. She had come to the US from El Salvador after finding out she was pregnant, in the hopes of raising her son in a safer home.
“An official arrived and they said it was not a hospital and they weren’t doctors. They wouldn’t look after me,” she told BuzzFeed News, speaking by phone from another detention center, Otay Mesa in San Diego. “I realized I was losing my son. It was his life that I was bleeding out. I was staining everything. I spent about eight days just lying down. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t do anything. I started crying and crying and crying.”
Stuck in detention and having lost her baby, E says she wouldn’t have come to the US seeking a safer life if she’d known what would happen. She asked that her full name not to be used out of fear of repercussions while in detention and for her family back home.
“My soul aches that there are many pregnant women coming who could lose their babies like I did and that they will do nothing to help them,” she said.
so anyway I met a guy when I was walking out of the metro today
“I’m Polish, I just haven’t been here for thirty years,” he said, and even under the stubble and the fucking haggard look that had me make eye contact before he walked up to me because damn bitch, you okay bro? and I know what kind of desperation puts that kind of look on your face, I pegged him at some mid-thirties, so he’d be like, what, four fucking years old when he left the country, “I’ve just been deported from Chicago, I have no family here, I have no home, I have nowhere to go. So I’m trying to get on a train to Berlin, but all I have,” and he shows me a handful of silver and yellow pennies and a crumpled banknote that is very distinctly not Polish currency, “is these and one dollar, I haven’t slept in two days, I haven’t showered in a week, I haven’t had water,” and he really fucking looks the part too and his voice breaks when he says the train from Warsaw to Berlin is so-and-so fucking expensive, BUT it’s cheaper from Poznan even counting the Warsaw-Poznan course and I’m just glad this man had the sense to beg near an ATM and to ask if I speak English before he said all that
and he was dead certain I’m not serious when I handed him enough for that train ticket and as much over as I could spare so he can remind himself he’s a human being
and I guess why I’m making this post is
@America, kindly get your SHIT TOGETHER
STAT.
Please reblog this. Please keep reblogging this. Please make Americans see this and see it again and over again. Their government is doing this to their own people, and it doesn’t result in anything being made great.
Can we start calling the random deportation of longtime US residents “flying TrumpAir”?
Last month U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services released previously unreported statistics on the numbers of active duty and veteran service members who were seeking deportation protections for a spouse or a dependent.
The data shows that rejections of veteran requests have increased under President Donald Trump, from about a 10 percent rejection rate in fiscal 2016, the last year President Barack Obama was in office, to an almost 20 percent rejection rate through the first nine months of fiscal 2018…
The protections, known as Parole in Place, allow members of the military to petition the government to drop any removal proceedings against a spouse or dependent who entered the U.S. illegally…
Parole in Place requests from both active duty and veteran service members spiked 31 percent from the last year of the Obama administration to the first year of Trump’s presidency, to 6,586 applications in 2017, as the new president directed the Department of Homeland Security to increase the number of deportations it processed.
Multiple active duty families have contacted Military Times with fears that their spouse or dependent will be deported while they are deployed, and veterans have contacted the paper worried that despite their military service, their family will be split apart.
My office recently learned the shocking revelation from @HHSGov that reunification could mean placing a separated child with ANY long-term sponsor — regardless of whether it’s their parents, other family in the US, family back in their home country or in long-term foster care.
If true, this interpretation blatantly ignores the terms of the court order. The federal government has also recently admitted that reunification is being used as a bargaining chip to induce parents to agree to voluntary deportation.
We cannot trust that these families will actually be reunified. Today I led a group of six governors in demanding @HHSGov & @DHSgov take responsibility for the dire effects of the “zero-tolerance policy” and trauma inflicted on nearly 3,000 children.
Here the link to the letter, signed by the governors of Washington, New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Oregon.
This New York Times piece includes a lot of information you can find elsewhere, but here’s what was startling to me:
“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.”
You know, no matter how bad you think it is, it’s always going to turn out to be worse. I was assuming they just weren’t keeping good enough records at the separation point; and there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that in a lot of cases they didn’t. But at least according to the Department of Homeland Security sources they talked to for this article, in a significant number of cases Health and Human Services/Office of Refugee Resettlement actually did keep records–and then Customs and Border Patrol erased them:
“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.”
Why would CBP delete information about family groups? Oh don’t worry, says the article, they weren’t doing it ON PURPOSE:
“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.”
I don’t see how tracking individuals separately PRECLUDES also hanging on to the information about how they’re related. I think there is a contingent of CBP people out there who decided that having their children irretrievably lost in the system would be part of these asylum seekers’ “punishment.” I cannot prove this; but that’s what I think. For THIS administration, we have to reverse the old saying, and assume that we cannot attribute to incompetence that which can be attributed to malice.
Yeah, well, it only makes sense to delete that information if you weren’t expecting any attempt at reunification. Not only that, but we’ve got multiple reports that families at the border were being told that to expect that their children would be adopted by American families.
To adoption reform advocates, who monitor unethical and abusive practices in child welfare, it looked like any number of adoption crises in the past, like the airlifts out of Haiti in the wake of its cataclysmic 2010 earthquake. Then, masses of unaccompanied children were suddenly labeled orphans and became the focus of a deafening campaign in the U.S. to rescue them through inter-country adoption, even as Haitian adults were being warned not to try to come themselves.
Fears of a new adoption rush in today’s border crisis weren’t groundless. There was reason to be concerned. The former head of U.S Immigration and Customs Enforcement under President Barack Obama warned that some of the children who’d recently been separated would remain separated “permanently” and potentially be adopted. Reports surfaced of mothers who were told that their children would be adopted as an incentive to “behave.” On Tuesday night, the Daily Beast reported that the threat of adoption has become weaponized, as a Guatemalan mother detained by Customs and Border Protection earlier this month was allegedly presented with the ultimatum that if she didn’t abandon her asylum appeal, she would be jailed for a year and her daughter put up for adoption. And conservative figures deeply hostile to immigrant families, like Fox News provocateur Laura Ingraham, herself an adoptive mother, toggled between mocking the detention of children as akin to “summer camp” and calling to “make adoption easier for American couples who want to adopt these kids.”
Some immigrant U.S. Army reservists and recruits who enlisted in the military with a promised path to citizenship are being abruptly discharged, the Associated Press has learned.
The AP was unable to quantify how many men and women who enlisted through the special recruitment program have been booted from the Army, but immigration attorneys say they know of more than 40 who have been discharged or whose status has become questionable, jeopardizing their futures…
Some of the service members say they were not told why they were being discharged. Others who pressed for answers said the Army informed them they’d been labeled as security risks because they have relatives abroad or because the Defense Department had not completed background checks on them…
To become citizens, the service members need an honorable service designation, which can come after even just a few days at boot camp. But the recently discharged service members have had their basic training delayed, so they can’t be naturalized.
Margaret Stock, an Alaska-based immigration attorney and a retired Army Reserve lieutenant colonel who helped create the immigrant recruitment program, said she’s been inundated over the past several days by recruits who have been abruptly discharged.
All had signed enlistment contracts and taken an Army oath, Stock said. Many were reservists who had been attending unit drills, receiving pay and undergoing training, while others had been in a “delayed entry” program, she said…
Stock said the service members she’s heard from had been told the Defense Department had not managed to put them through extensive background checks, which include CIA, FBI and National Intelligence Agency screenings and counterintelligence interviews. Therefore, by default, they do not meet the background check requirement.
Hearseeno 