ICE stories

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Re: ICE stories

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue May 29, 2018 12:00 pm

Betsy DeVos Says Schools Should Call ICE on Undocumented Students

Photo of Luke Darby
BY LUKE DARBY
3 days ago
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos Testifies To House Education Committee On Department's Priorities
MARK WILSON
The Secretary of Education is leaning hard into her brand of being uninformed and indifferent.

Betsy DeVos has spent her brief but disastrous tenure as secretary of education by fighting against students at every turn. Whenever she's had the opportunity, she's chosen to make education more hostile, more expensive, and now, more dangerous.
Earlier this week, DeVos appeared before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. While there, she was questioned by Adriano Espaillat, a Democratic Representative from New York and a formerly undocumented immigrant himself, about what she thought schools' roles were regarding ICE. Per The Independent:
“Inside the school,” Mr Espaillat asked, “if a principal or a teacher finds out that a certain child is undocumented, or his or her family members are undocumented, do you feel that the principal or teacher is responsible to call Immigration and Customs Enforcement and to have that family reported?”
Ms DeVos replied: “Sir, I think that’s a school decision. That’s a local community decision. And again, I refer to the fact that we have laws and we also are compassionate, and I urge this body to do its job and address or clarify where there is confusion around this.”
DeVos is right, we do have laws—laws that forbid exactly what she's directing schools to do. In 1982, the Supreme Court ruled in Plyler v. Doe that schools cannot deny children their right to a free education based on their immigration status. That's because, despite what DeVos seems to think, even undocumented immigrants have protections under the U.S. constitution. Unsurprisingly, the specter of arrest and deportation is more than enough to keep children from school. The Huffington Post points out that schools see sharp drops in attendance after local businesses are raided by ICE. In an attempt to clarify DeVos' seeming ignorance of laws protecting students without actually retracting what she said, a spokesperson for the Department of Education told HuffPo, "Her position is that schools must comply with Plyler and all other applicable and relevant law."
Condemnation came quickly. Rocío Inclán, the former director of the Center for Social Justice at the National Education Association, told NBC News, "We are shocked, incredulous and we're really upset that the leader of our public schools, the Education Department, would be so uninformed and wrong." The ACLU released a statement the same day, with director of immigration policy Lorella Praelli saying:
“Let’s be clear: Any school that reports a child to ICE would violate the Constitution. The Supreme Court has made clear that every child in America has a right to a basic education, regardless of immigration status. Secretary DeVos is once again wrong.”
That's the legal angle, but consider the moral one as well. According to DeVos, every school should decide for itself whether or not to turn over students to an unaccountable, militarized police force that's abducting people off the street. She's empowering schools to put students into an overwhelmed and massively flawed system that had already lost track of nearly 1500 children before Trump directed Customs and Border Patrol to forcibly separate children from their parents. It's a system where CBP is accused of routinely abusing child detainees—verbally, physically, and sexually.
The best case scenario is that DeVos is as uninformed about ICE as she is about basically everything in her own department. The worst case scenario is that she knows the horror she's exposing students to and just doesn't mind at all.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: ICE stories

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed May 30, 2018 9:00 am

Systemic Indifference

Dangerous & Substandard Medical Care in US Immigration Detention

May 8, 2017
Summary

On April 6, 2015, Raul Ernesto Morales-Ramos, a 44-year-old citizen of El Salvador, died at Palmdale Regional Medical Center in Palmdale, California, of organ failure, with signs of widespread cancer. He had entered immigration custody four years earlier in March 2011. He was first detained at Theo Lacy Facility, operated by the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, and then at Adelanto Detention Facility, operated by the private company Geo Group, both of which had contracts with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) to hold non-citizens for immigration purposes.

An ICE investigation into the death of Morales-Ramos found that the medical care he received at both facilities failed to meet applicable standards of care in numerous ways. Two independent medical experts, analyzing ICE’s investigation for Human Rights Watch, agreed that he likely suffered from symptoms of cancer starting in 2013, but that the symptoms essentially went unaddressed for two years, until a month before he died.


Throughout this time, Morales-Ramos repeatedly begged for care. In February 2015, he submitted a grievance in which he wrote, “To who receives this. I am letting you know that I am very sick and they don’t want to care for me. The nurse only gave me ibuprofen and that only alleviates me for a few hours. Let me know if you can help me.” At the time of ICE’s report on its investigation, the final cause of death had not yet been determined, but as detailed below, the facts revealed in the ICE investigation show that systemic indifference to his suffering and systemic failures in the healthcare system spurred his death.

***

This report examines serious lapses in health care that have led to severe suffering and at times the preventable or premature death of individuals held in immigration detention facilities in the United States. The lapses occur in both publicly and privately run facilities, and have persisted despite some efforts at reform under the Obama administration, indicating that more decisive measures are urgently needed to improve conditions. At time of writing, it was unclear how the Trump administration would address the issue, but its pledge to sharply increase the number of immigrants subject to detention and reports it is also planning to roll back protections for immigrants in detention, raise serious concerns that the problems fueling the unnecessary suffering could grow even worse.

As with our assessment of the Morales-Ramos case above, this report is based in large part on review by independent medical experts of ICE’s own investigations into deaths in custody and, in a range of other cases that did not involve deaths, independent review of detained individuals’ medical records as well as interviews with people who have been detained, family members, and those who have worked closely with them.

***

The number of people held in immigration detention in the United States has grown significantly over the past decade. It hit a record high under President Obama, over 400,000 people per year, and is likely to grow even higher under President Trump, who soon after his inauguration signed executive orders calling for increased detention, both through changes in detention policy and increased construction of or contracts for detention centers along the US-Mexico border. Trump’s enforcement priorities, which now encompass people who have no criminal convictions but have committed a “chargeable offense,” are also likely to lead to a substantial increase in the number of people detained.

Medical care in the US immigration detention system, and the poor system of oversight that allows substandard care, has long been the target of criticism by investigative journalists and human rights advocates. This is the third report Human Rights Watch has released on medical care in immigration detention since 2007, and one among many reports by civil and human rights organizations on conditions in such facilities nationwide.

Gaining access to immigration detention facilities is difficult and information on conditions there is hard to obtain. ICE took an important, if limited, step forward in June 2016 when it publicly released detailed reports of its investigations into 18 deaths in custody (death reports) that occurred in such facilities between May 2012 and June 2015. (A total of 21 people died in US immigration detention during that period.) To better assess the evidence and gain insight into health care practices and responses to serious illnesses in immigration detention facilities, Human Rights Watch and Community Initiatives for Visiting Immigrants in Confinement (CIVIC) asked independent medical experts to analyze the recently released reports. We also asked experts to review the medical records of a dozen other individuals, none of whom died in custody, recently held in 10 different facilities across the country.

As detailed here, the experts identified repeated, clear-cut instances of subpar medical care, including inadequate care that contributed to seven deaths in detention. They also found numerous examples of systemic substandard and dangerous medical practices in other cases—such as overreliance on unqualified medical staff, delays in emergency responses, and requests for care unreasonably delayed. The cases examined represent a small but not necessarily representative sample—though many of them point to much larger, systemic failures of healthcare provision and government oversight that have likely put many more thousands of other detained individuals at risk.

Manuel Cota-Domingo, detained at Eloy Detention Center, died of untreated diabetes and pneumonia after numerous delays, including a policy that placed restrictions on which staff could call 911, resulted in eight hours passing between the moment he started to have trouble breathing and his arrival at an emergency room. Tiombe Carlos died by suicide in York County Prison after being detained for two-and-a-half years. The mental health care she received was deemed “woefully inadequate” by an independent expert. Santiago Sierra-Sanchez, detained at Utah County Jail, died of a staph infection and pneumonia. A correctional health expert said of the care he received, “Medical staff essentially abandoned this patient by not properly assessing him or following up.”

Medical experts identified numerous and significant delays in the care “Jose L.” received while detained at Adelanto Detention Facility for three years, including a failure to act quickly to address vision problems that likely led to him becoming legally blind in his right eye. “Carlos H.” tore his ligament while detained at Yuba County Jail in California, but it was not properly diagnosed for three months because he kept seeing licensed vocational nurses who did not refer him to a doctor, and then ICE further delayed his scheduled surgery repeatedly without providing any clinical reason. “Luke R.,” detained at Orange County Jail in New York, had been diagnosed previously with schizophrenia. The facility not only failed to provide adequate mental health care—at one point changing a prescription for an anti-hallucinogen to Benadryl, an anti-histamine—it also disciplined Luke and put him into solitary confinement for actions that were clearly related to his mental health condition.

As noted above, these are not new problems. ICE has been receiving reports of such substandard medical care for years but has failed to take meaningful action. The Obama administration implemented several new programs meant to improve oversight, but these monitoring procedures remain inadequate, and the Trump administration has already announced plans to reverse many of these reforms, including not including the most recent detention standards for contracts with county jails. The Government Accountability Office has faulted ICE for its failure to track and analyze its oversight mechanisms and grievances from detained immigrants. ICE’s response to Human Rights Watch’s requests under the Freedom of Information Act have been uninformative and in some cases appear to indicate that the agency lacks important baseline information about the provision of healthcare services to people in its custody.

Most disturbingly, there is significant evidence that ICE does know about many of the deficiencies in its medical care system, but that it has failed to take swift and appropriate action. Its own investigations into deaths in detention have shown that it lacks the procedures necessary to take appropriate and timely corrective action. For example, Eloy Detention Center (EDC), run by the private company CoreCivic/CCA[1], has seen 15 deaths in detention since 2003, more than any other detention facility in the US. The ICE death report for Jose de Jesus Deniz-Sahagun, who died by suicide in 2015, flagged the lack of a suicide prevention plan at the facility “despite Deniz Sahagun’s suicide being the third at EDC since April 2013 and the fifth since 2005.”

Annual reports by the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at the Department of Homeland Security make clear that recommendations stemming from allegations of abusive conditions in detention facilities are regularly sent to ICE, but ICE often does not respond for years or responds in ways that are deemed completely inadequate to CRCL. In its 2015 report to Congress, CRCL states it sent ICE 49 recommendations regarding an unnamed facility in Arizona that mentions the number of suicides in recent years, making clear it is Eloy Detention Center. It took ICE two years to respond to these recommendations, concurring in 19, but CRCL stated it “[d]oes not believe that ICE responded appropriately to the other 30 recommendations.”

Over two-thirds of individuals in immigration detention are held in facilities operated by private prison companies, and these facilities in recent years have come under particular scrutiny by advocates, investigative journalists, and government bodies. The Bureau of Prisons (BOP), the federal prison system, also has private prisons run by the same companies.

In August 2016, a report by the Office of Inspector General at the Department of Justice found, “[I]n most key areas, contract prisons incurred more safety and security incidents per capita than comparable BOP institutions and that the BOP needs to improve how it monitors contract prisons in several areas.” Soon afterward, the Department of Justice announced it would phase-out the use of private prisons in its own federal prison system, “to ensure consistency in safety, security and rehabilitation services.” The US Department of Homeland Security then announced it would review its own use of private facilities.

The report of the Homeland Security Advisory Council, summarizing the results of the review, stated private detention would continue, but in the report’s release, the council voted 17-5 to support one member’s dissenting recommendation of a “measured but deliberate shift away from the private prison model.” At the same time, in October 2016, the Department of Homeland Security decided to reopen Cibola County Correctional Center, a private prison the Department of Justice had closed after a history of numerous citations for deficiencies in medical care, including deaths after inadequate medical care.

President Trump’s administration has since reversed the DOJ decision to phase-out the use of private prisons.

In researching this report, Human Rights Watch found significant problems with medical care in facilities operated by private companies, but it also found evidence of subpar care in county jails that contract to hold immigrants for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It should be noted that in many privately-operated facilities, the medical care is provided by ICE’s Immigrant Health Service Corps (“IHSC”) and not by the private company. Although private facility staff and policy can affect the provision of medical care in IHSC-staffed facilities, including in responses to emergencies, the lack of appropriate medical care in public and private facilities, as well as those staffed by IHSC, underscore that problems with medical care are systemic.

The problem of poor medical care in immigration detention cannot be separated from the enormous and unwieldy nature of the system itself. At present, the US immigration detention system holds an average of 41,000 people on any given day. It holds asylum seekers and long-term residents of the US, including those with lawful permanent resident status. It holds men, women, and children, sometimes for days, and sometimes for months or years. Most are detained without an individualized hearing as to whether their detention is truly necessary.

The United States could meet its legitimate goals of ensuring appearance at removal hearings, protecting public safety, and effectuating removal by releasing many of the people who are currently detained and supervising them through community-based programs that provide case support. Several studies have shown such programs would be considerably less costly. A smaller detention system would also be more in keeping with international human rights principles. The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has stated: “If there has to be administrative detention, the principle of proportionality requires it to be a last resort.”

The Trump administration, however, has signaled it will rapidly expand the use of detention. The challenges of adequately monitoring and holding accountable a diffuse and disparate system with numerous operators, including those with a strong incentive to reduce costs, will only be exacerbated in a system that rapidly expands.

The executive branch does not have unfettered power to expand the system: Congress must allocate the funding and thus is in a position to push back and insist on reforms, including increased use of alternatives to detention and measures to ensure effective oversight and adequate provision of health care for those who are detained.

Because ICE relies on contracts with many local governments for detention space, states also have a role to play in improving medical care and detention conditions more generally. In California, which detains more immigrants than any state except Texas, a bill is pending that could improve conditions. At the time of writing, Senate Bill 29, Dignity Not Detention, would end localities’ contracts with private companies to hold immigrants in detention; require localities that hold immigrants in detention for the federal government to adhere to the most recent Performance-Based National Detention Standards; and make these standards enforceable by the California Attorney General and local district and city attorneys. An earlier version of this bill passed the California legislature in 2016 but was vetoed by Governor Jerry Brown, who cited the then-pending review of private facilities by the US Department of Homeland Security.

Under the US Constitution and international law, anyone who is detained or incarcerated is entitled to adequate medical care. The Trump administration is obligated to ensure that all people in detention are treated humanely and with dignity, including through provision of appropriate medical care, and to provide sufficient funding to meet these obligations. Congress and state governments should work to limit the scope of detention to what is truly necessary and ensure that those who are detained are treated humanely.
https://www.hrw.org/report/2017/05/08/s ... -detention
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Re: ICE stories

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu May 31, 2018 5:24 pm

Over 10,000 migrant children are now in US government custody at 100 shelters in 14 states

A girl and other members of a caravan of migrants from Central America get ready to spend the night near the San Ysidro checkpoint in Tijuana, Mexico on April 29, 2018.
Reuters/Edgard Garrido

The number of migrant children held without their parents by the US government has surged 21% since last month to 10,773 children, the Washington Post reported.

The uptick comes after the Trump administration imposed a new "zero tolerance" policy to prosecute migrants who cross the US border illegally.

The policy means that migrant parents who cross the border with their children are forcibly separated while they await criminal prosecution.
The Trump administration's new "zero tolerance" policy toward migrants who cross the US border illegally has driven up the number of migrant children held in government custody without their parents, the Washington Post reported Tuesday.

