Fintan O’Toole: Trial runs for fascism are in full flow

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Re: Fintan O’Toole: Trial runs for fascism are in full flow

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Dec 17, 2018 7:39 am

3C68EA93-902F-4970-A1AF-025E4166792C.jpeg


Lorena and her two children hold out their arms to show the numbers they were given to be on a list at Casa del Migrante to seek political asylum in the United States on Nov. 28, 2018. (Photo: Adria Malcolm for Yahoo News)
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Re: Fintan O’Toole: Trial runs for fascism are in full flow

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Dec 19, 2018 8:49 am

15,000 children in U.S. custody

Image
Claudia Maquin shows a photo of here daughter

Her name Is Jakelin Amei Rosmery Caal Maquin

Her name Is Jakelin Amei Rosmery Caal Maquin

Her name Is Jakelin Amei Rosmery Caal Maquin

she died in U.S. custody
181215-jakelin-amei-rosmery-caal-maquin-al-1009_d57ef1890558ac6f150f465a9a2786c8.fit-760w.jpg





We warned DHS that a migrant child could die in U.S. custody. Now one has.

Pamela McPhersonDecember 19 at 6:00 AM
A heart-shaped sign displays the name of Jakelin Caal Maquin in Raxruha, Guatemala, on Saturday. The 7-year-old girl died in a Texas hospital after being taken into custody by Border Patrol agents in a remote stretch of New Mexico desert. (Oliver de Ros/AP) (Oliver De Ros/AP)
When we learned last week of the death of 7-year-old Jakelin Caal Maquin, we were serving as government experts briefing a delegation from Congress before lawmakers visited family detention facilities in South Texas.

The news that Jakelin had died in U.S. Customs and Border Protection custody after crossing the border from Mexico during her journey from Guatemala came as a shock to many, but not to us. This was the very danger we had warned of in 2014 during our first inspection of a family detention facility in Artesia, N.M.

For four years, we have been inspecting detention facilities as contractors for the Department of Homeland Security. We are government experts in the medical and mental health care of children and families in immigration detention. Jakelin was apprehended in a remote desert in New Mexico and never held in a family detention center, which makes her case slightly different from the ones we’ve studied closely. But we fear that unless U.S. authorities stop detaining children, Jakelin will not be the last child to die in government custody.

(Contacted by The Washington Post, a DHS spokesman said Jakelin’s case has nothing to do with family detention centers: “Upon encountering a large group of illegal aliens in one of the most remote parts of our border, Border Patrol agents professionally and promptly took the appropriate action to get Jakelin Caal Maquin the needed medical attention. She spent no time in a family detention center. The Border Patrol saves more than 4,300 people every year in the border environment; unfortunately, they were unable to save one more last week.”)

We first visited a family detention facility in Artesia four years ago on a contract with the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. After that trip, we documented how ill-prepared DHS was in providing adequate care for children in its custody at the Artesia facility. We found systemic problems in the provision of basic care, including a lack of pediatric providers, widespread problems with language access and poor coordination among multiple agencies.

[Civil servants said separating families was illegal. The administration ignored us.]

As we toured Artesia then, a member of our inspection team who had no medical training spotted a 16-month-old child who was listless and sickly. We referred the child to the medical unit and set about reviewing the child’s medical record with staff. That record documented that the mother had brought her child to the medical unit multiple times over a 10-day period for a diarrheal illness, yet the child received no definitive treatment, and the mother was repeatedly sent away with reassurance, some Pedialyte and instructions to continue breast feeding. Over the course of 10 days, under the care of government physicians (many of whom lacked adequate pediatric training and experience), the toddler lost nearly one-third of their body weight, a finding consistent with life-threatening dehydration.

Experienced pediatric providers would have considered serious dehydration at 10 percent body-weight loss and sent the child to an emergency room for intravenous fluids and further evaluation and treatment. Until we brought our findings about the documented weight loss to the attention of the medical staff, though, no medical provider had noticed how critically ill the child was. Once staffers at the facility recognized how close the child had come to death from the easily treatable condition of dehydration under the care and custody of the U.S. government, they expressed genuine humility and alarm.

In our debriefing to multiple agencies, including high-ranking DHS officials, we placed our government on notice. We warned them that the children arriving at these facilities were vulnerable and medically and psychologically at risk. These children required comprehensive medical and mental health care. We pointed out that the government had narrowly averted a tragedy in this case and warned that if it continued to detain at-risk children, loss of life was a real possibility.

Because of this and other findings of systemic failures to provide adequate care, our team recommended that the Artesia detention facility be closed immediately. Within two weeks, the recommendation of our inspection team was heeded, and Artesia was permanently shut down. Unfortunately, the closing of Artesia was followed by the opening of new family detention facilities at Karnes and Dilley, Tex., the facilities visited last week by the congressional delegation.

[I crossed the border seeking safety. Instead, they took my daughter away.]

And despite our repeated efforts to warn the government of ongoing harm to children, family detention has not only continued but also been expanded greatly under the Trump administration. This rapid expansion has put more children in harm’s way. In July 2018, after our efforts to warn officials within DHS had failed to produce any results, we alerted Congress about our concerns that plans to expand family detention created an imminent risk to the health and safety of children.

Detaining immigrant children harms them and puts them at great risk. We are not alone in realizing this. Since we first spoke out, 14 medical professional associations, including the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Physicians, the American Psychiatric Association and many others have all expressed unequivocal support for our call to prevent harm to immigrant children caused by detention. CBP officials and others working in the immigration system are not deliberately trying to harm children. But when the confinement of children is prioritized over care, risks already posed by conditions of detention foreseeably escalate.

A civilized and humane society would greet frail and vulnerable children arriving on our border with compassion and care. Children coming into the custody of the United States should be immediately screened for both physical and mental health problems by qualified health professionals. Children should be provided with humane care and treatment in a nurturing community setting. Only then should asylum and other legal procedures proceed, and those processes should proceed without the unnecessary detention of the children and their families. This approach, prioritizing care first, would have give children like Jakelin a fighting chance.

As physicians, we have a duty to speak out against policies and practices that threaten the health and safety of children and their families. For years, the medical community has warned that the toxic stresses of detention itself carry great risks to the health and safety of children, and as such, family detention cannot be justified.