The US Health and Human Services Department said it was holding 10,773 migrant children in custody as of Tuesday — up 21% from the 8,886 it was holding a month earlier.

The surge comes in the wake of the Trump administration's new tactic to criminally prosecute every person who crosses into the US illegally, which requires them to be separated from any children they brought with them while they're detained.

But it's unclear exactly how many of the 10,773 children being held in government custody were actually forcibly separated from their parents — a Customs and Border Protection official told lawmakers at a hearing last week that 658 children had been separated from 638 adults between May 6 and May 19 under the new zero tolerance policy.

Many of the other children may have arrived at the border unaccompanied. They're typically held in government custody briefly before being placed with "sponsors," who are usually parents or immediate relatives of the children.

The shelters the children are staying in are at 95% capacity and are expected to add thousands of bed spaces in the coming weeks, one HHS official told the Post.

To house migrant children, HHS relies on "an existing network of approximately 100 shelters in 14 states."

HHS has also reportedly weighed housing migrant children on military bases, but the HHS official told the Post that measure is being considered only as a "last option."

The Trump administration has come under fire in recent weeks for its policies toward migrant children. The family separation policy sparked an uproar, particularly after the White House chief of staff John Kelly dismissed concerns that the policy was "cruel" during a recent interview with NPR.

"The children will be taken care of — put into foster care or whatever," Kelly said. "But the big point is they elected to come illegally into the United States and this is a technique that no one hopes will be used extensively or for very long."

Anger over the issue reached a boiling point last week, when a month-old piece of news resurfaced, prompting Trump critics to assail the government for losing track of 1,475 immigrant children who arrived at the border alone.

But both the Trump administration and immigration advocates have sought to tamp down concerns about those children, many of whom may have deliberately chosen not to tell the federal government where they are.
http://www.businessinsider.com/children ... icy-2018-5
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Re: ICE stories

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Jun 01, 2018 1:24 pm

THE WAR ON IMMIGRANTS
Deconstructed
June 1 2018, 5:00 a.m.


THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION is targeting children — migrant and refugee children — to achieve its policy goal at the border, crack down on immigration, and placate its far-right base. Whereas the Obama administration kept undocumented children with their parents at emergency shelters and family facilities and “initiated a program designed to allow families more freedom while awaiting deportation hearings,” splitting children from their families is the official policy of the Trump administration. Since last October, more than 700 children have been forcibly separated from both parents at the border and more than 100 of them have been under the age of 4, according to official figures obtained by the New York Times. This is not a side effect of having a tough immigration policy; this is the goal of the policy as White House Chief of Staff John Kelly let slip on NPR last month, “The big name of the game is deterrence.” Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal, an immigrant herself, joins Mehdi Hasan to discuss the Trump administration’s immigration policies and the unprecedented danger it poses to immigrants and people of color.

Representative Pramila Japayal: I’ve seen U.S. citizens always be questioned about their patriotism and their loyalty. You know, I’ve been here since I was 16 years-old, and that is the vast majority of my life, because I’m 52 now, and I still find people questioning why I’m here.

[Musical interlude.]

Mehdi Hasan: I’m Mehdi Hasan. Welcome to Deconstructed.

This week, a topic close to my own heart: immigration. It’s always bothered me as a progressive, that center-left parties in the West, whether the Labour Party back in the U.K. or the Democrats here in the U.S. never seem do enough to make the case for immigration, and are always too quick to throw migrants — and more broadly, people of color — under the bus.

Immigration has also become a very personal issue for me since I became an immigrant myself for the first time in my life. Yeah, I’m the idiot who became a Muslim immigrant to the U.S shortly before the election of one Donald J. Trump.

And my guest today, rising Democratic star Representative Pramila Japayal, one of the few immigrants elected to Congress, agrees with me that this president poses a clear and present danger both to migrants and to people of color.

PJ: He is a racist. Maybe at one time in his life, he was willing to confront that racism within himself more. But I don’t think you could say some of the things that he says unscripted and not be racist.

MH: So this week, the war on immigrants.

President Donald J. Trump: They’re bring drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists.

DJT: And this is why we call the bloodthirsty MS-13 gang members exactly the name that I used last week. What was the name? [Crowd yells: “Animals!”] Animals.

DJT: Chain migration provides a gateway for terrorism.

DJT: We’re going to be guarding our border with the military. That’s a big step.

DJT: Extreme vetting. Extreme, oh, it’s going to be extreme.

DJT: Suspend the Syrian refugee program and keep radical Islamic terrorists the hell out of our country.

MH: So that’s Trump’s horrific rhetoric on immigration, but his policies are even worse.

According to official figures obtained by the New York Times, since last October, more than 700 kids have been forcibly separated from both parents at the border. More than 100 of them have been under the age of 4. In fact, they’re even going after children as young as a year old. There have been actual stories of toddlers, of babies, being literally ripped from the arms of their undocumented parents — in many cases, their refugee parents — and put in detention while their parents are prosecuted.

I want to call this behavior shameless, but that would imply that the people doing this — the Border Patrol agents, the ICE agents and the people who order them to do it, the members of the Trump administration — have any shame to begin with. They clearly don’t. To target families, to target children in this way, is barbaric, it’s brutal, it’s inhumane.

Chris Hayes: Immigrants arriving on the border often seeking asylum are having their children ripped away from them. Immigrants and civil rights groups are saying they have never seen anything like this.

Lee Gelernt: They put her in a makeshift hotel with the daughter for four days, and then they say to them, “We want the daughter to come in the other room for a second.” The daughter goes in the other room. The mother then hears the child screaming, “Please, please don’t take me away from my mommy.”

MH: Remember: this is not a side effect of having a tough immigration policy; this is their tough immigration policy. This is the goal. This is the objective. They may claim otherwise in their official statements, but let’s be clear: the reason they’re separating parents from their kids is to act as a cruel deterrent to others who might want to come here “illegally.”

In fact White House chief of staff John Kelly let slip on NPR last month, saying, and I quote, “the big name of the game is deterrence.” Deterrence.

So yes, this administration is using kids, targeting kids, migrant kids, refugee kids, the most vulnerable of the vulnerable, the most powerless of the powerless, to achieve their policy goal at the border, to crack down on immigration, to placate their far-right base.

And yet I’ve heard a lot of people say this past week or so: “Well, what about Obama? There’s no point just blaming Trump, Obama did similar things. A lot of these abuses began under Obama; a lot of these policies began under Obama.”

And just recently, as my colleague Jeremy Scahill reported on Intercepted earlier this week, the ACLU put out a report showing how kids who came to the U.S. from Central America between 2009 and 2014, under Obama, were put in detention by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents, where many of them were beaten, assaulted, even threatened with rape. Now, Obama should have stopped that, clearly. He should have held those agents to account, not given them a pass. But the fact is that Obama didn’t order those agents to assault those kids; Trump is ordering federal agents and Homeland Security officials to forcibly break up families. In fact, he’s getting mad at them for not breaking up more families.

So look, bad things happened on Obama’s watch and his immigration record was, yes, in many ways, horrific. I know that: I was writing about it and doing TV segments on it long before Trump was elected president. Obama was the original deporter-in-chief. According to one count, he deported more people from the U.S. than all of the presidents of the 20th century put together. He presided over awful abuses of migrant children in detention as documented by the ACLU, among others.

But what Trump is doing now is not ‘the same’ as what Obama did. It’s not even a continuation of Obama, let’s be very clear about that: facts matter. Splitting kids from both their parents, breaking up families, is a clear departure from what Obama did, from what George W. Bush, from what Bill Clinton did. The Obama administration, for example, kept undocumented kids with at least one of their parents at emergency shelters and family facilities. They also, to quote a recent NBC report, “initiated a program designed to allow families more freedom while awaiting deportation hearings.” But “the Trump administration ended [that] program last summer.”

So just keeping on invoking Obama for all his many sins on this issue and others — yes, it absolutely acts as a reminder that the entire system needs changing, that ICE needs reforming or, ideally, abolishing, but it also distracts us from the way in which what Trump is doing is so unique, so unprecedented, so unethical and disgusting. Yes, the immigration system was broken before Trump came to office. And yes, every president has been bad on this issue. But no other previous president has pushed such an openly white nationalist agenda. Ask almost any immigrant or person of colour and they will tell you that what is happening now is beyond Obama, beyond even George W. Bush. We are living in a very different, very dangerous, very dark era right now.

I mean, just as an example: Obama’s last two attorneys general — whatever you think of their individual records — were a black man, Eric Holder, and a black woman, Loretta Lynch. Trump’s attorney general is a man, Jeff Sessions, who was named after the president of the confederacy, who has used the N-word and called the NAACP “un-American”; who was deemed too racist to be a federal judge by a Republican-led Senate in the 1980s. And Trump may be mad at Sessions for not shutting down the Russia investigation but on immigration, they both sing from the same racist, authoritarian, white nationalist hymn sheet.

It’s not just Jeff Sessions either. Listen to White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, who if he’s not slamming immigrants for being quote “too lazy to get off their asses,” is insisting that their too uneducated, too rural to fit into America. Here he is being interviewed on NPR last month:

John Kelly: They’re also not people that would easily assimilate into the United States. They’re overwhelmingly rural people. In the countries they come from, fourth, fifth, sixth grade educations are kind of the norm.

MH: In that same interview, Kelly complained that those same immigrants “don’t speak English,” and said that that is “obviously a big thing.” Yeah, a big thing. And yet, John Kelly’s own great-grandfather came from rural Italy in the late 19th century and was still unable to read, write or speak English 18 years after arriving in the U.S..

Trump’s own grandfather, Friedrich Trumpf, couldn’t speak a word of English when he came here from Germany in 1885. Some might say Trump still can’t speak English himself!

So look: when it comes to immigration and immigrants, these people, Trump and his cronies, are not just heartless racists, they’re brazen hypocrites, too.

[Musical interlude.]

MH: But here’s my question today: What if there were more immigrants in Congress, making immigration policy, debating immigration reform, offering a different perspective on this issue? The U.S. population is at least 13 percent foreign-born, and yet only 4 percent of members of Congress are foreign-born, are immigrants.

One of them is my guest today, who was actually born abroad and came to this country as an immigrant, to study, as a teenager from India. She became a U.S. citizen, an immigration rights activist and, in 2016, the first Indian-American member of Congress, from the state of Washington.

Pramila Jayapal has been called “a rising star in the Democratic caucus” by Nancy Pelosi and a “leader of the … resistance” by the Nation magazine. She packs a serious progressive punch and doesn’t take crap from anyone — least of all right-wing Republican men:

Representative Don Young: I’m deeply disappointed in my good lady from Washington. She doesn’t know a damn thing about what she’s talking about … And I really am disturbed. You may not know me, young lady, but I’m deeply disturbed. I am still talking.

PJ: The gentleman has already impugned my motives by saying that I don’t know a damn thing about what I’m talking about.

DY: I didn’t say “damn.” You said it.

PJ: He’s now called me young lady. And Mr. Chairman, I ask that he take down his voice.

MH: So earlier, I went to her office on Capitol Hill to sit down with Congresswoman Jayapal to talk immigration, racism, Donald Trump and even the future of the man she backed for president in 2016: Bernie Sanders.

[Musical interlude.]

MH: Congresswoman Jayapal, thank you so much for joining me on Deconstructed.

PJ: I’m thrilled to be here.

MH: This is a nation which prides itself on being a nation of immigrants, on its diversity. And yet, we’re sitting here in Congress, on Capitol Hill, it’s not a very diverse place. It’s got even fewer immigrants in it. What impact do you think that has on Congress to have so few people who are immigrants in its members making laws, making policy on immigration?

PJ: Well I think this is the problem with not having any kind of diversity in all of our institutions and Congress is the prime example of that. I don’t think you make as good laws when you don’t have people that represent the diversity of the population. I always say it’s not just that the pictures look better when we’re in them — and they do look better — but it is also that we bring different experiences with us. We have different stories to tell. We chair hearings differently. We propose different legislation.

But in this moment we have a president who is using the bully pulpit of the White House to really fuel that anti-immigrant hatred. And, you know, when the president gets up and says “Latino” and the whole crowd boos, that is I think a real problem.

MH: And the right of their party, does seem to have taken it up, the far right, on this issue. Because there was a time when Republicans thought, oh, we need to reach out to Latinos and we need immigration reform. and now that’s all gone.

PJ: That’s all gone.

MH: That civil war was won by the right of the party. In your party, the Democrats, we know where the Republicans stand now.

PJ: Yeah.

MH: Are the Democrats united when it comes to immigration policy? When it comes to issues like protecting the Dreamers, the 700,000-odd undocumented immigrants who were brought to this country as kids, protecting them from deportation for example. Is there unity in your party?

PJ: There is unity in the party. I think the question is, you know, how strong are we willing to make that unity in order to pass legislation. And I think we’ve held out in the House pretty well. I mean, we have won the public opinion debate on the Dreamers. But actually, we had won the public opinion debate on comprehensive immigration reform back in 2013 when the Senate passed a bipartisan bill, 67 bipartisan votes, which is hard to imagine today.

Democrats are united around the Dreamers. I think that Trump has put the question before us so starkly that you cannot choose the other side.

MH: That’s true. Can the Democratic Party win this debate or at least have a credible position on the immigration debate, especially progressives in your party like yourself ,without reckoning with the Obama legacy? Because Obama was dubbed the deporter-in-chief by immigration advocacy groups, it was a world you inhabited for many years. He did deport something like 2.5 million people or more, more than all of the presidents of the 20th century combined. Has the Democratic Party come to terms with that?

PJ: Maybe not as much as it needs to yet. We’ll see when we have power.

I was one of the people that called Obama deporter-in-chief — that was when I was an activist — but I do think that President Obama — I miss him deeply, I should say that first —

MH: I think we all miss him. We’re in a position where we’re missing George Bush and Ronald Reagan.

PJ: Isn’t that bizarre? I know.

MH: It’s depressing.

PJ: But it is true that he and other Democrats have not helped us on the immigration issue. I’ve worked on this issue for 15 years, and I can tell you that when I first started working on it in 2000, 2001, not a lot of Democrats were with us.

MH: You’ve been dubbed one of the leaders of the #resistance against the president and some of the kind of democratic norms that he’s breaking. You spoke out on the House floor in objection to the Electoral College result certifying Donald Trump’s victory. You also did not attend his inauguration. Is that because you believe Donald Trump to be an illegitimate president of the United States?

PJ: I believe that — I don’t know about the word illegitimate — but I believe that Donald Trump should not have been president had a whole host of things happened, from voting rights abuses at the ballot box, which is why I challenged the Electoral College certification, to, you know, all of what we’re finding out around collusion of foreign governments in the election.

I do believe that he is in violation of the emoluments clause. We have not had any hearings on any of this — and I’m on the Judiciary Committee. But I believe that he has committed impeachable offenses.

MH: Trump, of course, has offered this deal to Democrats, this trade, that if you fund my ludicrous border wall, I will give an extension to DACA —

PJ: Except he didn’t. Except he didn’t.

MH: Well, let’s take it for granted that he doesn’t mean what he says, but then you do hear congressional Democrats as recently as a few days ago, I was listening to one saying, you know, they’d be open to that deal because, OK, you can get rid the wall later, but we can save DACA now.

PJ: Yeah. Yeah.

MH: Are you one of those Democrats that would do a deal?

PJ: I have been against the border wall, but more importantly I’m against all of the other things that he’s been proposing. In the grand scheme of things, the border wall is a symbol that’s a very, very important symbol, but I am way more troubled about the mass deportations, the mass detentions.

You know, he says that he would take that, but in fact that is the deal that Chuck Schumer offered him — without talking to most of us — but that is the deal that Chuck Schumer offered him and he said no. He’s actually been offered that deal multiple times. What he has come back with every time is a moving target. The latest moving target is he wants to cut family-based immigration — legal immigration — he wants to cut legal immigration to the United States by 50 million people over the next five decades.

MH: What do you think — it’s a long list — what do you think the worst thing, the most egregious thing he has said or proposed in the field of immigration policy since coming into office? What one thing jumps out at you, as someone who campaigned on this before you became an elected politician?

PJ: That is such a difficult question because there are so many egregious things. But I think probably the most egregious to date has been the ripping apart of children from their mothers at the border. And, like I said, I’m almost hesitant to say this because, you know, what about calling African nations “s-hole countries” and things like that, but in terms of policy, the ripping apart of families broadly, and then most recently, the ripping apart of babies from their parents.

MH: Tell me about your own story, your own journey. How did you end up in the U.S. as a 16-year-old immigrant on your own?

PJ: Yeah. It’s a strange thing. I was born in India and I grew up in India and Indonesia and a little bit in Singapore, and my parents, when they sent me here, for some reason, you know, most Indian parents, as you know, would have, if given the choice, would have sent their kids to the U.K. because of the colonial influence. And my dad, for whatever reason, always believed that the United States was the place that I was going to have the most opportunity. So they had about $5,000 in their savings account — literally — and he said: “You’re going to the United States, and I want you to have the best education, I want you have opportunity.” He really wanted me to be a doctor, a lawyer or an engineer. Those three professions.

MH: Classic. The classic Indian trio.

PJ: Exactly. And so I came here for college at the age of 16 by myself, and I don’t think I ever fully understood what a sacrifice that was for my parents — not just financially taking everything they had, but also just emotionally — until my son turned 16 and then I thought about what that meant to send your kid across the ocean and know that they might never come back. And because of our broken immigration system, it took me 17 years to become a U.S. citizen. By the time I had become a U.S. citizen, it was too late.

MH: 17 years?

PJ: 17 years.

MH: You’ve been a citizen for many years.

PJ: I have.

MH: You’re now a member of Congress.

PJ: Correct.

MH: And yet, I read somewhere that even now you have this nagging doubt or thought at the back of your head that one day somehow your citizenship might be taken away from you.

PJ: I do. I do. I haven’t said that in a while, but it’s still true.

MH: Why?

PJ: It’s a strange thing. I guess because I have seen that happen, not necessarily to U.S. citizens, but I’ve seen U.S. citizens always be questioned about their patriotism and their loyalty.

You know, I’ve been here since I was 16 years old and that is the vast majority of my life, because I’m 52 now, and I still find people questioning why I’m here. I get told to go back to my own country. The other day I was on C-SPAN’s program where, you know, a Congress member answers questions for half an hour.

C-span Host: Steve in Reno, Nevada. Republican line. Hi.

PJ: And I was asked by a caller if I’m a U.S. citizen.

Steve: I just wanted to know if the Congresswoman herself is a U.S. citizen.

PJ: I had to just laugh —

PJ: Yes, absolutely, you have to be a U.S. citizen to be in Congress.

PJ: — but that is of course what we go through.

MH: I’m amazed how calm you stayed. I would’ve told him to f off. But you’re a member of Congress, I’m a journalist.

PJ: Yes, well, sometimes — but I think that that is the bind we’re always in. If we respond and we get annoyed.

MH: Then you’re the angry brown person.

PJ: Exactly. Exactly. You know exactly what I’m talking about.

MH: Where do you stand on the Donald Trump racism debate? Is he merely an enabler of racism as some say, or is he an actual racist himself? We know that he’s a hero to the white nationalists, but some people balk at actually calling him a white nationalist.

PJ: He is a racist. He is a racist. I don’t believe you can say all the things that he says and not be a racist. Maybe at one time in his life he was willing to confront that racism within himself more, but I think that he has allowed all of those things to be fueled and flamed by playing to a base, that’s true.

He is an enabler as well, but I do believe he’s a racist. I don’t think you could say some of the things that he says unscripted and not be racist.

MH: So, you mention the base as well. How much the other big debate, which a lot of us journalists are having and politicians, is how much of a role do you think anti-immigrant sentiment, anti-minority sentiment, racial resentment political scientists call it, how much did that play in the election of Donald Trump? Because there is this divide. Some of us are saying: It was race. Others are saying: No, it was #economicanxiety, and there’s this kind of divide.

From where I’m sitting, the studies I’ve seen, it does seem to be much more cultural, racial, than it was economic in terms of getting people out and making the impact that Trump had, especially in kind of “white working class communities.”

PJ: I think that fear and racism rear their heads when there is a personal feeling of being left behind. It would be much harder to blame somebody if you were already doing well, but so many people are looking for somebody to blame.

Another time that I was on C-SPAN, I had this white-collar man in some Midwestern state call me and say, you know, just go off.

Caller: They took my grandkids’ jobs, they took my kids’ jobs, run them out of business. They need to be deported, just like their parents.

Blaming immigrants for the loss of jobs and the fact that his son was unable to get a decent job. And I said, you know, I feel your pain. I hear that you are in a lot of pain.

PJ: It sounds like you’re in a lot of economic pain. And that is true across the country.

PJ: And I tried to validate that sentiment and say what we were doing around that. But then immediately turn around and say: “But, you’re wrong to blame immigrants.”

PJ: To blame immigrants is completely wrong. And here’s why it’s wrong.

MH: Do you think that works? Do you think Democrats have found a language and a strategy to get through to some of these people, some of these Trump voters, some of these alienated people who are blaming immigrants for all their problems, immigrants are taking jobs, immigrants are taking welfare — it’s funny how you can take jobs and welfare at the same time — immigrants are committing all the crimes. Can you get through to them and change their minds or is that a lost cause? You should actually focus on getting your own base, your own communities of color who didn’t vote in the last election, should that be the priority or should you actually spend precious time and energy trying to get through people who you’re not going to be able to get through to.

PJ: Well, I actually don’t know that they’re, they’re different messages. We just did a poll for the progressive caucus that I led in 30 swing districts across the country. We tested what we call progressive messages: things like Medicare for all, things like free college without debt, these are ideas that resonate with independents as well as with what we call progressive surge voters, people who have never voted before.

I’ve always been focused on actually the progressive surge voters, because I think we’ve gone in the opposite direction.

MH: That’s fair. I think a lot of people in your party who go further, and actually, I’m from the U.K., you have Labour Party there for many years, including people like Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, who did this kind of dog whistling to the right which, again, we understand your concerns.

You often hear center-left politicians in the West say, “you know, these voters they have legitimate concerns,” when often they don’t have legitimate concerns, if they’ve been fed some media or misinformation or, you know, Fox News propaganda. And people of color or immigrants hear that and feel like they’re being thrown under the bus by some progressives.

PJ: Right.

MH: They’re saying, “Well, they don’t have a legitimate concern. Why not call a spade a spade?” Plus, tactically, does it ever work to meet a racist in the middle, to kind of say: I’m going to meet you halfway?

PJ: Well, I think the question is everybody that is in the middle, are they all — Like, here’s an example: you know, my state is a jungle-primary state and so there were two Democrats running last year in the election. And I figured, well, there’s 20 percent of people who are Republicans, I’ll go out and talk to them. I actually have some people who voted for Trump, who voted for me, who actually believe in DACA.

So there are some people that we can get. I have never been afraid to call people out. But I also believe that there are times when you can call people in. And we have to make sure that we’re pulling those people in — not at the expense of calling out racism. I won’t do that. But I will help people to come in and recognize that economics, you know, we need to give them somebody new to blame. And —

MH: That’s a very good point. People do feel that someone should be blamed for what’s going on.

PJ: Somebody should be blamed. And they’re right about that!

MH: Yeah.

PJ: We should blame the biggest corporations, the people, the wealthiest individuals. I just read the other day that three Americans have the combined wealth of 50 percent of American people. What kind of a country has this become that in that is what we see?

MH: It wasn’t the people in DACA who crashed the economy in 2008 or invaded Iraq in 2003.

PJ: No. But if you listen to their hearings on Judiciary Committee, we just had a hearing the other day, a couple months ago, on how the opioid crisis is created by illegal immigrants — their words — illegal immigrants.

MH: In the next year or so we’re going to see more and more Democrats — Senate Democrats, Democratic governors, mayors, maybe, members of the House — making it clear they plan to run for president in 2020 maybe against Donald Trump. They have to declare their candidacies in the next year or so. Do you believe Bernie Sanders should be one of them? You endorsed him last time around. Do you think he should run again in 2020?

PJ: I think Bernie is an incredible guy. You know, I think he really brought forward all these policies that people said couldn’t win, that, you know, he and we that supported him were too idealistic. And I always say: Who ever got big things done with small ideas? I mean what is wrong with having a big vision. Many of these ideas have been tested in other countries and I think we have him to thank for putting that forward.

I think they’re going to be a lot of people that run and we’ll have to see whether he runs, whether other people run. Certainly, I think he has a very big following and a big name that would be hard to beat, but we have to see, you know, who comes up. And I stay in very close touch with him. I am doing bills with other people that are potentially running for president as well — Kamala Harris and I have done several bills together and I, you know, think Elizabeth Warren is fantastic. I’m doing a bill with Cory Booker. So we’ll see what happens there.

MH: Do you think Bernie would have beaten Trump? It’s a great question on the left?

PJ: I don’t know. I’m typically not somebody who does a lot of the “what-ifs” just because … why? You know, it’s nowhere we are. So — I don’t know. But I certainly think that we might have gotten some people that voted for Trump.

MH: And just to come full circle, do you think it’s unfair that someone like yourself can never run for president, the natural-born citizen clause?

PJ: [Laughs.]

MH: I mean, not just to flatter you to say you’d make a great president, but just on the specific, kind of constitutional issue, there is a clause in the Constitution, the natural-born citizen clause, which prevents someone like yourself, an immigrant to the United States, from running for president. Isn’t it time to change that in a country that is a nation of immigrants?

PJ: I think it is. I think it’s a strange clause. And I think that, you know, we have a lot of people who don’t even think about running for office because they say, “Oh, I’m not considered an immigrant.” And, in fact, when we run and when we tell our stories, there are some consultants out there who say, “Oh, don’t talk about being brown, don’t talk about being an immigrant.”

For me, I’m proud. I’m a proud immigrant. I’m one of only a dozen members of Congress who are born outside of the United States. I think that gives me a view on globalism, on international diplomacy, on war, on public health on all these things that other people don’t have. And so —

MH: So on that note, and last question: What is your advice to an immigrant listening to this interview, whether documented or undocumented, who’s maybe living in fear or is anxious about their status, or just is fed up with having to go through this anti-immigration environment we’re living through, what do you say to them?

PJ: I say hang in there. I say that this country has been resilient about how we’ve come around. We’ve made so many mistakes. We’re a country born on slavery, after all. And so we have — and we took land from Native Americans to establish this country — so the whole conversation about immigration and anti-immigrants is bewildering to most of my tribal leader friends.

So I just say to people: Hang in there, be strong in yourself, think about who you are, think about what you want to do and, you know, don’t let anybody back you down, because that is when they win is when they back us down. So we’ve got to stand up strong, tell our stories, be proud of who we are and recognize that this is a tough moment. But courage is not what comes when it’s easy. Courage is what comes when things are hard. And so these are the moments for us to really be courageous. And immigrants that I know, undocumented and documented, are some of the most courageous, most resilient, smartest, most resourceful people that I have ever had the privilege to work with. And so I say: We just keep fighting and we will win. It just may take us some time.

MH: Pramila Jayapal, thank you so much for joining me on Deconstructed.

PJ: Thank you.

[Musical interlude.]

MH: That was Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal. And that’s our show.

Deconstructed is a production of First Look Media and The Intercept, and is distributed by Panoply. Our producer is Zach Young. Dina Sayedahmed is our production assistant. Leital Molad is our executive producer. Our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw. Betsy Reed is The Intercept’s editor in chief.

I’m Mehdi Hasan and you can follow me on Twitter @mehdirhasan. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to the show so you can hear it every Friday. Go to theintercept.com/deconstructed to subscribe from your podcast platform of choice: iPhone, Android, whatever. If you’re subscribed already, please do leave us a rating or review. It helps new people find the show. And if you want to give us feedback, email us at Podcasts@theintercept.com. Thanks so much!

See you next week.
https://theintercept.com/2018/06/01/the ... mmigrants/
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Re: ICE stories

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Jun 04, 2018 6:36 am

Senator Jeff Merkley

I’m at an immigration detention center where children who have been separated from their families are being held. Trying to get inside to get answers. Follow live >>>

Image
https://twitter.com/SenJeffMerkley/stat ... 4587723776

I was barred entry. Asked repeatedly to speak to a supervisor—he finally came out and said he can’t tell us anything. Police were called on us.

Children should never be ripped from their families & held in secretive detention centers. RT if you agree this is WRONG.





CREDO Mobile

"The attorney general's team and the Office of Refugee Settlement, they don't want anyone to know what's going on behind these doors." – @SenJeffMerkley http://credo.cm/FwHcLS #FamiliesBelongTogether
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Re: ICE stories

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Jun 05, 2018 7:59 am

NEWS & POLITICS
Sen. Merkley Says Immigrants Are Kept in Cages that Looked 'Like Dog Kennels'
The reality of breaking up immigrant families is even more horrific than it sounds.
By Cody Fenwick / AlterNet June 4, 2018, 4:37 PM GMT


Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) drew attention to the plight of recently arrived immigrants under President Donald Trump's administration over the weekend when he posted video of himself being denied access to one of the facilities where unaccompanied immigrant children are housed. But on Monday night, he spoke with MSNBC's Chris Hayes and described the condition of many of the immigrants at a processing center he did get to see — and his description was deeply disturbing.

"The first room had a series of cages that look a lot like dog kennels, which people had recently arrived — they had been put into them," he said. "They were very crowded. The individuals had space blankets, so you had all these silver space blankets, no mattresses, and people looking very distressed and upset. A number of women holding children in their arms."

He continued: "And then adjacent to that is a very, very large warehouse, with much larger cages, and in those, the children have already been separated from the parents."


He described one child he saw in this warehouse as four or five years old. And while some of these children likely arrived on their own, some came with families and then were separated from their parents by border agents, even though they were seeking asylum — a form of legal immigration.

Merkley's description of the dehumanizing treatment these immigrants are being put through perhaps shouldn't be a surprise, given Trump's willingness to use dehumanizing rhetoric to discuss immigration.

Hayes explained on Twitter: "And to be clear: the cages themselves predate the Trump admin. The systematic child separation policy, however, is new."