We can and we must prevent more children from suffering like Jakelin. America is better than this. We owe these children care and compassion — not confinement.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/ ... 99dbea3726
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Re: Fintan O’Toole: Trial runs for fascism are in full flow

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Jan 21, 2019 10:49 pm

Leaked Memo Reveals Trump Administration's "Immoral" Plan to "Traumatize" Migrant Children
"It appears that they wanted to have it both ways—to separate children from their parents but deny them the full protections generally awarded to unaccompanied children."
byJessica Corbett, staff writer
Image
Sen. Jeff Merkley (D.-Ore.)
Sen. Jeff Merkley (D.-Ore.) appeared on MSNBC's "All In With Chris Hayes" Thursday night to discuss a leaked document about the Trump administration's family separation policy. (Photo: MSNBC)
Following reports on Thursday that federal officials forcibly separated thousands more migrant children from their families than previously reported, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D.-Ore.) released a document to NBC News revealing the Trump administration intended to "traumatize children and intentionally create a humanitarian crisis at the border."


The December 2017 draft memo—which Merkley shared with NBC News after receiving it from a government whistleblower—shows that Trump administration officials wanted to deport children more quickly by denying them asylum hearings after taking them away from their parents.

"It appears that they wanted to have it both ways—to separate children from their parents but deny them the full protections generally awarded to unaccompanied children," concluded ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt, who led a class-action lawsuit on behalf of migrant parents.

President Donald Trump's "child immigration strategy is immoral and comes from a dark place in the heart of this administration," Merkley declared, responding to the revelations on Twitter. "Children are NOT expendable commodities in political battles."

The leaked document, as NBC reports,

also shows officials wanted to specifically target parents in migrant families for increased prosecutions, contradicting the administration's previous statements. In June, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said the administration did "not have a policy of separating families at the border" but was simply enforcing existing law.

The authors noted that the "increase in prosecutions would be reported by the media and it would have a substantial deterrent effect."

The memo was shared with high-ranking members of DHS and the Justice Department before then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, an ex-senator infamous for his anti-immigrant positions, officially unveiled the administration's cruel "zero tolerance" policy in the spring.

Merkley, a vocal critic of Trump's immigration policies, appeared on MSNBC's "All In With Chris Hayes" to discuss the developments:
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/ ... t-children


seemslikeadream » Thu Jan 17, 2019 4:12 pm wrote:
Thousands More Migrant Children Were Separated From Parents, New Watchdog Report Finds

A new report shows that in 2017, government officials noticed a “steep increase” in separated children in detention centers.

Angelina Chapin
The Trump administration may have taken “thousands” more immigrant children from parents and guardians at the border than was previously known, and does not know how many families were separated in total, according to a report released Thursday by the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services. The government also does not know if these families were reunified.

This group is in addition to the 2,737 children the government separated from their parents starting last April, as part of a “zero tolerance” policy that required all migrants to be criminally prosecuted after crossing the border.

In the summer of 2017, staff and officials from the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), which runs the government shelters for unaccompanied migrant children, saw a “steep increase” in the number of separated children.

According the inspector general’s report, these children were “often very young” and required “placement at specially licensed facilities,” which resulted in a shortage of beds.

The report does not specify the exact number of kids who were separated from their parents and guardians because ORR staff were only informally tracking the issue, nor does it explain why these children were taken from their families. It’s likely impossible for the government to determine the full scope of how many migrant kids the Trump administration has taken away from their parents.

A boy and father from Honduras are taken into custody by U.S. Border Patrol agents near the U.S.-Mexico Border on June 12, 20
John Moore via Getty Images
A boy and father from Honduras are taken into custody by U.S. Border Patrol agents near the U.S.-Mexico Border on June 12, 2018, near Mission, Texas.
Michelle Brané, the director of migrant rights and justice at the Women’s Refugee Commission, said that her organization noticed an uptick in the number of family separations during 2017 and filed a complaint about the practice to the Department of Homeland Security, along with other immigrant rights groups.

Brané did not see an explicit policy during that time about taking children away from their parents at the border, but the administration was sending “plenty of messages” to staff in support of the practice, she said.

In March of 2017, then-Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly told CNN the department was considering family separation. From July to October of that year, the Trump administration ran a “pilot program” to test a “zero tolerance” policy in El Paso.

“We have been saying [this administration was] separating kids long before ‘zero tolerance,’” said Brané. “A lot of children were not counted in that snapshot.”

Katie Waldman, a DHS spokeswoman, told HuffPost in a statement: “It was and continues to be standard for apprehended minors to be separated when the adult is not the parent or legal guardian, the child’s safety is at risk or serious criminal activity by the adult. ... For the HHS OIG to claim it was not known that DHS is actively enforcing this policy in the same manner for more than a decade children were placed in HHS custody, casts doubt on the HHS OIG’s credibility on this topic.”

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The public and political outcry against Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy was so strong that the president signed an executive order to stop family separation in June. And this new report has re-stoked anger over a cruel practice that dehumanizes immigrants.

“The Trump Administration’s family separation policy is more than a bureaucratic lapse in judgment. It is and was a cruel policy inconsistent with the values of this nation,” said Senator Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) in a statement. “It’s inconceivable that the government of the United States chose to secretly separate thousands of children from their parents or guardians, was unable or unwilling to reunite these families for months due to incompetent leadership and poor planning, and still doesn’t know how many children were separated.”

We have been saying [this administration was] separating kids long before ‘zero tolerance.’ Michelle Brané, the director of migrant rights and justice at the Women’s Refugee Commission
Durbin also called for Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen to resign.

In Ms. L v. ICE, an ACLU lawsuit that required the Trump administration to reunite separated children with their parents, the organization also criticized the government for failing to properly keep track of separated families, which forced immigration advocates to find the locations of hundreds of deported parents themselves.

According to the inspector general’s report, 159 children who were separated under “zero tolerance” are still in ORR care. More than half of these children’s parents were deported and opted to keep their kids in the U.S. because of the life-threatening situations they fled back in Central America.

“This report reaffirms that the government never had a clear picture of how many children it ripped from their parents,” said Lee Gelernt, lead attorney and deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project in a statement. “We will be back in court over this latest revelation.”

Brané says the fact that the Trump administration both takes children from their parents and then fails to properly track those separations shows a cruel indifference to immigrants.

“It shows an extreme disregard for people’s rights and for the safety of children,” she said. “This administration doesn’t see these families and children as people who deserve consideration.”

This story has been updated with a statement from a DHS spokeswoman.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/th ... e98ffbb4a3
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Re: Fintan O’Toole: Trial runs for fascism are in full flow

Postby Jerky » Tue Jan 22, 2019 1:48 am

^^^^

Could THIS be one of the straws that finally collapses the camel's hump? or have the neural pathways forged to deliver whatever neurotransmitter it is that triggers the feeling we call "outrage" already been carved so permanently and so deep that yet another flash flood of them is destined to slosh its way past, all but unnoticed?

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Re: Fintan O’Toole: Trial runs for fascism are in full flow

Postby Jerky » Tue Jan 22, 2019 1:49 am

Who do you think set those fires, Rory?