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-polit ... og-kennels
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Re: ICE stories

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Jun 05, 2018 11:34 am

Trump Immigration Policy Veers From Abhorrent to Evil
Nicholas Kristof
By Nicholas Kristof
Opinion Columnist
May 30, 2018

Central American asylum-seekers waiting in April for buses to take them to the Mexico-United States border.CreditJohn Moore/Getty Images
We as a nation have crossed so many ugly lines recently, yet one new policy of President Trump’s particularly haunts me. I’m speaking of the administration’s tactic of seizing children from desperate refugees at the border.

“I was given only five minutes to say goodbye,” a Salvadoran woman wrote in a declaration in an A.C.L.U. lawsuit against the government, after her 4- and 10-year-old sons were taken from her. “My babies started crying when they found out we were going to be separated.”

“In tears myself, I asked my boys to be brave, and I promised we would be together soon. I begged the woman who took my children to keep them together so they could at least have each other.”

This mother, who for her protection is identified only by her initials, J.I.L., said that while in El Salvador she was severely beaten in front of her family by a gang, and she then fled the country to save the lives of her children.

Who among us would not do the same?

J.I.L. noted that she had heard that her children might have been separated and sent to two different foster homes, and added: “I am scared for my little boys.”

Is this really who we are? As a parent, as the son of a refugee myself, I find that in this case Trump’s policy has veered from merely abhorrent to truly evil.


Family separations arise in part because of the new Trump administration policy, announced last month, of “zero tolerance” for people who cross the border illegally. That means that parents are jailed (which happened rarely before), and their kids are taken away from them.

“That’s no different than what we do every day in every part of the United States when an adult of a family commits a crime,” Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen told NPR this month. “If you as a parent break into a house, you will be incarcerated by police and thereby separated from your family.”


Yet Mirian, a Honduran woman who arrived in the U.S., broke no law. She simply followed the established procedure by presenting herself at an official border crossing point and requesting asylum because her life was in danger in Honduras — nevertheless, her 18-month-old was taken from her.

“The immigration officers made me walk out with my son to a government vehicle and place my son in a car seat in the vehicle,” Mirian said in a declaration accompanying the A.C.L.U. suit. “My son was crying as I put him in the seat. I did not even have a chance to comfort my son, because the officers slammed the door shut as soon as he was in his seat.”

Likewise, Ms. G, a Mexican in the A.C.L.U. suit, went to an official border crossing point and requested asylum with her 4-year-old son and blind 6-year-old daughter. None of them had broken American law, yet the children were taken from their mother.

“I have not seen my children for one and a half months,” Ms. G wrote in her declaration. “I worry about them constantly and don’t know when I will see them.”

Granted, this does not happen to all who present themselves at the border and do not cross illegally; it seems arbitrary. But even for those parents who commit a misdemeanor by illegally entering the U.S. — because they want to protect their children from Central American gangs — the United States response seems to be in effect to kidnap youngsters.

If you or I commit a misdemeanor, we might lose our kids for a few days while we’re in jail, and then we’d get them back. But border-crossers serve a few days in jail for illegal entry — and after emerging from criminal custody, they still don’t get their kids back soon, said Lee Gelernt, an A.C.L.U. lawyer. In one case, he said, it has been eight months and the child still has not been returned.

It’s true that immigration policy is a nightmare, we can’t take everyone and almost no one advocates open borders. Some immigrants bring small children with them and claim to be the parent in hopes that this will spare them from detention.

Yet none of that should be an excuse for brutalizing children by ripping them away from their parents. I was at times ferociously critical of President Barack Obama’s handling of Central American refugees, but past administrations managed these difficult trade-offs without gratuitously embracing cruelty. One fruitful step has been to work with countries to curb gang violence that forces people to flee.

White House Chief of Staff John Kelly hails family separation as a “tough deterrent” and shrugs that “the children will be taken care of — put into foster care or whatever.”

So what’s next, Mr. President? Minefields at the border would be an even more effective deterrent. Or East German-style marksmen in watch towers to shoot those who cross?

We as a nation should protect our borders. We must even more assiduously protect our soul.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/30/opin ... order.html


NEWS & POLITICS
ICE Acting Director Scheduled to Speak at Anti-Immigrant Hate Group Gathering
Trump has been steadily appointing hate group leaders and activists to top administration posts.
By Gabe Ortiz / Daily Kos June 4, 2018, 1:44 PM GMT


Just in case there was any remaining doubt that this administration is on an ethnic cleansing campaign, let Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) acting director Thomas Homan—set to retire this summer from his job of tearing families apart to spend more time with his family—settle any remaining doubts you may have:

Homan will be at the National Press Club on Tuesday morning to participate in an event hosted by the anti-immigrant hate group Center for Immigration Studies (CIS).

Trump has been steadily appointing hate group leaders and activists to top administration posts, and CIS has been among the worst and most visible. Founded by white nationalist and eugenicist John Tanton, the group has been notorious for circulating swill from anti-Semites and Holocaust-deniers, one of whom called Jewish people “truly subversive,” “manipulative,” and “evil.” Homan is sitting with that same racist group this week:

Don't let big tech control what news you see. Get more stories like this in your inbox, every day.


The conversation, covering such topics as deportations, worksite enforcement, and sanctuary jurisdictions, will be moderated by Jessica Vaughan, the Center's director of policy studies.

Vaughan is another gem. She’s been a favorite go-to for anti-immigrant legislators, testifying in front of Congress to fear monger about immigrants when she’s not busy being “a featured speaker at multiple extremist events including white nationalist publisher the Social Contract Press’ annual Writer’s Workshop.” CIS may claim ICE is all about “national security and public safety,” but it’s really about making America white—and with the assistance of CIS and other hate group leaders stacked throughout the administration.

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-polit ... -gathering
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Re: ICE stories

Postby elfismiles » Wed Jun 06, 2018 9:43 am

NOT nICE / NOT TSA butt ...

FLASHBACK to May 2017 - now in the news again, June 2018.

Customs officers at Newark Airport describe hazing, ‘assault’ by colleagues
By Washington Desk, Published May 10, 2017
Image
http://www.talkmedianews.com/us-news/20 ... olleagues/

Newark Airport customs agents under investigation for assaulting fellow employees on a ‘rape table’: report
Bob Brigham, 09 May 2017
Image
https://www.rawstory.com/2017/05/newark ... le-report/

Customs officer admits assault in airport 'rape table' case
[Associated Press]
Associated Press•June 6, 2018

NEWARK, N.J. (AP) — A U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer has admitted his role in using a "rape table" to haze two colleagues at Newark Liberty International Airport.

Tito Catota pleaded guilty on Monday to forcibly assaulting, impeding, intimidating and interfering with the victims while they were engaged in their duties.

The 38-year-old admitted helping grab the two men and holding them down on what were known as "rape tables" in the Passenger Enforcement Rover Team office at the airport in 2016 and 2017.

The victims claimed the officers simulated sex acts on them.

Catota faces up to eight years in prison and a $250,000 fine when he's sentenced.

Two other officers, 40-year-old Parmenio Perez and 32-year-old Michael Papagni, have been indicted and maintain their innocence.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/customs-offi ... 14523.html
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Re: ICE stories

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Jun 07, 2018 9:34 am

Federal judge advances ACLU lawsuit challenging separation of parents, children at border

A federal judge on Wednesday refused the Trump administration's request to dismiss a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) challenging the practice of separating migrant parents and children at the U.S. border.

U.S. District Judge Dana M. Sabraw in San Diego said in his ruling that the Trump administration's "wrenching separation" of families might violate the Constitution's guarantees of due process.

“Such conduct, if true, as it is assumed to be on the present motion, is brutal, offensive, and fails to comport with traditional notions of fair play and decency,” Sabraw wrote. "The facts alleged are sufficient to show the government conduct at issue ‘shocks the conscience’ and violates Plaintiffs’ constitutional right to family integrity.”

Sabraw rejected the federal government's argument that the practice of separating families cannot be challenged on constitutional grounds. He did, however, dismiss a separate challenge to the law that claimed the separation of families violates asylum laws.

The ACLU filed its lawsuit in February after a woman from the Democratic Republic of Congo was separated from her 7-year-old daughter while trying to seek asylum in the U.S. According to the ACLU's suit, the mother and child were detained separately at facilities 2,000 miles apart.

Wednesday's ruling comes as President Trump's immigration policies face heavy criticism, especially the practice of separating parents and children.

Former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton ripped the policy as "disastrous" last week, and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) has said she plans to introduce a bill that would end the rule.

The ruling also comes following reports this week that U.S. Border Patrol agents are running out of space to detain migrant children that were separated from their parents. Roughly 550 children are currently detained, of which nearly 300 have spent more than 72 hours in custody.
http://thehill.com/regulation/court-bat ... trump-over



Judge rules in favor of Philadelphia in case of withheld funding over sanctuary city policies

Associated Press
Judge rules in favor of Philadelphia in case of withheld funding over sanctuary city policies
Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions speaks with California leaders and public officials who oppose California's sanctuary policies at the White House on May 16. (Olivier Douliery / Tribune News Service)
A federal judge has ruled in favor of Philadelphia in its lawsuit against the federal government for withholding grant funding in response to how the city deals with immigrants in the country illegally.

U.S. District Judge Michael Baylson issued a 93-page memo Wednesday, saying the conditions placed on the city by the federal government in order to receive the funding are unconstitutional, “arbitrary and capricious.” He also wrote that Philadelphia's policies are reasonable and appropriate.

Philadelphia has said as a “sanctuary city” it will turn over immigrants to Immigration and Customs Enforcement only if they have a warrant signed by a judge. The city was fighting federal efforts to block funding as a result of the policy.

A federal appeals court in April sided with Chicago in a similar dispute.
http://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow ... story.html
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Re: ICE stories

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Jun 18, 2018 9:54 am

Trump’s Immigration Goon Squad Pretends to Be Police in NYC

ICE agents have been resorting to deceptions that go way beyond just identifying as ‘police.’

This story, by Felipe De La Hoz, is from Documented, an independent and non-partisan newsroom covering immigration as it matters to New Yorkers.

It was early in the morning when Miguel found his Brooklyn apartment surrounded by people clad in vests emblazoned “POLICE.”

He had refused to open the door when they first knocked. One of the men had called his cellphone to say, in Spanish, that they had been sent by his probation officer. The voice on the other end of the line was calm, beckoning him out.

“We’re police from probations," the man said, according to Miguel. "We have some papers here that you need to come out and sign, and then you can go back in no problem, we'll leave. We only want to verify that you live here."

It didn’t add up. Miguel had seen his probation officer the day before, and she hadn’t mentioned anything about paperwork or sending anyone over.

He furrowed his brow as he recalled the incident on a recent Saturday afternoon, standing on the cracked pavement outside his building. He told the man over the phone, “I was there yesterday, and she never told me that anyone was going to come,” Miguel recalled. The man then insisted that, given Miguel’s English proficiency, he must have misunderstood what his probation officer had told him.

He didn’t open the door, and after he hung up the phone, he watched from the window as most of the men packed into a couple SUVs and sped off. The woman he rented his room from later told him she noticed something else written on their vests: “ICE.”

According to attorneys and advocates, field officers with Immigration and Customs Enforcement have for years been known to misrepresent themselves as members of local law enforcement agencies in an attempt detain immigrants, a practice known internally as “ruses.” As municipal and state officials scale back cooperation with ICE, often in response to the agency’s ever-more aggressive tactics under the Trump administration, agents have been regularly resorting to making home arrests and using deceptions that go way beyond merely identifying as “police.”

The tactic helps ICE gain access. “ICE is a law enforcement agency and they’re bound by the same constitutional restrictions as any law enforcement agency,” said Ghita Schwarz, senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Nancy Morawetz, a professor of clinical law and an immigration expert at New York University School of Law, said that though existing case law allows federal law enforcement agents to use ruses, she doesn’t believe it’s clearly legal for a federal officer to masquerade as a local one. “What ICE is doing is saying ‘Oh, it’s all the same question. If law enforcement can use ruses, then any ruse is an option,’” she said. “There is a pretty strong argument, I think, that it is impersonating a police officer,” a felony charge in New York state.

Fourth Amendment protections mean that even if agents know where a target lives, they cannot enter without either a judicial warrant or the occupant’s consent. Posing as local law enforcement officials is one way to create that consent. “The use of ruses is a way to skirt the constitutional protections and get in the door,” said Genia Blaser, senior staff attorney at the Immigrant Defense Project, which tracks ICE arrests.

According to Blaser, most of the cases Immigrant Defense Project hears about follow similar patterns: the agents call their target at a personal number, show up at their door, or both, and claim to be local officers of some type investigating a crime, executing a warrant, or responding to an accident.

That’s how it went for Aida*, a refugee from Senegal. There was a loud knock on her door early in the morning; she opened it and came face-to-face with an unidentified officer. She says she quickly realized they were police—they had guns and badges—“but I didn’t know what kind of police they were,” she said recently from a couch in her Brooklyn walkup, as her young son watched television nearby.

The officer asked if she had a son who worked at a supermarket. When she said she didn’t, the man told her that her oldest son’s identity had been stolen and was being used at a supermarket, and he needed to speak to her son Omar, face to face. “When I looked at his face, he was acting a little funny, and I closed my door,” Aida said.

Within minutes, agents called Omar*, on his cellphone and told him the same thing. By the time he left for work, the agents had gone to his wife’s house, where his mother-in-law spoke with them. They told her they had a warrant for Omar’s arrest but refused to tell her what it was for when she asked. “They said he had done something really bad,” his mother-in-law said. “They were asking, does my daughter know what type of person he is, what kind of person she’s dating?”

Eventually, the agents convinced Omar to leave work and meet them in front of his mother’s apartment. He called Aida and reassured her that he only wanted to get to the bottom of his identity theft. “He doesn't even think about immigration. He thinks he is going with the local police,” she said. Hours later, Omar finally got back in touch. He was at 26 Federal Plaza, where the ICE agents had taken him to be processed before sending him to a detention center in New Jersey.

Internal training materials the agency released through Freedom of Information Act requests refer to the use of ruses. A 2010 copy of the Fugitive Operations Handbook calls them “a tactic designed to control the time and location of a law enforcement encounter” that results in “improved safety for the officers and the public by reducing the opportunity for the target to flee.” Both this handbook and guidance memos it draws on stipulate that “a ruse involving the impersonation of a federal, state, local, or private-sector employee is contingent on permission from the proposed cover employer.” It’s unclear whether this is currently ICE policy, but it appears no permission has been sought in New York.

Candace Sandy, a spokesperson for the New York City Department of Probations, said in an email that “any impersonation of a New York City Probation Officer would be of critical concern to this agency. We are not aware of, and have received no reports of any such activity taking place.” Reached by phone, Dalvanie Powell, president of the United Probation Officers Association, said she hadn’t heard of ICE impersonating her officers. “It is certainly a concern of mine,” she said. “I don’t know why anyone would go that far, and it disturbs me.”

In response to questions, ICE spokesperson Emilio Dabul denied that the tactic is in use. “[Enforcement Removal Operations] Deportation Officers do not identify themselves as members of any other organization. Deportation Officers may use the universally recognized ‘POLICE’ when initially making contact with someone during a field operation,” he wrote in an email.

NYPD leaders, including Commissioner James O’Neill, have maintained that they will not cooperate with ICE in order to preserve the public’s ability to safely report crime. In February, legislative affairs director Oleg Chernyavsky told the City Council that “it's important for victims of crimes, irrespective of their immigration status, to trust their police and to come forward and inform their police."

Yet advocates say that, as immigrants feel the lines start to blur between who is local law enforcement and who is ICE, they’re less likely to cooperate with anyone. “People still respect the police and they still want to help, but when the word is getting around that [ICE agents] are misidentifying themselves, we have no choice but to teach people not to open the door for any reason,” said Ravi Ragbir, the executive director of the New Sanctuary Coalition of NYC. “If the NYPD wants to keep this space safe, they have to also work with us, and become involved in that process.”

Ultimately, Morawetz, the NYU law professor, believes it’s up to state and local governments and agencies to push back. “I think if local law enforcement protested to [the Department of Homeland Security], they would get results,” she said. Neither the New York City Police Department nor its largest union, the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, responded to repeated requests for comment.

“[ICE’s] scorch-earth raids on our immigrant neighbors undermine public safety, and the egregious examples of their unconstitutional conduct sow fear in our communities,” said Governor Andrew Cuomo in a statement to Documented. “I urge all residents to come forward if they believe ICE violated their Constitutional rights and report incidents to the state.” The executive office did not address whether it was planning specific actions on this issue beyond the legal threats the governor included in a letter to ICE Acting Director Thomas Homan in April.

Rosemary Boeglin, a spokesperson for the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs, said in an email, “We are deeply concerned about these reports and are actively monitoring the allegations. Any resident, regardless of immigration status, with concerns or information about the impersonation of City Officials is encouraged to contact the Department of Probation or the NYPD. Your call will be kept confidential." The mayor’s office declined to answer further questions about whether it had communicated directly with the NYPD or ICE about the practice.

Schwarz, the attorney from CCR, pointed out that federal courts have ruled that federal agents have violated the Fourth Amendment by using ruses in previous cases.

In the spring, a mother of three was detained at her home in Brooklyn after ICE agents forcefully opened the door once her husband had opened it a crack. They initially described themselves as “detectives.”

“He showed me a picture of a very dark-skinned woman, and he asked if I knew who that was. I said no,” her husband Francisco* told Documented. Once inside, they switched out the picture of the unknown woman for one of his wife. Attorneys said that ICE agents pretending to be police officers looking for someone who doesn’t live in the home is a common trick, and the use of decoy pictures is widespread.

The family’s lawyer said that he is now filing a motion to suppress evidence with the immigration judge, alleging that the arrest was unlawful and the agents improperly gained access to the apartment.

“The one I’ve mostly seen over the years is the one about the picture being used, to suggest that someone else had committed a crime,” said Sarah Deri Oshiro, managing director at the immigration practice of the Bronx Defenders. Sometimes, they claim they’re looking for a person that committed a crime against a member of the family, and present themselves as cops only there to help. “They give you the kind of information that, in retrospect, doesn’t make any sense, but if they’re telling you that there’s a crime involving someone you know, you’re going to react out of emotion,” she said.

In a case like Omar’s, the Fourth Amendment questions become thornier, as the agents didn’t enter his home but rather convinced him to meet them outside of it. The tactic of calling targets and convincing them to meet elsewhere, including outside of actual NYPD precincts, under the guise of investigating made-up local crimes is one that has been separately described to Documented by multiple attorneys.

Schwarz said factors that courts consider when determining consent include whether officers fabricate an imminent danger, such as a car accident, or threaten continuing legal action they’re not actually allowed to follow through on.

For Miguel, the agents threatened that noncompliance would have an effect on his probation. "’If you don't come out, it's going to be worse for you,’" he remembers them saying. "Then the next time you go [to the probation office], that's when we're going to arrest you. It's going to be worse."

*names have been changed to protect sources
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-im ... ice-in-nyc
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Re: ICE stories

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Aug 06, 2018 7:36 am

How Trump Radicalized ICE

A long-running inferiority complex, vast statutory power, a chilling new directive from the top—inside America’s unfolding immigration tragedy

Franklin Foer

Image
Justin Metz
Settling into a sense of safety is hard when your life’s catalog of memories teaches you the opposite lesson. Imagine: You fled from a government militia intent on murdering you; swam across a river with the uncertain hope of sanctuary on the far bank; had the dawning realization that you could never return to your village, because it had been torched; and heard pervasive rumors of former neighbors being raped and enslaved. Imagine that, following all this, you then found yourself in New York City, with travel documents that were unreliable at best.

This is the shared narrative of thousands of emigrants from the West African nation of Mauritania. The country is ruled by Arabs, but these refugees were members of a black subpopulation that speaks its own languages. In 1989, in a fit of nationalism, the Mauritanian government came to consider these differences capital offenses. It arrested, tortured, and violently expelled many black citizens. The country forcibly displaced more than 70,000 of them and rescinded their citizenship. Those who remained behind fared no better. Approximately 43,000 black Mauritanians are now enslaved—by percentage, one of the largest enslaved populations in the world.

After years of rootless wandering—through makeshift camps, through the villages and cities of Senegal—some of the Mauritanian emigrants slowly began arriving in the United States in the late 1990s. They were not yet adept in English, and were unworldly in almost every respect. But serendipity—and the prospect of jobs—soon transplanted their community of roughly 3,000 to Columbus, Ohio, where they clustered mostly in neighborhoods near a long boulevard that bore a fateful name: Refugee Road. It commemorated a moment at the start of the 19th century, when Ohio had extended its arms to accept another influx of strangers, providing tracts of land to Canadians who had expressed sympathy for the American Revolution.

Refugee Road wasn’t paved with gold, but in the early years of this century, it fulfilled the promise of its name. The Mauritanians converted an old grocery store into a cavernous, blue-carpeted mosque. They opened restaurants that served familiar fish and rice dishes, and stores that sold CDs and sodas imported from across Africa.

Image
(John Moore / Getty)
Over time, as the new arrivals gave birth to American citizens and became fans of the Ohio State Buckeyes and the Cleveland Cavaliers, they mentally buried the fact that their presence in America had never been fully sanctioned. When they had arrived in New York, many of them had paid an English-speaking compatriot to fill out their application for asylum. But instead of recording their individual stories in specific detail, the man simply cut and pasted together generic narratives. (It is not uncommon for new arrivals to the United States, desperate and naive, to fall prey to such scams.) A year or two after the refugees arrived in the country, judges reviewed their cases and, noticing the suspicious repetitions, accused a number of them of fraud and ordered them deported.

But those deportation orders never amounted to more than paper pronouncements. Where would Immigration and Customs Enforcement even send them? The Mauritanian government had erased the refugees from its databases and refused to issue them travel documents. It had no interest in taking back the villagers it had so violently removed. So ice let their cases slide. They were required to regularly report to the agency’s local office and to maintain a record of letter-perfect compliance with the law. But as the years passed, the threat of deportation seemed ever less ominous.

Then came the election of Donald Trump. Suddenly, in the warehouses where many of the Mauritanians worked, white colleagues took them aside and warned them that their lives were likely to get worse. The early days of the administration gave substance to these cautions. The first thing to change was the frequency of their summonses to ice. During the Obama administration, many of the Mauritanians had been required to “check in” about once a year. Abruptly, ice instructed them to appear more often, some of them every month. ice officers began visiting their homes on occasion. Like the cable company, they would provide a six-hour window during which to expect a visit—a requirement that meant days off from work and disrupted life routines. The Mauritanians say that when they met with ice, they were told the U.S. had finally persuaded their government to readmit them—a small part of a global push by the State Department to remove any diplomatic obstacles to deportation.

Fear is a contagion that spreads quickly. One ice officer warned some Mauritanians sympathetically, “It’s not a matter of if you’ll be deported, but when.” Another flatly said, “My job is to get you to leave this country.” At meetings, officers would insist that the immigrants go to the Mauritanian consulate and apply for passports to return to the very country whose government had attempted to murder them.

One afternoon this spring, I sat in the bare conference room of the Columbus mosque after Friday prayer, an occasion for which men dress in traditional garb: brightly colored robes and scarves wrapped around their heads. The imam asked those who were comfortable to share their stories with me. Congregants lined up outside the door.

One by one, the Mauritanians described to me the preparations they had made for a quick exit. Some said that they had already sold their homes; others had liquidated their 401(k)s. Everyone I spoke with could name at least one friend who had taken a bus to the Canadian border and applied for asylum there, rather than risk further appointments with ice.

A lithe, haggard man named Thierno told me that his brother had been detained by ice, awaiting deportation, for several months now. The Mauritanians considered it a terrible portent that the agency had chosen to focus its attention on Thierno’s brother—a businessman and philanthropically minded benefactor of the mosque. If he was vulnerable, then nobody was safe. Eyes watering, Thierno showed me a video on his iPhone of the fate he feared for his brother: a tight shot of a black Mauritanian left behind in the old country. His face was swollen from a beating, and he was begging for mercy. “I’m going to sleep with your wife!” a voice shouts at him, before a hand appears on-screen and slaps him over and over.

In 21st-century America, it is difficult to conjure the possibility of the federal government taking an eraser to the map and scrubbing away an entire ethnic group. I had arrived in Columbus at the suggestion of a Cleveland-based lawyer named David Leopold, a former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. Leopold has kept in touch with an old client who attends the Mauritanian mosque. When he mentioned the community’s plight to me, he called it “ethnic cleansing”—which initially sounded like wild hyperbole. But on each of my trips back to Columbus, I heard new stories of departures to Canada—and about others who had left for New York, where hiding from ice is easier in the shadows of the big city. The refugees were fleeing Refugee Road.

Video: Fleeing ICE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6xneZ3bSh8


Since taking office, Donald Trump has regularly thundered against the “deep state.” With the term, he means to evoke a cabal of bureaucrats burrowed within law enforcement, the intelligence community, and regulatory agencies, a nebulous elite that will stop at nothing to countermand his will—and, by extension, that of the people.

But one segment of the deep state stepped forward early and openly to profess its enthusiasm for Trump. Through their union, employees of ice endorsed Trump’s candidacy in September 2016, the first time the organization had ever lent its support to a presidential contender. When Trump prevailed in the election, the soon-to-be-named head of ice triumphantly declared that it would finally have the backing of a president who would let the agency do its job. He’s “taking the handcuffs off,” said Thomas Homan, who served as ice’s acting director under Trump until his retirement in June, using a phrase that has become a common trope within the agency. “When Trump won, [some officers] thumped their chest as if they had just won the Super Bowl,” a former ice official told me.

Image

When Donald Trump was elected, Thomas Homan, the acting director of ICE until his retirement in June, said that the new president was “taking the handcuffs off” the agency. (Sandy Huffaker / Getty)
Whatever else Trump has accomplished for ice, he has ended its relative anonymity. His administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration regime has triggered a noisy debate about the organizations he has deployed to enforce his policies. For weeks this spring, the nation watched as officers took children from their parents after they had crossed the U.S.–Mexico border in search of asylum. Although ice played only a supporting role in the family-separation debacle—the task was performed principally by U.S. Customs and Border Protection—the agency has emerged as a shorthand for what critics say is wrong with Trump’s immigration agenda. Virtually every Democratic politician hoping to flash his or her progressive bona fides has called for ice’s abolition.

The history of the agency is still a brief one. When terrorists struck the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, ice didn’t exist. In the Justice Department, there was the old Immigration and Naturalization Service. But while the mission of INS had always included the deportation of undocumented immigrants—and it occasionally staged significant workplace raids—it never had a large force that would enable their systematic removal from the nation’s interior.

But following the shock of 9/11, ice was created as part of the Department of Homeland Security, into which Congress awkwardly stuffed a slew of previously unrelated executive-branch agencies: the Secret Service, the Transportation Security Administration, the Coast Guard. Upon its creation, DHS became the third-largest of all Cabinet departments, and its assembly could be generously described as higgledy-piggledy. ice is perhaps the clearest example of where such muddied, heavily politicized policy making can lead.

Since its official designation, in 2003, as a successor to INS, ice has grown at a remarkable clip for a peacetime bureaucracy. By the beginning of Barack Obama’s second term, immigration had become one of the highest priorities of federal law enforcement: Half of all federal prosecutions were for immigration-related crimes. In 2012, Congress appropriated $18 billion for immigration enforcement. It spent $14 billion for all the other major criminal law-enforcement agencies combined: the FBI; the Drug Enforcement Administration; the Secret Service; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives; and the U.S. Marshals Service.

ice quickly built a sprawling, logistically intricate infrastructure comprising detention facilities, an international-transit arm, and monitoring technology. This apparatus relies heavily on private contractors. Created at the height of the federal government’s outsourcing mania, DHS employs more outside contractors than actual federal employees. Last year, these companies—which include the Geo Group and CoreCivic—spent at least $3 million on lobbying and influence peddling. To take one small example: Owners of ice’s private detention facilities were generous donors to Trump’s inauguration, contributing $500,000 for the occasion.

An organization devoted to enforcing immigration laws will always be reflexively and perhaps unfairly cast as a villain. But borders are a fundamental prerogative of the nation-state: The policing of them is a matter of national security, and a functioning polity maintains orderly processes for admitting some immigrants and turning others away. By definition, elements of this mission are exclusionary and hard-hearted. The liberal immigration policies practiced within the European Union have shown how what seems like a simple generosity of spirit can also be deeply destabilizing. A balance needs to be found.

Still, ice, as currently conceived, represents a profound deviation in the long history of American immigration. On many occasions, America has closed its doors to both desperate refugees and eager strivers. But once immigrants have reached our shores, settled in, raised families, and started businesses, all without breaking any laws, the government has almost never chased them away in meaningful numbers. In 1954, Dwight Eisenhower’s Operation Wetback—this was its official designation—removed more than 1 million Mexican immigrants. It is remembered precisely because it was so dissonant with America’s self-styled identity as a nation of immigrants.

ice, however, is assigned the task of removing undocumented immigrants from the country’s interior, and it has approached this mission with cold, bureaucratic efficiency. Until recently, the agency had a congressional mandate to maintain up to 34,000 beds in detention centers on any given day with which to detain undocumented immigrants. Once an immigrant enters the system, she is known by her case number. Her ill intentions are frequently presumed, and she will find it exceedingly difficult to plead her case, or even to know what rights she has.

Approximately 11 million undocumented immigrants currently live in this country, a number larger than the population of Sweden. Two-thirds of them have resided in the U.S. for a decade or longer. The laws on the books endow ice with the technical authority to deport almost every single one of them. Trump’s predecessors, Barack Obama and George W. Bush, allowed for a measure of compassion, permitting prosecutors and judges to stay the removals of some defendants in immigration court, and encouraging a rigorous focus on serious criminals. Congress, for its part, has for nearly two decades offered broad, bipartisan support for the grand bargain known as comprehensive immigration reform. The point of such legislation is to balance tough enforcement of the law with a path to amnesty for undocumented immigrants and the ultimate possibility of citizenship.