Rory » 27 Nov 2018 18:21 wrote:
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Re: Fintan O’Toole: Trial runs for fascism are in full flow

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Feb 05, 2019 5:44 pm

7 of the Top Immigration Lies From the Trump Administration

By Laura Muñoz Lopez Posted on February 5, 2019, 9:00 am
President Donald Trump speaks to the press as he departs the White House in Washington, D.C., on January 10, 2019.
Getty/Brendan SmialowskiPresident Donald Trump speaks to the press as he departs the White House in Washington, D.C., on January 10, 2019.

This column contains corrections.

This evening, President Donald Trump will deliver his annual State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress. In last year’s address, Trump spent more time talking about immigration than any other issue, and he used the speech to attack immigrants by spreading lies and instilling fear in the American people. Given the horrific events of the past two months—including the longest-ever partial government shutdown over an unnecessary and unpopular border wall, the deaths of two children in Border Patrol custody, the tear-gassing of asylum seekers at the border, and more—he will undoubtedly come back to the same themes in this year’s State of the Union address.

Here are 7 of the top immigration lies that President Trump and his administration have spread since taking office:

Data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) show that apprehensions at the southern border have declined more than 75 percent since 2000. The individuals still arriving at the border are largely asylum seekers fleeing violence in Central America—most of whom are children and families. So while President Trump is correct that there is a humanitarian situation at the border, it is not a security crisis. As such, the situation requires not the heavy-handed response the administration has proposed but instead a humanitarian response that takes into account the need to protect children and families arriving at the border, allows individuals to exercise their legal right to apply for asylum, and lives up to the values of freedom and refuge upon which America was founded.

The president insists that a border wall is needed to stop the entry of dangerous drugs along the southern border. However, the Justice Department’s Drug Enforcement Administration has concluded that most drug trafficking occurs through ports of entry into the United States, not in between them. CBP drug seizure data confirm this finding. Additionally, the purest form of fentanyl, an extremely strong opioid, is often transported into the United States through the mail. A wall would do little to stop this. In an effort to halt the trafficking of these dangerous drugs into the country, the Democratic House members appointed to the conference committee currently considering the fiscal year 2019 Homeland Security appropriations bill have proposed far more effective solutions: investing in new screening equipment “at the land ports of entry” and purchasing “new equipment at mail processing facilities.”

The Trump administration terminated the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program in September 2017, throwing the lives of hundreds of thousands of recipients into chaos. Since then, President Trump has walked away from multiple compromises and has repeatedly used Dreamers as bargaining chips to try to put forth his anti-immigrant legislative agenda, which includes cutting legal immigration, gutting family reunification, criminalizing undocumented immigrants, and eliminating protections for asylum seekers and children fleeing persecution and torture—all while stopping short of actually delivering real protections for Dreamers.

The Trump administration terminated the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designations for Honduras, El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua, Nepal, and Sudan—among other countries. This affects more than 300,000 TPS holders, many of whom have made the United States their home for decades. Government documents released in a lawsuit challenging several TPS termination decisions show that political appointees ignored the recommendations of career staff and stretched the truth to make the case for the termination of TPS. They also disregarded former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s concerns that ending TPS for Honduras and El Salvador would worsen conditions in the region.

In 2015, Donald Trump started his presidential bid by insulting Mexican immigrants and describing them as criminals.** Since then, the president has consistently equated immigrants to criminals, regardless of the facts. Research collected by the Cato Institute shows that immigrants do not increase local crime rates and are less likely to be convicted of crime than native-born Americans. When comparing native-born Americans to undocumented immigrants, the Cato Institute found that undocumented immigrants across the nation have lower rates of incarceration and “are less likely to be incarcerated” overall.

President Trump and Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen have both stated that immigrants going through removal proceedings—particularly those applying for asylum—simply do not appear at their court dates, instead choosing to remain in the United States unlawfully. However, the Department of Justice’s own statistics show that nearly three-quarters of all immigrants appear at their hearings, including nearly 90 percent of those seeking asylum. As various organizations have pointed out, in many of the remaining cases, it’s the government that withholds important information that leads to unjust deportations. Just last year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that notices to appear in immigration court filed by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) must provide a specific date and time for an immigrant to appear. Previously, DHS was filing notices without that information, which set people up for failure in an already backlogged court system. In response to the ruling, DHS began filing thousands of notices with arbitrary dates and times that it likely didn’t intend to keep because DHS officials didn’t show up for court on the dates specified. There are also times when immigrants do not show up because they have moved and are unaware that they must change their address with the immigration court—therefore failing to receive the court notice to appear. What the administration consistently fails to realize is that the single best way to ensure appearance is to ensure that immigrants are represented by legal counsel. Data analyzed by the American Immigration Council found that immigrants who had counsel were far more likely to attend their immigration court hearings and avoid removal orders caused by missing court dates.

And counsel is not just critical to appearance rates: A national study in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review on access to counsel in immigration proceedings found that immigrants with counsel were 15 times more likely to apply for relief, and five times more likely to receive it, compared with those without counsel. Analysis by the American Immigration Council found that detained immigrants with counsel were 10-and-a-half times more likely to succeed compared with detained immigrants who did not have counsel.

Perhaps the biggest lie the president has told is that Mexico will pay for the wall along the southern border, the same wall that nearly 60 percent of Americans oppose. If Mexico is paying, then why did the president shut down the government over more than $5 billion for a down payment on the wall? The truth is that American taxpayers would be the ones to fund the wall, not Mexico, as has been fact-checked multiple times.

And it’s not just taxpayers who will suffer. Landowners on the border will lose their property to eminent domain if the Trump administration builds the wall.

Conclusion

As the president gives his State of the Union address this evening, it is imperative that the American people recognize fact from fiction. The president has used lies to attack immigrants since the beginning of his presidential campaign and has continued to use this reprehensible tactic while in office. As the American people listen to President Trump’s speech, they should remember that contrary to what the president peddles as the truth, poll after poll shows that the American public supports immigrants and immigration reform and rejects the Trump administration’s lies and nativist agenda.

Laura Muñoz Lopez is a special assistant for Immigration Policy at the Center for American Progress.

* Correction, February 5, 2019: The fourth quote has been corrected to include its reference to extending TPS for Sudan.

** Correction, February 5, 2019: This column has been corrected to state that Donald Trump began his presidential campaign in 2015.
https://www.americanprogress.org/issues ... istration/





Caroline Orr

Trump is fear-mongering about immigrants and crime again, but the research is clear: Immigrants. including those who are in the U.S. illegally, are far *less* likely to commit crimes than native-born citizens. #SOTU
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Re: Fintan O’Toole: Trial runs for fascism are in full flow

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Feb 24, 2019 9:39 am

Immigrants At A Detention Center Were Fed Slimy Meat And Lived In "Inhumane" Conditions. Now There's A Special Hearing


Inspectors found moldy bread, blood from raw chicken leaking in refrigerator units, and other conditions that posed "significant threats" to immigrant detainees.