Yet no politician has ever quite summoned the will to overcome the systematic obstacles that block reform. Democrats didn’t make it a top priority when they briefly controlled Congress during Obama’s first term, and Republican reformers have again and again been stymied by anti-immigration hard-liners in the House. A comprehensive reform bill passed the Senate in 2013 by a resounding 68–32 margin, but then-Speaker John Boehner refused to allow it a vote in the House. The 2016 GOP presidential hopeful Marco Rubio went from staking his political identity on immigration reform to suggesting that he’d never truly supported the reforms in the first place.

Under the current administration, many of the formal restraints on ice have been removed. In the first eight months of the Trump presidency, ice increased arrests by 42 percent. Immigration enforcement has been handed over to a small clique of militant anti-immigration wonks. This group has carefully studied the apparatus it now controls. It knows that the best strategy for accomplishing its goal of driving out undocumented immigrants is quite simply the cultivation of fear. And it knows that the latent power of ice, amassed with the tacit assent of both parties, has yet to be fully realized.

On a last-minute trip to Columbus, I booked a room in a boutique hotel on the upper floors of a newly refurbished Art Deco skyscraper. I had arranged to meet a 20-something African immigrant, whom I will call Ismael, and his lawyer at the Starbucks in the lobby the next morning; I would accompany them to Ismael’s regularly scheduled appointment with ice.

Short, gaunt, and taciturn, Ismael came from Africa last year by way of a smuggling route through Mexico—a circuitous trek that culminated in his capture while crossing into California and several months in ice detention. When I met Ismael, he rolled up a snug-fitting leg of his black jeans to show me the monitoring bracelet strapped around his bony ankle—a condition of his release. He had also received permission to relocate to his cousin’s apartment in Columbus. Because ice prohibited him from working while he awaited authorization papers, Ismael had improved his English by watching copious television. It was good enough for him to tell me, “I came to America to be free. This is not freedom.” As we made our way to ice, I was startled to discover that we would not be leaving the premises. ice had office space on the third floor of the building my hotel occupied. It was a small but jolting illustration of the ubiquity of the relatively new agency.

Unsurprisingly, the waiting room at ice was not part of the skyscraper’s upscale refurbishment. It was like a dentist’s office stripped of magazines, posters that importune flossing, and pretty much any other splash of color. A small, older woman from Central America wandered through the perfectly quiet room with a piece of paper stapled to a manila envelope: “I don’t speak English. Please help me.”

A heavy, locked door separates the waiting room from ice’s main office, where officers interview immigrants and sometimes detain them. When a functionary in a flannel shirt opened the door and summoned Ismael, his lawyer rose to accompany him. But the officer waved a forefinger in her direction. “Sorry, lawyers aren’t allowed back,” he told her. A look of confusion compressed her face. “But I’ve been allowed back in the past. I think I’m allowed back,” she told him. “Can I talk to a supervisor?”

Two minutes later, an officer with a shaved head, a black Under Armour hoodie, and a gun on his belt leaned his body through the door to stare intently at Ismael. “Why have you been working?” he asked. “We know you’ve been working.” It appeared to be an annoyed response to the lawyer’s resistance, hurled without evidence, perhaps in the hopes of provoking a self-incriminating response. It seemed of a piece with the fraught atmosphere in the waiting room. Earlier, there had been an announcement that a car was parked illegally outside and needed to be moved. Ismael’s lawyer had leaned over to tell me that this would be widely presumed to be another trick: Many immigrants under ice scrutiny are not allowed to drive.

When immigration lawyers in Columbus deal with ice, they are tentative, fretful that anything that might reek of complaint could provoke ice into seeking retribution against their clients. So Ismael’s lawyer struck a stance of studied conciliation. As she gently explained herself, Ismael disappeared behind the door for his appointment and another manager emerged. He said that the man handling Ismael’s “intensive supervision” worked for a private contractor hired by ice, and that the company’s contract with the federal government prohibited lawyers from attending its sessions with immigrants. “Just out of curiosity,” the lawyer asked, “can I see a copy of the rules?” The supervisor returned with a sheet of paper. He pointed to the crucial passage in a section enumerating “participant rights.” It described “the right to confidentiality with the exception of information requested by ice.” The lawyer flashed me a furtive smirk as she refrained from commenting on the bravura display of doublespeak: Ismael had been denied his right to an attorney in order to protect his confidentiality. But the manager, a Latino man with an untucked shirt and glasses, earnestly attempted to explain himself. He said that he wanted to help, and he mentioned the possibility of Ismael getting a work permit soon. “Look,” he said, “I’m very sympathetic to him.”

When Ismael returned to the waiting room, he supplied one-word answers to the lawyer’s questions about the meeting. It had ultimately amounted to little more than a rote brush with the system. Still, it left the lingering sense that a terrible outcome had merely been postponed—which was perhaps the whole point.

No one, as a child, dreams about growing up to deport undocumented immigrants. Some 6,000 officers work in the Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) wing of ice, but this is not always a first-choice career option. “Many in ice applied to other agencies that rank higher in law-enforcement prestige,” says David Martin, a scholar of immigration law who served in the Clinton and Obama administrations. The ranks of ice are drawn in large part from retired members of the military and from former Border Patrol agents, who prefer the metropolitan locations of ice offices to the remote outposts dotting the nation’s southern border. The job is a solid option for high-school graduates, who are not eligible to apply to federal agencies that require a college education. It makes for an accessible entry point into federal law enforcement, a trajectory that comes with job security and decent pay, and perhaps the hope of someday storming buildings or standing in the backdrop of press conferences, beside tables brimming with seized contraband. Such reveries are easy enough to entertain, until the first day on the job.

ice consistently ranks among the worst workplaces in the federal government. In 2016, the organization ranked 299th on a list of 305 federal agencies in a survey of employee satisfaction. Even as Trump smothered the organization with praise and endowed it with broader responsibilities, ice still placed 288th last year.

The culture of ice is defined by a bureaucratic caste system—the sort of hierarchical distinctions that seem arcane and petty from the outside, but are essential to those on the inside. When ice was created, 15 years ago, two distinct and disparate workforces merged into one. The Immigration part of the agency’s name refers mostly to deportation officers who came over from the freshly dismantled Immigration and Naturalization Service. The Customs part of the name refers to investigators imported from the Treasury Department. This was a shotgun marriage, filled with bickering and enmity from the start. The customs investigators had adored their old institutional home and the built-in respect it accorded them. They were given little warning before being moved to a new headquarters, with new supervisors, a nebulous mission, and colleagues they considered their professional inferiors. When I interviewed one of the customs investigators, who later had a top job at ice, he still referred to the “unfortunate events of March 1, 2003”—the day ice came into official existence.

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When ICE was created, two workforces merged, one involved with immigration enforcement and the other, a higher-status group, investigating transnational crime. Members of the latter have since requested to be released from ICE. (John Moore / Getty)
After several false starts, the customs investigators were eventually restyled into a unit called Homeland Security Investigations. HSI managed to consistently find its way to glamorous cases that involved transnational crime—software piracy, child pornography, the bust of the Mexican kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera, the investigation of terrorist bombings in Paris. But for all their efforts, HSI agents still found themselves dogged by their ties to ERO and the emotionally charged issue of immigration. They were shunned by police in big cities that refused to cooperate with ice, not allowing for the fact that HSI functioned as its own distinct entity. Indeed, this summer 19 HSI agents signed a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, asking her to officially separate their division from ice. The agents wrote: “HSI’s investigations have been perceived as targeting undocumented aliens, instead of the transnational criminal organizations.” They explained that they felt HSI was paying a reputational price for its connection to ERO.

There is arguably a certain institutional hauteur to HSI. “They think of themselves as aristocrats,” one former homeland-security official told me. Among other benefits, working for HSI brings the rank of “special agent”—what’s known in federal guidelines as 1811 status—which sets officers on the same level as FBI agents. Meanwhile, ERO officers carry an 1801 classification. This position typically comes with a less favorable pay scale and limited powers. For instance, these officers are not allowed to execute search warrants.

An ERO officer’s day-to-day existence is at a distant remove from the televised image of federal law enforcement. It often consists of paper-pushing and processing immigrants through the various stations of deportation. In many instances, when ERO officers are assigned to detain criminals who are at large, they brush up against bureaucratic limitations. “You go bang on a door and they’re not there,” John Sandweg, a former acting director of ice, told me. Even if the person is home, he has the right to refrain from letting officers inside. If that happens, officers have no recourse other than to sit outside and wait.

“Regular cops get frustrated when a plea agreement is too soft,” says Sandweg. “With ERO, about 50 percent of the people you arrest will still be in the country a year later.” This is one of the many consequences of a system that—whatever one’s political views on immigration—has obvious elements of dysfunction. ice’s capacity to detain immigrants long ago outstripped the capacity of courts to process them. Immigration courts currently have a backlog of 700,000 cases, which means that someone might wait several years before ever seeing a judge. A sense of futility, therefore, has become a prevailing ethos for much of the ice rank and file. One former agent recalls learning a maxim on his first day on the job: “It’s not over until the alien wins.”

Even as some ice officers suffer from a sense of their own impotence, the outside world often depicts them as heartless jackboots. Thomas Homan has described how, as acting director of the agency, he would wake up every morning and read the latest complaints and negative coverage from the American Civil Liberties Union and mainstream media. And those aren’t the only sources of criticism. Most ice agents work in cities. Many of them are themselves Latino or have married an immigrant. As John Amaya, a former deputy chief of staff of ice, told me, “Their kids go to school and hear things; they go to the grocery store and hear shit. They are not immune.”

When I asked how ice responds to complaints and criticism, I was repeatedly told that officers can have genuine qualms about their work. Like any large organization, ice has its share of bad apples. But officials from the Obama administration vociferously countered any notion that ice is teeming with racists. Carlos Guevara, who served as an adviser to the homeland-security leadership, told me, “There are a lot of good officers … And I don’t think a lot of them feel great about picking up abuelita”—someone’s grandmother—“or somebody who’s been here for 20 years, much less being part of a policy separating kids from parents.”

To navigate this moral thicket, ice officers tell themselves comforting stories. The agency was founded, after all, in the aftermath of 9/11, when the government had failed to prevent evildoers from infiltrating the homeland and killing thousands. As one former ice official told me, “You numb yourself by saying everything we do has a national-security focus. By God, if we let this one slip by, it’s the tip of the iceberg. We never know when we’re confronted with the real threat.” The likelihood of that genuine threat, of course, is very much open to debate. Statistically speaking, an immigrant who has lived in the United States for decades, has an immaculate criminal record, and comes from Central America (like many ice targets) poses so negligible a national-security threat that it is virtually nonexistent. No immigrant from the region has ever committed a terrorist attack on U.S. soil, which is something that cannot be said of native-born Americans.

This fragile institutional psyche was on full display in ice’s obstreperous response to Obama. During the first term of his presidency, Obama pursued an aggressive policy of immigration enforcement. As late as 2013, he expelled 438,000 undocumented immigrants, a far higher number than any other recent administration did. This extreme crackdown was intended as a down payment on comprehensive immigration reform. Republicans had clamored for proof of Obama’s sincere commitment to enforcement, and he supplied it. Alas, that down payment would never be recouped. Immigration reform collapsed thanks to the guerrilla tactics of the GOP hard-liners in the House. And so, in the face of congressional inaction, Obama set about steering ice toward a more compassionate strategy. He wanted to give the agency a set of explicit and rigid priorities for whom it would detain and deport. Previously, almost any undocumented immigrant had been fair game. Now Obama set about focusing ice’s efforts on serious criminals and recent arrivals. By the middle of his second term, the administration had figured out how to translate its priorities into bureaucratic reality. It supplied ice with clear procedures—with checklists and paperwork—to ensure that the organization hewed closely to the new goals.

In the parlance of certain factions of ice, these Obama-era priorities were the “handcuffs” that prevented officers from doing their job. At various moments during these years, a broad swath of ice officers behaved as a rogue unit within the federal government. In 2012, after Obama proposed his enforcement priorities, the union representing ice officers initially didn’t allow its members to attend training sessions that inculcated the new approach. When Obama issued his plans for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (daca) that same year, the head of the union, Chris Crane, sued top administration officials to block the move. Crane became a favorite witness of then-Senator Jeff Sessions, who called Crane “an American hero.”

Upon entering the political scene, Donald Trump promoted himself as ice’s salvation. By flaying Obama’s immigration policy with uncharacteristic consistency and specificity, he spoke to the deep resentments of many ERO officers. Lavishing them with praise—“We respect and cherish our ice officers”—he constantly asserted their importance to public safety. When the ice union assembled to endorse a presidential candidate, Trump received 95 percent of the vote. And he returned the favor: During a speech exactly five days after his inauguration, the president pointed to Crane and declared, “You guys are about to be very, very busy doing your jobs.”

We know all the common knocks against government: how it overcomplicates tasks, how it resists change, how it has a remarkable capacity for inventing inefficiencies. But ice has quickly created a system of incredible scale, an industrialized process for removing human beings from the United States.

Take the example of ice Air. Twelve years ago, ice set about creating an internal mechanism for transporting deportees back to their native lands by establishing its own airline. ice Air has access to 10 planes, most of them Boeing 737s, each capable of carrying 135 deportees, dispatched from airports in five hub cities: Mesa, Arizona; San Antonio and Brownsville, Texas; Alexandria, Louisiana; and Miami. Maps like the ones found in seat-back pockets show the arcing trajectories of ice Air’s most common routes, extending out across the hemisphere. (In 2016, ice Air flew 317 trips to Guatemala, its top destination.) Like most airlines, ice Air has a baggage limit: no more than 40 pounds. Unlike most airlines, ice Air forbids passengers from wearing belts and shoelaces, for fear they might use them to commit suicide. If nothing goes amiss, stewards serve granola bars and water, or on longer flights a full meal. Sometimes they unlock the handcuffs of the deportees who have been shackled.

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In 2006, ICE established its own airline, ICE Air, to transport deportees back to their native countries. In 2016, ICE Air flew 317 trips to Guatemala, its top destination. (Edmund D. Fountain / Redux)
Yet provisions on ice Air have been a source of controversy. Last winter, a flight carrying 92 Somalians made a pit stop in Dakar, Senegal. During the layover, the plane waited for a fresh crew, which was delayed due to issues at its hotel. So the plane reportedly sat on the runway for almost 24 hours, the passengers never disembarking. ice has disputed accounts of the long delay, but some of the Somalians say that the agency failed to supply them with sufficient food and drink, and that because of faulty air-conditioning, they found breathing difficult. According to one account, they weren’t allowed to walk the aisles to the lavatory, so they relied on empty water bottles—and when their urine outpaced the supply of water bottles, they were forced to wet themselves.