Brianna Sacks
BuzzFeed News Reporter
Last updated on February 22, 2019, at 4:37 p.m. ET

Officials in New Jersey are holding a hearing regarding squalid and unsanitary conditions at a large detention center for immigrants that were cataloged in a scathing inspection report last week.

The Essex County Correctional Facility has a contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to house nearly 1,000 immigrants as they await deportation hearings or their removal from the US. In July, the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which oversees ICE, visited the detention center unannounced and witnessed an array of "unsanitary and unsafe conditions," unreported security incidents, and other serious violations, according to the report.

Inspectors found that about 800 men had been living in conditions that posed "significant threats" to their health and safety, detailing "slimy, foul-smelling lunch meat," moldy bread, and mildew-covered housing units.

They also reported finding open packages of raw chicken "leaking blood all over refrigeration units" and staff serving hamburgers "that were foul smelling and unrecognizable."

In interviews, detainees said the food caused infections, vomiting, and diarrhea. One man said he started a liquid-only diet because the meals were so horrific. Over a period of six months, the men filed 200 kitchen-related grievances, with comments like, "For dinner, we were served meatballs that smell like fecal matter."

According to inspectors, the dining situation was so substandard that ICE and facility leaders replaced the kitchen manager during the visit.

Photos of the housing units show mold and mildew covering the walls and "unsanitary" showers, large leak stains on the ceilings, and tattered mattresses tied together with sheets to keep the stuffing from falling out.

"We observed two of the leaks dripping directly onto detainee beds," officials wrote. "Mold in the showers extended into the hallways leading to the showers."

ICE requires that all detainees get to spend time outside, but the detention center had no outdoor space. Instead, inspectors say the facility had erected "large
glass enclosures inside detainee living areas with mesh cages at the top to
allow in outside air."

The report notes that ICE had promised to build a soccer field at the facility when it started housing detainees there in 2010, but never did.

"ICE officials have never documented concerns regarding outdoor recreation in their weekly inspections or cited the facility for failure to meet this detention standard since it began housing detainees," inspectors stated.

Essex County also repeatedly failed to notify immigration officials about incidents involving detainees, the report added.

In April 2018, an immigrant found a county jail guard's loaded gun in a bathroom while he was cleaning as part of his job duties. He reported the weapon, but the detention center never told ICE about the incident, which is a contract violation. Facility leaders suspended the guard for 45 days and admitted to inspectors that they had instructed the detainee "not to discuss the matter with anyone else," according to the report.

It was the fourth time in less than a year that the detention center did not report issues involving immigrants, despite ICE previously citing the facility for not telling them about "fights and hospitalizations for mental illness," inspectors wrote.

The report concluded that ICE and the facility promised to address and fix the poor conditions.

On Wednesday night, Essex County's Board of Chosen Freeholders announced that they will be holding a public hearing regarding the facility.

"After reviewing the report in detail, it is clear a follow up inspection is a prudent course of action," Kyalo Mulumba, a spokesperson for the Freeholders, told BuzzFeed News, adding that the board will "convene an ICE subcommittee meeting within the next 30 days to address any additional concerns."

Despite the report's findings, county and jail officials have said the facility provides "a clean, safe, and secure environment for its inmates and staff," and has an unblemished record, having earned "100 percent compliance ratings from the state for the past 10 years."

"Every year we are inspected eight to 10 times," Anthony Puglisi, a spokesperson for the county, told BuzzFeed News on Thursday. "The inspection from the OIG was the first negative inspection we have had and we are taking these recommendations very seriously and, in fact, have already addressed the concerns outlined in the report."

He added: "It is not the horrible place the report makes it out to be."

A few days before DHS released its damning report, however, the nearly 800 men were held in their cells from Feb. 4 to 8 as officers combed through their units looking for contraband, county officials said.

Lawyers representing some of the detainees told WNYC that immigrants were kept in their two-man cell for the entire four days. Some in high-security wings were only allowed out of their room for 10 minutes per day, they said, and the lockdown encompassed civil detainees, who have not been charged with crimes.

"When the Essex County Correctional Facility receives credible information about security threats, it initiates a lockdown so that a search can be conducted to collect any contraband," Puglisi said. "This is done to protect the safety and security of the detainees and officers. Because maintaining the security of the facility is our highest priority, detainees are maintained in their cells while searches are conducted; they are returned to their regular routines as soon as the searches in their area are completed."


Puglisi did not explain what kind of security threat yielded the four-day lockdown, but said that detainees often hid contraband in mattresses and then used sheets, shoe strings, or other materials to tie them back up. Inspectors pointed to the dismal state of the immigrants' mattresses in their report.

A large group stands outside the Essex County Correctional Facility.
Mel Evans / AP

ICE contracts with 206 detention facilities across the US, according to the DHS inspector general, paying them millions of dollars to house and care for more than 32,000 immigrant detainees.

In New Jersey, WNYC reported stated that three county jails were collecting $6 million a month from ICE. From January 2015 to March 2018, payments to Bergen, Essex, and Hudson counties increased 46%.

The Essex County facility, where the inspection took place, gets about $117 a day per immigrant detainee and have had a contract with ICE since 2008, according to Puglisi.

Last May, the jail reportedly made about $3 million from working with ICE.

In another report released Jan. 29, the DHS inspector general reviewed 106 facilities and concluded that ICE has repeatedly failed to hold the centers accountable for consistently failing to meet performance standards.

From Oct. 1, 2015, to June 30, 2018, there were more than 14,000 documented instances, including sexual assault, in which detention centers did not comply with federal rules and jeopardized the "safety and rights of detainees," according to the report.


ICE also issued waivers to jails with deficient standards, exempted them from complying with others, and withheld information about their contracts "with key officials," inspectors found.

Since 2016, ICE has paid the 106 contracted facilities more than $3 billion overall to house immigrants


https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/br ... ns-hearing
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Re: Fintan O’Toole: Trial runs for fascism are in full flow

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Feb 24, 2019 10:54 am

White House plans to house immigrant children by toxic dump

Proposed camp at Texas air force base designed to hold up to 7,500

Sarah Okeson
Immigrant children walk in outside the Homestead Temporary Shelter for Unaccompanied Children in Homestead, Fla. (AP/Brynn Anderson)

The Trump administration has drawn up plans for another tent city for migrant children in Texas that would hold up to 7,500 children in a camp built on or next to a former dump and not far from Superfund sites.