To coordinate ice Air requires a certain logistical genius, especially given the organization’s aim—familiar to anyone who relies on commercial air travel—of filling as many seats as possible on each of its flights. (To execute such deportations, ice Air prefers to charter its own flights; the agency tries to avoid placing deportees on commercial flights, because airlines won’t board a passenger who actively refuses to fly.) One former ice official recalls a conversation in which a colleague boasted of an especially complex deportation to Gaza, which required traversing the Sinai Peninsula. He said the agency has felt intense congressional pressure to demonstrate that no nationality, no matter how small its presence in the United States, is beyond its deportation capacity.

ice has numeric goals, and it goes to great lengths to achieve them. Among the most important of these goals is the drive to constantly run its detention facilities at maximum capacity. In 2004, Congress directed ice to add 8,000 new beds a year. (In 1994, the government maintained a daily average of 6,785 detainees; this year, the expected average is 40,520.) This required a massive investment in detention, which Congress wanted to ensure didn’t go to waste. In 2009, Robert Byrd, the late Democratic senator from West Virginia, quietly added a provision to an appropriations bill mandating that ice “maintain a level of not less than 33,400 detention beds.” The provision was never debated and left room for competing interpretations. But for large stretches of the Obama years, Byrd’s amendment was regarded as an obligatory quota. (Last year Congress finally removed the Byrd quota, but Trump’s goals for detention far outstrip anything Congress has ever mandated.)

It’s one thing for a city to require cops to issue a minimum number of parking tickets; it’s another for the federal government to proscribe a daily goal for the number of human beings it will deprive of liberty. But the system that Byrd helped enshrine encourages precisely that. Jeremy Jong, an attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center, described to me a conversation he had with an ice official at a Louisiana detention facility. The official bragged that “he always did his best to fulfill his contractual obligation to keep the center’s beds full of inventory.”

The description of immigrants as “inventory” is a logical extension of how ice has outsourced detention to private firms, for which each confinement represents additional profit. Detention is a boom industry, backed by such megafunds as Vanguard and BlackRock, and it has experienced a decade of steroidal growth. In the months following Trump’s election, the stock prices of the biggest detention companies, the Geo Group and CoreCivic, rose by more than 100 percent. (Those prices have leveled out since then.) Last year, the bipartisan army of lobbyists employed by the Geo Group and its primary competitors included power firms Akin Gump and the Gephardt Group, founded by former House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt. That fall, the Geo Group celebrated its good fortune by holding its annual leadership conference at the Trump National Doral resort, in Miami.

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In 1994, the government detained an average of 6,785 undocumented immigrants on any given day. This year, the expected daily average is 40,520. (Kadir van Lohuizen / NOOR / Redux)
Both CoreCivic and the Geo Group maintain that they do not lobby for or promote specific legislation shaping immigration policy. But according to NPR, the detention industry donated money to 30 of the 36 co-sponsors of the infamous S.B. 1070, a broad and harsh crackdown on undocumented immigrants, which then–Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed into law in 2010. Additionally, two of Brewer’s top advisers were former lobbyists for CoreCivic. (The bill was eventually shredded by the courts on constitutional grounds.)

There are, of course, genuine public-policy rationales for ice’s contracting with private companies for detention facilities. The principal alternative is to rely on county jails, where ice reportedly rents beds for $130 a night. The detention system is supposedly encoded in civil law, but jails are inherently rooted in the criminal system. Many of the immigrants detained in jails wear brightly colored jumpsuits and live surrounded by bars and wires. Many of these jails, unlike the private facilities, have no capacity for handling non-English speakers.

Still, the private facilities are run with the explicit goal of profit—a motive that can come at the cost of the well-being of detainees. Several are in remote, rural areas, where land and labor come especially cheap. One of the primary private facilities in the South is in Lumpkin, Georgia, on the Alabama border, 140 miles from Atlanta. Civil detention is explicitly not meant to be punitive—merely a necessary step in the administrative process of deportation—but the distance to some facilities makes regular visits from relatives extremely difficult. Immigration lawyers told me that they tend not to take cases in such facilities, because access would be so difficult. Marty Rosenbluth, a lawyer from North Carolina, relocated to Lumpkin. “I’m currently the only attorney doing defense against removal cases, that I know of, between Lumpkin and Atlanta,” he told me. “I actually opened up a one-room B&B in my house to try and lure attorneys down here, since part of their excuse for not taking cases here is that the nearest hotels are an hour drive.” Even with his presence, a 2015 University of Pennsylvania Law Review study found that only 6 percent of detainees in the facility have a lawyer. Nationwide, the figure isn’t much better: 14 percent. And without a lawyer, their chances of victory in immigration court slump from slim (21 percent) to nearly hopeless (2 percent).

Private detention companies’ contracts with ice stipulate that they uphold a set of rigorous standards, but they of course seek to tamp down costs, which means that they may skimp on basic care for detainees. Take the CoreCivic facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey, which a group of lawyers and health professionals assembled by Human Rights First toured last year. What they discovered on their visits were reports of maggots in the showers and raw food served in the cafeteria, not to mention drinking water described as “pure bleach.” Several detainees said they avoid asking for dental care because the dentist at the facility only performs extractions, even when a filling would do. Mental-health treatment commonly includes “bibliotherapy”—the assignment of self-help books—despite the obvious fact that prolonged detention can bring stress and depression. CoreCivic maintains that Human Rights First’s report contained “numerous false and misleading allegations.” But these aren’t merely the stray observations of an activist group. In December, John V. Kelly, the acting inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security, issued a comprehensive report based on a series of surprise visits to detention facilities. His findings read: “We identified problems that undermine the protection of detainees’ rights, their humane treatment, and the provision of a safe and healthy environment.”

Like many bureaucracies, ice strains for growth. When the agency was created, it employed just over 2,700 deportation officers, roughly the same number of employees as the San Diego police department. That workforce has since doubled, and the organization’s ambitions have ballooned. Beyond its own budget and its network of private contractors, ice has availed itself of a provision in an immigration law signed by Bill Clinton in 1996. That provision empowered the federal government to partner with state and local police. In effect, this means ice can deputize police to enforce federal immigration laws. Not every jurisdiction has wanted to align itself with ice—indeed, most major cities have strenuously resisted, especially in the Trump era. But plenty of local police forces, many of them in suburban counties, have gladly taken up ice’s offer to collaborate.

Gwinnett County, in northern Georgia, once epitomized the old rural South, sparsely populated and largely white. But over the past few decades, its population has exploded in both size and racial diversity. Demographers say the county’s white majority is on track to be displaced by 2040. When Trump signed an executive order allowing ice to detain essentially any undocumented immigrants it encounters, the Gwinnett County police responded enthusiastically. The number of undocumented immigrants transferred to ice from local jails jumped by 248 percent during the first four months of Trump’s presidency, relative to the prior year. Gwinnett police weren’t rounding up dangerous gang members: When the Migration Policy Institute studied the new pattern of enforcement, it found that police were primarily arresting immigrants for traffic violations before handing them over to ice.

The early Trump era has witnessed wave after wave of seismic policy making related to immigration—the Muslim ban initially undertaken in his very first week in office, the rescission of daca, the separation of families at the border. Amid the frantic attention these shifts have generated, it’s easy to lose track of the smaller changes that have been taking place. But with them, the administration has devised a scheme intended to unnerve undocumented immigrants by creating an overall tone of inhospitality and menace.

Where immigration is concerned, Trump has installed a group of committed ideologues with a deep understanding of the extensive law-enforcement machinery they now control. One especially skilled participant is L. Francis Cissna, the head of the Office of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Cissna is a longtime bureaucrat at the Department of Homeland Security who styled himself a dissident during the Obama years. In 2015, he temporarily left the department to work “on detail” for Republican Senator Chuck Grassley. An MIT graduate and the son of a Peruvian immigrant, Cissna began his career as a Foreign Service officer in Haiti and then Sweden. Over time, he became a policy savant; even his ideological opponents confess that he is more fluent in the immigration system’s intricacies than they are.

From his perch in the Trump administration, Cissna has repeatedly broadcast the agency’s new attitude toward immigration. In February, he rewrote its mission statement, erasing a phrase that described the United States as a “nation of immigrants.” He explained the change by stating that he wanted to emphasize the “commitment we have to the American people”—as if there were intellectual tension between the two sentiments. Then, in June, he announced the opening of an office that would review the files of naturalized citizens, reexamining fingerprints and hunting for hints of fraud that might enable the revocation of citizenship.

Cissna is part of a close-knit coterie of former Capitol Hill staffers whom Trump has placed in charge of the immigration system. Before Trump took office, the group clustered in the offices of the conservative politicians most committed to restrictive immigration policy, especially Senators Grassley and Sessions. Even in a time when GOP policy on immigration had swung far to the right, these staffers—Stephen Miller, now a White House senior adviser, is the most famous of the bunch—existed far outside the party’s mainstream. According to former colleagues, the offices of senators such as John McCain and Marco Rubio would lose patience with them because of their eagerness to detonate any viable version of immigration reform. “They are a little cabal,” one Republican staffer who dealt closely with them told me. They specialized in churning out missives to DHS that requested information about individual immigrants so detailed, they sometimes seemed intent purely on overwhelming the system. One letter signed by Grassley, Sessions, and their Senate colleague Michael Lee asked DHS to respond “in precise detail” to queries about 250,000 immigrants.

Aside from Miller, perhaps the most important architect of Trump’s immigration policy is another young Sessions acolyte, Gene Hamilton. In 2008, while he was a law student at Washington and Lee University, Hamilton took an internship at an ice detention facility in Miami. In 2012, he scored a job as an ice lawyer in the Atlanta field office. (Back then, Atlanta was known as one of the most aggressive cities when it came to immigration enforcement: The court there granted asylum to just 2 percent of the seekers whose cases it heard. The national average is about 50 percent.)

At the beginning of the Trump presidency, Hamilton joined DHS as a senior counselor to then-Secretary John Kelly. Last year, he left DHS to serve as a top adviser to Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The logic of the job switch was made apparent to me by one former ice official, who described Sessions as the “de facto secretary of homeland security,” given his comprehensive influence over immigration policy. Together, Sessions and Hamilton have instituted a highly insular, fast-moving enforcement operation.

The work undertaken by Sessions, Hamilton, Miller, and their ilk is based to some degree on a theory first developed by Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state. Over the past year, Kobach has emerged as a prime bête noire of the left because of his ferocious, ultimately doomed attempts to stamp out a phantom epidemic of voter fraud. But for many years, he served as a lawyer for an offshoot of the Federation for American Immigration Reform—the loudest and most effective of the groups pressing for restrictive immigration laws. In that position, he helped write many of the most draconian pieces of state-level immigration legislation to wend their way into law, including Arizona’s S.B. 1070.

Kobach set out to remake immigration law to conform to a doctrine he called self-deportation or, more clinically, attrition through enforcement—a policy that experienced a vogue in 2012, when Mitt Romney, campaigning for president, briefly claimed the position as his own. The doctrine holds that the government doesn’t have the resources to round up and remove the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the nation, but it can create circumstances unpleasant enough to encourage them to exit on their own. As Kobach once wrote, “Illegal aliens are rational decision makers. If the risks of detention or involuntary removal go up, and the probability of being able to obtain unauthorized employment goes down, then at some point, the only rational decision is to return home.” Through deprivation and fear, the government can essentially drive undocumented immigrants out of the country.

Once you understand that self-deportation is the administration’s guiding theory, you can see why immigration hawks might take satisfaction in supposed policy defeats. Even if putative fiascoes such as the initial Muslim ban and family separations at the border fail in court or are ultimately reversed, they succeed in fomenting an atmosphere of fear and worry among immigrants. The theatrics are, in effect, the policy.

The Trump administration made explicit its policy that every undocumented immigrant is unsafe with the executive order that Trump signed during his first month as president, repealing Obama’s policy of prioritizing the deportation of immigrants who had committed serious crimes. As Thomas Homan testified before Congress last year, “If you’re in this country illegally and you committed a crime by entering this country, you should be uncomfortable … You should look over your shoulder, and you need to be worried.”

The administration has attempted to encode the spirit of that warning across the spectrum of immigration enforcement. For years, such enforcement has abided by a policy intended to give undocumented immigrants a sense of safety in “sensitive locations.” ice has, for instance, refrained from apprehending immigrants at schools, places of worship, and hospitals. The theory is that even if an immigrant might be at risk for deportation, she shouldn’t think twice about, say, visiting a doctor. But anecdotal evidence suggests that ice has been operating more often in the vicinity of sensitive locations: Agents arrested a father after he dropped off his daughter at school, and detained a group soon after it left a church shelter. ice has also attempted to undermine so-called sanctuary cities, which decline to hand over undocumented immigrants whom their police happen to arrest. ice has loudly trumpeted its escalation of raids in those cities, sending the message that any notion of sanctuary is pure illusion.

To date, there is little evidence that self-deportation is occurring in any meaningful numbers. Ample data, however, show that increased fear has caused immigrant families to alter their life routines. One study by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that undocumented immigrants tried to limit their driving in order to lower the chance of an inadvertent interaction with the police. Many immigrant parents now keep their kids indoors as much as they can. One woman told Kaiser she noticed that once-vibrant playgrounds in her neighborhood were suddenly vacant.

Likewise, police departments around the country have noted a sharp decrease among Latinos reporting domestic violence and abuse. (In Los Angeles, for instance, reports by Latinos of sexual assault dropped by 25 percent in the first four months of 2017 compared with the same period in 2016.) Women would apparently rather tolerate battery than expose their partner to the risk of deportation—or risk deportation themselves. According to the Houston Chronicle, waiting rooms at many health clinics serving undocumented immigrants in South Texas are half as full now as they were before Trump took office. And schools in suburban Atlanta report that immigrant parents are reluctant to sign their kids up for reduced-price lunch programs.

Researchers from UCLA interviewed teachers and counselors at schools across 12 states to gauge the impact of zero-tolerance immigration policies in the classroom. They found that children of undocumented immigrants consistently expressed fear at the prospect of returning home from school only to find their parents and siblings gone. An art teacher reported that “many students drew and colored images of their parents and themselves being separated, or about people stalking/hunting their family.”

Fears of ice can be exaggerated by word of mouth or compounded by hyperbolic news reports, especially in the Spanish-language media. But the activists who interact most frequently with ice, who pay daily visits to detention centers and immigration courts, share immigrants’ sense of trepidation. This spring, an immigration lawyer from Santa Fe named Allegra Love went to Mexico to visit a caravan of Central Americans headed to the California border. By the time she arrived, the procession, organized by the activist group Pueblo Sin Fronteras, or “People Without Borders,” had swollen to hundreds of asylum seekers and attracted the attention of the media, especially Fox News. President Trump described the caravan as a “disgrace.” Although Love has made a career of advocating on behalf of immigrants, she had come to Mexico with an explicit message of discouragement. “I wanted to keep these people safe and needed to explain to them how willing our government is to make them suffer,” she told me. She conducted a workshop in a makeshift refugee camp in the city of Puebla. As hundreds of migrants gathered, she addressed them with a microphone: “The system has become so appalling. You need to be afraid. You need to take that into account.” For the first time in her life, she was actively attempting to deter people from seeking refuge in the United States. This is the terrible irony of Trump’s policy: It turns even devoted activists into unwitting servants of its goals.

Donald Trump talks a lot about the crisis at the border. But over the past generation, the U.S. has spent tens of billions of dollars sealing the frontier with Mexico. It has invested vast sums in surveillance, fencing, drones, agents. A generation ago, politicians bemoaned the influx of Mexicans into the country. Ten years ago, Mark Krikorian, one of the most prominent conservative theorists on the subject, wrote a highly touted book warning about Mexican plans for a reconquista: Through mass migration, he argued, Mexico would attempt to erode American sovereignty and exert influence over the United States. Yet just as he promulgated that argument, the problem he diagnosed was disappearing. The nation’s rigid security has made casually traversing the border much harder. In recent years, there has often been more migration to Mexico than from Mexico. The Pew Research Center has estimated that there were 1.3 million fewer undocumented Mexican immigrants in the United States in 2016 than in 2007. Even with the recent surge of Central Americans fleeing violence in Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, illegal border crossings are a fraction of what they were in the 1980s and ’90s. In 2000, the U.S. apprehended 1.7 million people crossing the southwest border; last year, it nabbed just over 300,000. Contrary to widespread belief—and the president’s frequent complaints—very few borders have the dense, protective security layers present on America’s border with Mexico.

But even as the nation solves one problem, politicians and bureaucracies concoct new ones. Border Patrol has started aggressively taking advantage of an old regulation, long ignored, that permits an expansive definition of border, encompassing all terrain within 100 miles of the physical frontier. It has leveraged this flexible interpretation to set up checkpoints along I-95 in Maine and to board buses in Florida to ask passengers about their immigration status. Border Patrol has become a regular presence in cities such as Las Vegas and San Antonio—and its officers can be seen cruising highways in northern Ohio.

A similar mission creep afflicts ice. It’s hard to argue with the need for a bureau that can deport criminals who reside in the country illegally. But there are only so many of them. Study after study has shown that immigrants commit crimes at much lower rates than the native-born population. ice simply doesn’t have enough criminal targets to justify its enormous budget. That’s why, when Obama provided ice with strict priorities, its number of detentions quickly plummeted.

“Abolish ice” is a slogan, now fashionable among Democrats, that has a radical edge. Prudent policy, however, requires not smashing the system, but returning it to a not-so-distant past. Only five years ago, the political center deemed the legalization of the country’s 11 million undocumented immigrants a sensible element of a broad compromise. Only 15 years ago, before the birth of ice, America had a bureaucracy that didn’t treat them as a policing problem. Immigration enforcement was housed in an agency devoted to both deportation and naturalization. There’s no reason to wax nostalgic for INS, which had plenty of problems of its own. But the U.S. can now borrow from its positive example and design an institutional structure that restores a sense of proportion to the limited dangers posed by the immigrants embedded in American communities.

Lacking a large number of worthy targets, ice will train more of its attention on the likes of Jack, an undocumented immigrant from Mauritania whom I met this spring. (Jack is not his real name, but he does go by an Americanized nickname.) As Jack drove me around Columbus in his aging but meticulously maintained sedan, I came to think of him as an evangelist. With his round face, shaved pate, and impressive mustache, he exuded an optimism so cheery that it can only be described as faithful. I found myself disappearing into his homilies, as he set out to convert me to his version of the American dream.

As we meandered past Refugee Road toward his neighborhood, he wanted me to know that he had had the vision to buy a model home at a good price long before the developer had filled out his street. When we arrived at his place, he asked me to gaze out upon his little village of cookie-cutter houses and winding asphalt. The morning’s drizzle had turned to mist, and Jack closed his eyes and theatrically inhaled, an expression of self-satisfaction like one might see in a TV commercial.

He took me inside through his garage, past a shelving unit filled with four tiers of sneakers. Jack, a farmer’s son, takes huge—and very American—pleasure in abundance. Nearly every room in his house seemed to have a television set tuned to CNN. I saw pictures of his young son—born in Columbus, and a U.S. citizen—as well as an image of the former Ohio State University football coach Jim Tressel, whom Jack once met at a parade. I followed him to his basement, which he is in the early phases of transforming into a shrine to the team. The walls will be painted in the school’s colors, scarlet and gray. “It will be my man cave,” he told me.

Jack then led me up to his office, which has his favorite view in the house. It looks down on his deck and grill, across a grassy expanse of yard. Jack, who is in his mid-40s but looks older, is a professional mover. He works for a big company that specializes in long-distance relocations. At the beginning of the Trump administration, Jack even packed up the home of a soon-to-be senior Cabinet member and hauled his belongings to Washington. On the shelf opposite his desk, he keeps the awards he’s collected from his company for the excellence of his work.

“I refuse to give all this up,” he said. An officer at ice, whom he considers especially kind, has told him that it’s only a matter of time before he is detained and deported. But Jack, ever the American optimist, believes there’s no problem that can’t be solved. “I will tell them that I know I did the wrong thing. I came here without papers. But look at me. I’ve never broken a law. Fine, deport the guys who have committed a crime. I will say, ‘Look. It’s me, Jack.’ I will joke with them and let them know I’m not a threat. When I talk to them reasonably, they will relax.” Even with the threat of deportation hanging over him, he has disciplined himself to keep on believing. A few days earlier, he had bought a truck to start his own hauling company. “I want to employ people, to give them opportunities like I had.”

As we went through his office, he became wistful. He opened his closet and showed me the suit he had worn on his flight to America as a young man, almost 20 years ago. He had me run my hands along its frayed lapel. Then he grabbed a leather-bound notebook sitting on his printer and opened it. “Here are things that my girlfriend will need to know.” He had written instructions on how to access his bank accounts, open his safe, sell his house, reach his son. As he showed this to me, he finally broke from his customarily cheery character and said nothing. He closed the book and traced the cover with his finger one last time. Then he looked at me and said, “When the day comes.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ar ... ce/565772/
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Re: ICE stories

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Aug 16, 2018 4:10 pm

The manufacturer says the device can be “downsized to fit very small children.”


ICE Orders Dozens of Straitjacket-Like Restraints

August 16, 2018
In TYT Investigates by TYT Investigates


New ICE restraining device as it appeared on “Orange is the New Black,” as featured on the website of the device’s manufacturer, Safe Restraints, Inc. (Image: Safe Restraints video screengrab.)

By Ken Klippenstein

Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) Air Operations has ordered 60 “Wrap” restraint devices — full-body restraints that resemble straitjackets — for the purpose of restraining detainees during removal operations, according to federal procurement documents reviewed by TYT.

Image
Demonstration of The Wrap. (Image: SafeRestraints.com)

The Wrap is intended for detainees “who may be non-compliant, overly aggressive, combative or in a highly agitated state,” the documents say. The manufacturer says the device can be “downsized to fit very small children.”

It comes as no surprise that detainees facing deportation would be in an agitated state: Since Trump’s immigration policies took effect, there have been numerous cases of migrants who committed suicide after being separated from their families. Reports also suggest that many deportees face a return to life-threatening environments, such as domestic abuse or gang violence.

Many deportees may qualify for refugee or asylum status; however, the US government has been slow to process asylum requests — in some cases simply declining to hear them.

Aside from facing dangers in their home countries, migrants have also been detained by ICE at facilities with histories of abuse allegations, as TYT previously reported. At one such facility in 2002, a 15-year-old girl died from asphyxia after being restrained by staff members. The county medical examiner ruled her death a homicide.

The Wrap reportedly has been implicated in multiple fatalities, but no liability has been established in court and its maker, Safe Restraints, Inc., of California, maintains that no deaths or injuries have resulted from its use. An Arkansas juvenile facility reportedly was told to stop using The Wrap after officials found it was deployed as punishment rather than solely for safety purposes.


Excerpt from government price listings for The Wrap. (Image: GSAAdvantage.gov.)
ICE’s adoption of The Wrap represents a departure from former policy, according to the documents reviewed by TYT. Prior to the Trump administration, ICE had used what it called a “Humane Restraint Blanket.”

On September 18, 2017, ICE’s Office of Training and Tactical Programs published an updated Authorized Restraints Device Guidelines, in which the Wrap became the only authorized soft restraint device.

The Wrap’s manufacturer, Safe Restraints, Inc., on its website lists several federal government customers. With the exception of the FBI training academy at Quantico, all of the customers listed are ICE facilities:

ICE-Fort Benning, GA
ICE-Mesa, AZ
ICE-Fort Snelling, MN
ICE-Fresno, CA
ICE-Sacramento, CA
ICE-Phoenix
The company says hundreds of police and other local agencies use the device, as well.

Ken Klippenstein is a freelance journalist who can be reached on Twitter at @kenklippenstein or via email: kenneth.klippenstein@gmail.com

Follow TYT Investigates on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to stay on top of exclusive news stories from The Young Turks.
https://tytnetwork.com/2018/08/16/ice-o ... estraints/
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Re: ICE stories

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Aug 30, 2018 10:10 am

Migrant mother plans multiple lawsuits after toddler detained at ICE dies weeks later

Aris Folley08/29/18 11:43 AM EDT
A migrant mother from Guatemala who alleges that substandard care at a Texas detention facility is to blame for her toddler’s death is reportedly planning to take legal action against the U.S. government.

CBS News reported on Wednesday that Yazmin Juarez, 20, and her 18-month-old daughter, Mariee, arrived in the U.S. in March seeking asylum. The young mother claims she and her child were then placed in a detention facility operated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), where she alleges her child received inadequate medical care that lead to her death six weeks after they were released.

"She had an amazing smile and chubby cheeks. She had never had any serious medical conditions or chronic medical conditions of any kind. She was a healthy kid," said Stanton Jones, Juarez's lawyer, said, according to the network.

Lawyers representing Juarez said her daughter contracted a respiratory infection at the facility, which they allege went under-treated for nearly a month. Juarez claims she sought treatment for Mariee and she was prescribed medication, including Tylennol and honey, that failed to help her daughter.

Shortly after their release from the center, the mother and daughter flew to New Jersey to stay with Juarez’s mother. The toddler would later be diagnosed for respiratory failure and hospitalized before dying six weeks later.

CBS News reports that Juarez now plans a series of lawsuits, one of which seeks $40 million in damages from an Arizona city that serves as the government’s prime contractor for the Texas facility.

Due to pending litigation, ICE has declined to comment on Juarez’s case. However, the agency said in a statement to CBS News that it "takes very seriously the health, safety and welfare of those in our care…including providing access to necessary and appropriate medical care."
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing- ... t-ice-dies
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Re: ICE stories

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Sep 06, 2018 5:52 pm

ICE demands ‘exhaustive’ voting records from North Carolina

By Brian Murphy bmurphy@mcclatchydc.comWASHINGTON

President Donald Trump signs an executive order on immigration, at the Pentagon in Arlington, Va., Jan. 27, 2017. STEPHEN CROWLEY NYT
Immigration authorities want North Carolina elections officials to turn over nearly a decade’s worth of voting records by the end of the month.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of North Carolina subpoenaed records Friday from the state board of elections and 44 county elections boards in the eastern part of the state. A meeting notice from the board says the subpoena came at the request of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Among the state records from Jan. 1, 2010 through Aug. 30, 2018 that were requested: all voter registration applications, federal write-in absentee ballots, federal post card applications, early-voting application forms, provisional voting forms, absentee ballot request forms, all “admission or denial of non-citizen return forms,” and all voter registration cancellation or revocation forms.

North Carolina has nearly 7 million registered voters, according to the State Board of Elections and Ethics Enforcement. The board said it has more than 15 million documents and images stored within the state’s voter registration database.

Wake County, one of the 44 counties in the Eastern District’s jurisdiction, received its subpoena Friday via fax. Documents requested from the county are: “Any and all poll books, e-poll books, voting records, and/or voter authorization documents, and executed official ballots (including absentee official ballots), that were submitted to, filed by, received by, and/or maintained by the Wake County Board of Elections from August 30, 2013 through August 30, 2018.”

The state board said the request for “executed official ballots” for the 44 counties includes more than 2.2 million ballots that are traceable to the voters who cast them. These are ballots that were cast by mail or at early voting, according to the board. Those ballots have an identifying number on them. The request includes more than 3.3 million ballots that cannot be traced to individuals who voted on Election Day.

Wake County has more than 556,094 traceable ballots.

The office of the Eastern District of North Carolina said it had no comment on the subpoenas.

Gary Sims, the director of Wake County’s board of elections, said his staff has not begun to gather the data requested nor has it responded to the subpoena. The state and counties must appear in court with the documents in Wilmington on Sept. 25 at 8 a.m.


Criminal and non-criminal immigrants are being targeted by ICE agents
Last year arrests of undocumented but "non-criminal aliens” more than doubled from the previous year. A recent study shows an overall decline in the arrests and deportation of “non-criminal aliens," but are slightly up under President Trump.

“We’re going to see what information we receive from the state board meeting this Friday,” Sims said.

The state board plans to meet Friday at 10 a.m. The state board is “deeply concerned” by the request, it said in an email sent to the boards of elections in each of the 44 counties.

“We are deeply concerned by the administrative drain on county boards of elections in order to comply with the extensive subpoenas immediately prior to a federal election, including the necessary reproduction of millions of documents (all ballots, etc.). The subpoenas faxed to county boards are the most exhaustive on record,” wrote Josh Lawson, general counsel for the state board.

“In our view, compliance with the subpoena as-written will materially affect the ability of county administrators to perform time-critical tasks ahead of absentee voting and early voting.”

“The timing and scope of these subpoenas from ICE raise very troubling questions about the necessity and wisdom of federal interference with the pending statewide elections,” said Kareem Crayton, interim executive director of the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, a Durham-based nonprofit providing assistance to social justice causes. “With so many well-established threats to our election process from abroad, it is odd to see federal resources directed to this particular concern.”

In August, 19 people were charged with voting illegally because they weren’t U.S. citizens, The News & Observer reported. The people hailed from countries across the globe.

A federal grand jury in Wilmington handed up the indictments, which were announced by Robert J. Higdon Jr., U.S. attorney for the eastern district.

A post-2016 audit using state and federal databases identified potential non-citizens who voted in North Carolina. The potential non-citizen voters were sent a letter, and 41 admitted to not being citizens. The 41 came from 28 different countries and all were legally in the country, including one who was in her 70s and had lived in the U.S. for more than 50 years. An additional 34 people identified by the audit were able to provide proof of citizenship. Another 61 people did not respond to the letter, according to the state board.

The district includes Raleigh, Elizabeth City, Fayetteville, Greenville, New Bern and Wilmington.


The 44 counties are Beaufort, Bertie, Bladen, Brunswick, Camden, Carteret, Chowan, Columbus, Craven, Cumberland, Currituck, Dare, Duplin, Edgecombe, Franklin, Gates, Granville, Greene, Halifax, Harnett, Hertford, Hyde, Johnston, Jones, Lenoir, Martin, Nash, New Hanover, Northampton, Onslow, Pamlico, Pasquotank, Pender, Perquimans, Pitt, Robeson, Sampson, Tyrrell, Vance, Wake, Warren, Washington, Wayne and Wilson.
https://www.newsobserver.com/news/polit ... 46725.html
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Re: ICE stories

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Sep 07, 2018 11:58 am

Democracy NC


9-Member ncsbe Board (1 Unaffiliated, 4 Republicans, 4 Democrats) moves to adjourn after deciding unanimously to work to quash state and county-level ICE subpoenas.

(In short, NC has decided to fight back against these excessive and harmful anti-voter requests.)
https://twitter.com/democracync/status/ ... 0874527744
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