The 70-acre camp at Goodfellow Air Force Base in San Angelo in West Texas would be similar to the infamous camp in the border town of Tornillo that closed in January. Gregg Gnipp, a commander in the U.S. Public Health Service, is overseeing this for our nation’s health agency, according to planning documents.

“Public records show the migrant children’s housing site proposed for Goodfellow will be built atop a former landfill, in an area riddled with lead, benzene, and other chemicals particularly hazardous to children,” said Lisa Evans, an attorney forEarthjustice.

A health department spokesman said the Goodfellow site and other proposed sites in Arkansas and Texas are not under active consideration at this time.

Our nation’s only temporary camp for immigrant children is now in Homestead, Fla., near another Air Force Base. State child welfare regulations don’t apply to the camp.


The Hispanic Federation and other nonprofits sued the U.S. Army in federal court in August to try to get more documents about Goodfellow. The lawsuit is pending.

David Lang, a former hydrologist with the EPA’s Superfund program, studied documents that were available and recommended that residential housing not be built on top of the landfill until more studies are done.

Toxic chemicals, fuel and other waste were buried from 1970 to 1982 in a series of trenches in the 37-acre landfill in the southeast corner of the Air Force Base. The landfill was not properly closed by today’s standards.

Another area of the base was named a Superfund site in 2002 because of high levels of carbon tetrachloride which can cause liver and kidney damage. Much of the contamination was removed, and the Air Force has removed monitoring wells where the children’s camp would be built.

A former firing range was contaminated with lead which can cause brain damage and stunt growth. Soil from the firing range has been removed, but it is unclear if what is left is safe for children, according to Lang. There is no known safe level of lead in the body.

Children, whose organs are still developing, are more vulnerable to chemical poisoning than adults. Current evaluations when setting health and risk limits compare adverse health effects to a 70-kilogram man.

Please wait...

https://www.salon.com/2019/02/23/white- ... p_partner/


Democrats pursue subpoenas on Trump separations of immigrant families
Jonathan Landay, Mark Hosenball

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - In what is likely to be their first public use of subpoena power since taking over the U.S. House of Representatives in January, Democrats were set to vote on Tuesday on subpoenaing documents on the Trump administration’s migrant family separation policy.

FILE PHOTO: Immigrant children are led by staff in single file between tents at a detention facility next to the Mexican border in Tornillo, Texas, U.S., June 18, 2018. REUTERS/Mike Blake
If approved, the subpoenas by the House Oversight Committee would show Democrats beginning to invoke the investigative clout they obtained when voters in November handed them majority control of the House and took it away from Republicans.


Democrats are initiating a series of investigations of President Donald Trump, his personal finances and business interests and his 25-month-old administration, including controversial policies such as family separation.

The House Oversight Committee will vote on a resolution from Chairman Elijah Cummings to issue subpoenas to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, Attorney General William Barr, and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, according to committee documents reviewed by Reuters.


The resolution is likely to pass as the committee’s Democrats outnumber Republicans, 24-18.

As part of a crackdown on illegal immigration, the Trump administration separated thousands of children from their immigrant parents who crossed from Mexico into the United States, placing many in detention camps.

Immigration advocates and Democratic lawmakers say many traumatized children, having fled their home countries, were held in institutionalized settings for too long under the policy. The Department of Health and Human Services’ inspector general said in a January report that the administration began ramping up separations in 2017. They accelerated in 2018 after Trump implemented a “zero tolerance” policy to criminally prosecute and jail all illegal border crossers.


Trump says it again; "There was no collusion"
Outrage over the policy led Trump to sign an executive order on June 20, 2018, reversing course.

In a Feb. 22 letter to Cummings, top Oversight Committee Republican Jim Jordan said the three departments “have been working expeditiously” to provide documents and information to the panel and that it was premature to vote on subpoenas.

An Oversight Committee official said the documents to be subpoenaed are the same as those requested from the departments in a July 2018 letter signed by Cummings, when the Democrats were in the minority, and Republican Representative Mark Meadows.

After the departments refused to hand over the documents, the panel’s then-Republican chairman Trey Gowdy declined Cummings’ request to issue subpoenas and refused to hold a vote, said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa- ... SKCN1QC0SF
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Re: Fintan O’Toole: Trial runs for fascism are in full flow

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Mar 07, 2019 1:53 pm

U.S. officials made list of reporters, lawyers, activists to question at border

March 6, 2019, 6:30 PM CST
WASHINGTON — Customs and Border Protection has compiled a list of 59 mostly American reporters, attorneys and activists who are to be stopped for questioning by border agents when crossing the U.S.-Mexican border at San Diego-area checkpoints, and agents have questioned or arrested at least 21 of them, according to documents obtained by NBC station KNSD-TV and interviews with people on the list.

Several people on the list confirmed to NBC News that they had been pulled aside at the border after the date the list was compiled and were told they were being questioned as part of a "national security investigation."

CBP told NBC News the names on the list are people who were present during violence that broke out at the border with Tijuana in November and they were being questioned so that the agency could learn more about what started it.

In a statement, the ACLU's Esha Bandhari said the rights group is “exploring all options in response.”

“This is an outrageous violation of the First Amendment,” said Bhandari, staff attorney with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project. “The government cannot use the pretext of the border to target activists critical of its policies, lawyers providing legal representation, or journalists simply doing their jobs.”

A sample of names and photos from the list. KNSD blurred the names and photos of individuals who haven't given permission to publish their information.Obtained by KNSD
The list, dated Jan. 9, 2019, is titled "San Diego Sector Foreign Operations Branch: Migrant Caravan FY-2019 Suspected Organizers, Coordinators, Instigators, and Media" and includes pictures of the 59 individuals who are to be stopped. The people on the list were to be pulled aside by Customs and Border Protection agents for questioning when they crossed the U.S.-Mexico border to meet with or aid migrants from the Honduran caravan waiting on the Mexican side of the border.

Click here to read KNSD's story about the list

The list includes 10 journalists, seven of them U.S. citizens, a U.S.-based attorney and others labeled as organizers and "instigators," 31 of whom are American. Symbols on the list show that by the time it was compiled 12 of the individuals had already been through additional questioning during border crossings and nine had been arrested.

In some cases, CBP had also compiled dossiers on the individuals with the help of intelligence from Mexican officials, according to the materials obtained by KNSD.


The cover of the list includes a seal with both the American and Mexican flags and was compiled shortly after the arrival of nearly 5,000 Honduran immigrants at the Tijuana-San Ysidro border, which is in the Border Patrol’s San Diego sector.

On Nov. 25, unrest broke out as some immigrants attempted to run through border checkpoints or scale the barriers after growing frustrated with the long wait to enter the country. CBP officers responded with tear gas, bringing attention to the worsening tension between CBP and the frustrated migrants in Tijuana.

In response to a KNSD question about the list, a spokesman for CBP said it is protocol to "collect evidence that might be needed for future legal actions."

"To determine if the event was orchestrated … CBP and our law enforcement partners evaluate these incidents, follow all leads garnered from information collected, conduct interviews and investigations, in preparation for, and often to prevent future incidents that could cause further harm to the public, our agents, and our economy," the spokesman told KNSD.

Fears confirmed

The documents confirm what many people who report on immigration or provide humanitarian aid and legal counsel to asylum-seekers at the southern border have reported anecdotally. They say that CBP is focused on them and increasingly pulling them aside for what is known as a "secondary screening."

During that screening, journalists and lawyers describe being told that they are being interviewed as part of a national security investigation and that they must give officers access to their cellphones. Many do not know their rights as American citizens to refuse to answer such questions or request a lawyer.

One lawyer from the list who was recently stopped at a San Diego-area crossing, Nicole Ramos, refugee director for Al Otro Lado, a law center for migrants in Tijuana, Mexico, learned from NBC News that CBP had compiled a dossier of information on her. The dossier included personal details such as her mother’s name, her social media pictures, the car she drives and her work and travel history.

"The document ... appears to prove what we have assumed for some time, which is that we are on a law enforcement list designed to retaliate against human rights defenders who work with asylum-seekers and who are critical of CBP practices that violate the rights of asylum seekers," Ramos said.

Two other immigration lawyers who frequently travel to northern Mexico to help asylum-seekers attempting to cross into the U.S. say the practice is starting to scare away would-be volunteers.

"It has a real chilling effect on people who might go down there. I was going to go this week, but I had to worry about whether I could get back in" to the U.S., one lawyer speaking on the condition of anonymity told NBC News.

Other immigration lawyers told NBC News they have been stopped and questioned in places far from San Diego. In Juarez, an attorney was stopped and accused of being a human smuggler. She was released only after the officers took her contacts and data from her phone. She was also asked what she was telling asylum-seekers to say to U.S. authorities, according to another lawyer speaking on her behalf.

A former senior DHS official said it is against U.S. policy to target travelers based on their profession.

"It would be highly inappropriate and questionable from a legal perspective," the former official said.

"While it is true that CBP has broad authority to interview and search anyone crossing the border, if there is no reasonable suspicion that you are involved in criminal activity, then they have no right to detain you," the former official added.

Julia Ainsley is a national security reporter for NBC News.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigr ... er-n980301






Trump Administration Deported 471 Parents Separated From Their Kids At The Border

The American Civil Liberties Union has been leading an effort to contact deported parents to try to reunify them with their children.

Zoe Tillman
Posted on March 6, 2019, at 9:01 p.m. ET

A mother migrating from Honduras holds her 1-year-old child as she surrenders to U.S. Border Patrol agent near McAllen, Texas.
David J. Phillip / AP


WASHINGTON – The Trump administration disclosed in a court filing Wednesday that the government deported 471 migrant parents separated from their children at the US–Mexico border without first giving them the option to reunify.

It was the first concrete number from the government about the number of parents deported without their children during the spike in family separations in 2018. In court filings last summer, the Justice Department indicated the number was in the 400s, but the numbers continued to change as new information came in and as reunifications began under a federal court order.

More than eight months after a judge in San Diego ordered the government to reunify separated families, information has continued to trickle in about the scope and aftermath of family separations. More than 2,800 children were separated from a parent crossing the border and placed in US custody, and it was clear early on that hundreds of those kids had a parent who had been deported. In Wednesday's filing, the government offered a concrete number.

The American Civil Liberties Union has been leading the effort to locate deported parents outside of the United States. Those parents are given a choice about whether to reunify with their children where they are, or waive reunification, which allows their children to stay in the United States and pursue asylum claims.

US District Judge Dana Sabraw issued a preliminary injunction in June 2018 that halted most family separations at the border, finding that the ACLU was likely to succeed in arguing that the separations were unlawful. He ordered the government to reunify families that had already been separated, and required regular reports from the government about its progress.

Nearly all of the more than 2,800 separated children identified in the class action before Sabraw have either been reunified with a parent or released to a sponsor, according to the government's latest status report. Sabraw is weighing a recent request by the ACLU to expand the number of separated families covered by his order to include situations where a child separated from a parent had already been released from US custody — typically to a sponsor — by the time he entered his injunction in June. The government is opposing the request, citing the effort it would take to account for what happened to those families and arguing that shouldn't be part of this litigation.

Lee Gelernt, the lead ACLU attorney, told BuzzFeed News that the final tally of separated parents and kids — and the number of parents deported without first getting the choice to reunify — could increase, possibly by an "enormous number," if Sabraw grants their request to expand the class.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/zo ... -separated
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Re: Fintan O’Toole: Trial runs for fascism are in full flow

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Mar 08, 2019 8:41 am

Nurse turned congresswoman Lauren Underwood asked Kirstjen Nielsen if she considered the long-term mental and physical consequences of separating and detaining immigrant children. She had not.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LNgT1_8WP4
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Re: Fintan O’Toole: Trial runs for fascism are in full flow

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Mar 09, 2019 8:53 am

ICE Is Detaining 50,000 People, an All-Time High
Never before has America held so many allegedly undocumented immigrants in detention at one time.
Spencer Ackerman

For the first time in its history, the U.S. government is detaining more than 50,000 people it says are undocumented immigrants in jails and prisons around the country.

According to a figure provided to Capitol Hill and made available to The Daily Beast, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has set an all-time record–the latest in its string of broken records concerning immigrants detained–is 50,049 people as of Wednesday, March 6. The figure includes both single adults and whole families behind bars. After initial publication of this piece, ICE confirmed the detentions figure.

It’s an increase of approximately 2,000 people in the month-plus since Jan. 30, when ICE, it previously told The Daily Beast, was detaining 48,088 people. And it’s just another 2,000 people shy of the 52,000-person daily detentions ICE is asking Congress to fund in its next budget.

Asked what accounts for the increase, ICE spokeswoman Danielle Bennett said in a statement: “ICE makes custody determinations on a case-by-case basis, in accordance with U.S. law and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) policy, considering the merits and factors of each case while adhering to current agency priorities, guidelines and legal mandates. Ensuring there are sufficient beds available to meet the current demand for detention space is crucial to the success of ICE’s overall mission.”

It isn’t clear where ICE would have found the money for the increase. A year ago, when passing ICE’s most recent budget, legislators explicitly instructed the interior-immigration agency to cap detentions at 40,520. Instead, by the summer ICE had surpassed that total, leading its Department of Homeland Security parent to raid its other accounts, including FEMA, to float ICE. A Senate appropriator–the last sort of person an executive agency wishes to anger come budget season–called ICE out for continuing a policy of “maximum cruelty.”


“Congress should absolutely not pay a single penny more to fuel the administration’s agenda until there are clear and transparent explanations for what they’re planning on doing with the money,” Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) told The Daily Beast in November.

Nevertheless, ICE continued breaking its detention records. It’s now reached a record high, composed of people who spend months–years, even–locked away, navigating a cumbersome and unfamiliar legal process, sometimes separated from their children or their parents and siblings. In some cases, they are held in for-profit prisons where they work for far below minimum wages.

ICE has still yet to account for its funding for the detentions increase. Asked on Thursday by The Daily Beast, ICE pointed to a conference call with Deputy Director Matt Albence from Feb. 11. Albence at the time answered a question about where ICE found money for an 8,000-person detentions overage by saying it was “still coming out of our detention PPA [program, project or activity]. That’s where we fund our detention beds. So, we are funding at levels where we are able to cover the bills that we currently have.”

Albence said last month that the 52,000 detentions ICE seeks congressional funding for was “really what we need to get the [job] done. We're managing as best as we can with the resources that we currently have, but there’s certainly no shortage of work out there.”

Immigration advocates were unsurprised and no less horrified.

“To see ICE jailing more than 50,000 immigrants each day–it’s a tragic milestone,” said Heidi Altman, policy director of the National Immigrant Justice Center. “This mass deprivation of liberty and dignity is unnecessary and continues to play out in dangerous ways. Inside the jails people are enduring overcrowding, food consistently described as foul and meager in calories, solitary confinement as punishment for a misplaced word, and more. An expansion this quick and this reckless risks lives.”


ICE did see an increase in detention funding as part of the deal to prevent a government shutdown. Democrats and Republicans kept the government open, immigration advocates warned, on the backs of immigrants thrown behind bars. The deal raised the upper boundary of people ICE was funded to hold–but to 45,724. Even as legislators struck their deal, ICE had thousands more people than that under detention. It’s now exceeded that cap even more.

One young woman, Yesica, told The Daily Beast that she fled her native El Salvador to escape MS-13, the brutal gang President Donald Trump frequently suggests are representative of central American migrants. After escaping a dire fate of violent persecution for her sexual identity, she described her for-profit ICE prison in Texas, where she works for as much as $3 per day, like this:

“This is a really terrible place,” Yesica, 23, said through a translator in December. “It’s inhumane. It’s like a torture chamber.”

https://www.thedailybeast.com/ice-is-de ... -time-high
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Re: Fintan O’Toole: Trial runs for fascism are in full flow

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Mar 11, 2019 6:06 am

A newborn. The government just took a NEWBORN from her mother.

Family separation is still occurring.

The cruelty continues.

Hundreds of migrant children are taken from families despite rollback of separation policy - The Boston Globe



Hundreds of migrant children are taken from families despite rollback of separation policy

Silvia Maribel Ramos, who arrived in the United States last month to learn that her husband had been deported to Guatemala and her 3-year-old daughter had been taken, in Oakland, March 1, 2019. Ramos is struggling with the paperwork required to recover Ashley. “My daughter can’t understand. She just weeps and begs to be with us,” she said. (Jim Wilson/The New York Times)
JIM WILSON/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Silvia Maribel Ramos arrived in the United States last month to learn that her husband had been deported to Guatemala and her 3-year-old daughter had been taken. Ramos is struggling with the paperwork required to recover her child. “My daughter can’t understand. She just weeps and begs to be with us,” she said.

By Miriam Jordan and Caitlin Dickerson NEW YORK TIMES MARCH 09, 2019
OAKLAND, Calif. — Nearly nine months after the Trump administration officially rescinded its policy of separating migrant families who have illegally crossed the border, more than 200 migrant children have been taken from parents and other relatives and placed in institutional care, with some spending months in shelters and foster homes thousands of miles away from their parents.

The latest data reported to the federal judge monitoring one of the most controversial of President Trump’s immigration policies shows that 245 children have been removed from their families since the court ordered the government to halt routine separations under last spring’s “zero tolerance” border enforcement policy. Some of the new separations are being undertaken with no clear documentation to help track the children’s whereabouts.

Images of crying mothers and children at the border last year prompted an intense backlash across party lines, with all four living former first ladies and Melania Trump expressing horror at the policy. But despite Trump’s June 20 executive order rescinding it, the practice was never completely suspended.

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Under the original policy, most children were removed because parents who illegally crossed the border were subject to criminal prosecution. The recent separations have occurred largely because parents have been flagged for fraud, a communicable disease, or past criminal history — in some cases relatively minor violations, years in the past, that ordinarily would not lead to the loss of parental custody.

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The new separations are taking place amid an unprecedented influx of migrant families from across the southern border that has highlighted the failure of the Trump administration’s hard-line policies to deter them. The Border Patrol detained 76,103 migrants in February, an 11-year high for that month. Among those intercepted were about 40,000 members of families, two-thirds more than in January.

In Congress last week, Democrats grilled Kirstjen Nielsen, the Homeland Security secretary, over the separation policy, citing research that has found that separations from parents can inflict long-term psychological harm on children.

Family separations also sometimes occurred under the Obama administration, but only rarely and in extreme cases in which a child’s safety appeared to be at risk.

Customs and Border Protection officials say the separations are legal under the parameters set by the court and are intended to protect children, who they say may be threatened by human trafficking or by adults pretending to be a parent to capitalize on the advantage that gives them under US immigration laws.

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“CBP does not declare that a parent poses danger to a child arbitrarily or without merit,” the agency said in a statement. It said agents “will maintain family unity to the greatest extent operationally feasible,” separating children only in the presence of “a legal requirement” set out in written policy or “an articulable safety or security concern that requires separation.”

But opposition to the new separations has been growing from both outside and inside the federal government. At the Health and Human Services Department’s Office of Refugee Resettlement, which oversees the care of separated children until they can be reunited with their families, some officials have tried to resist receiving children referred to the agency by the Border Patrol.

According to an official who was not authorized to discuss government business and spoke on the condition of anonymity, staff members have in some cases raised questions with Border Patrol agents about separations with what appear to be little or no justification. In some of those cases, border agents have refused to provide additional information, the official said, or if additional documents were provided, they were sometimes redacted to the point of illegibility.

The official, along with another staff member at the Department of Homeland Security, the Border Patrol’s parent agency, said some separations were occurring with no formal notification to the refugee resettlement office. Both officials said they had been made aware of concerns about an apparent inconsistency in standards applied by border agents when determining whether a family should be separated.

The failure to keep accurate records suggests that more children could have been separated than the 245 accounted for by Feb. 20 in official records.

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The New York Times reviewed several cases of children who have been separated since the policy was officially ended, and learned of many others through the lawyers who handled them. Some of the new separations, the review showed, occurred in families with a parent who had a drunken-driving conviction in the past, or a 20-year-old nonviolent robbery conviction. In one case, a parent had been convicted of possession of a small amount of marijuana.

Donna Abbott, vice president for refugee and immigrant services at Bethany Christian Services, a contractor that accommodates migrant children in temporary foster homes until they can be reunited with family members, said most cases of family separations do not list detailed reasons, making it difficult to evaluate whether they were appropriate.

For example, some files state only that the parent was suspected of having gang affiliations or a criminal history, without additional information. “Is it trespassing or is it murder?” Abbott said.

In December, a mother traveling from El Salvador with her three children was arrested and put on a bus to an immigration detention facility in Arizona while her children, ages 5, 8 and 15, were sent to foster care in New York.

The woman, Deisy Ramirez, 38, said it was nearly six weeks before she talked to her children.

They were “devastated,” said Ramirez’s sister, Silvia Ramirez, who was trying to persuade the government to allow her to take the children to live with her in Seattle while her sister was in custody. “They couldn’t understand why they were separated,” she said.

On March 1, Deisy Ramirez’s eldest daughter was transferred to a hospital after threatening to take her own life, Silvia Ramirez said, and she remained there even after her mother’s release from detention last week.

“I never imagined this could happen,” Deisy Ramirez said Friday, her voice breaking. “All I want is to hold my children and to be with them.”

Her lawyer, Ricardo de Anda, said he had received no response to his formal request for a reason for the separation. He suspects it may be connected to the fact that Deisy Ramirez had been deported from the United States more than a decade ago. He sent government lawyers a series of emails, ultimately securing her release.

On Saturday, the day after her release from the Arizona detention facility, Deisy Ramirez was preparing to fly to New York to reunite with her children.

Border agents removed 3-year-old Ashley Ramos from her father after they were detained last month in Arizona. He was swiftly deported to Guatemala and the girl was sent to a shelter.

The child’s mother, Silvia Maribel Ramos, who had been separated from the pair during their journey from Guatemala when Mexican police pulled her and other migrants off their bus for questioning, arrived in Arizona a few days later, only to learn from authorities that her child was gone.

“They told me they had no idea where she was, that I would find out after being released,” said Ramos, who is staying with relatives in Oakland, California.

The child was located nearly two weeks later, she said, after her husband contacted Guatemalan authorities back home. Now Ramos is struggling with the paperwork required to recover Ashley. “My daughter can’t understand. She just weeps and begs to be with us,” she said.

In late January, Victor Antonio Marin was separated from his 4-year-old son, whose mother is deceased, after they were detained near Calexico, California. According to his lawyer, Bob Boyce, Marin had a 20-year-old nonviolent robbery conviction in the United States that did not involve the use of a weapon. He served time and was deported back to El Salvador.

Now Marin remains locked up in an immigration detention center while his child is in a shelter in Texas.

Ruben Garcia, who runs a network of migrant shelters in El Paso, Texas, said that immigration authorities this month dropped off a distraught 18-year-old woman from Guatemala.

The woman said she had given birth less than a week earlier and had been separated from her baby. Child welfare authorities had come to the hospital to take the child, who was a U.S. citizen; immigration agents took the mother back to a detention cell where she waited for several days. The baby’s first two weeks were spent away from the mother, who finally regained custody after interventions from multiple legal-aid groups, Garcia said.

Since Trump ended the family separations under “zero tolerance” on June 20, about 2,700 children have been reunited with their parents. Still, thousands more children who were separated before the policy officially went into effect have not been accounted for, according to the Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services. The investigators cited the lack of an efficient tracking system.

The American Civil Liberties Union requested that the government locate the families, and on Friday, Judge Dana M. Sabraw ruled that they should be included in the pending litigation over protecting and reuniting separated families.

“The hallmark of a civilized society is measured by how it treats its people and those within its borders,” the judge wrote in his opinion.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation ... story.html
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Re: Fintan O’Toole: Trial runs for fascism are in full flow

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Mar 16, 2019 10:29 am


ZERO TOLERANCE
After Controversy, Heartland to Close Four Illinois Shelters for Immigrant Youth
At the same time, another shelter operator is trying to expand its footprint in Chicago.
by Melissa Sanchez, Duaa Eldeib, and Jodi S. Cohen March 13, 4 a.m. CDT

ZERO TOLERANCE
Trump’s Immigration Policy at the Border

This story was co-published with the Chicago Sun-Times.

Leer en Español.

Eight months after its shelters for immigrant children came under public scrutiny over allegations of abuse and lax supervision, Heartland Human Care Services says it will close four shelters in suburban Chicago and add staff, training and other resources at its remaining five facilities.

The decision, announced to employees in a memo Friday, comes as another agency, Maryville Academy, plans to open two additional shelters, including one as early as next month.

Heartland officials told ProPublica Illinois they plan to move children out of its four shelters in Des Plaines between now and the end of May. Altogether, the Des Plaines shelters can house as many as 116 children and teens; the change will cut Heartland’s total capacity under state rules a little more than 20 percent, from 512 to 396.

According to the memo, obtained by ProPublica Illinois, Heartland officials decided to shutter the Des Plaines facilities after an internal review and listening sessions with staff in the chaotic aftermath of the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance immigration crackdown. The practice separated more than 2,700 children from parents and sent them to shelters across the U.S., including 99 to Heartland shelters in Illinois.

Hear More About the Story
Reporter Melissa Sanchez spoke about this reporting on WBEZ Chicago’s “Morning Shift” show on March 13.


Dive Deeper Into Our Reporting
Our newsletter is written by a ProPublica Illinois reporter every week



“We began this process last summer following the challenges we all experienced as we cared for the influx of children who had been severely traumatized by the federal government’s practice of forcibly separating them from their parents at the border,” executive director David Sinski wrote in the memo.

Some of the separated children sent to the Des Plaines shelters said they were mistreated by staff and had witnessed an employee sedate an unruly young boy, allegations first reported last summer by The Washington Post. The allegations, which Heartland has denied, prompted an ongoing federal investigation, outcry from elected officials and regular protests at the shelters and even outside Heartland fundraisers.

In a statement, Heartland officials said the decision to close the Des Plaines shelters and move children to its Chicago facilities was prompted by the organization’s lease in Des Plaines ending and an effort to “align capacity” to the average number of children it has housed in recent years.

While the zero-tolerance crackdown brought new attention to Heartland’s shelter program, the problems the organization now seeks to address predate that policy.

ProPublica Illinois reported extensively on conditions inside Heartland shelters last year and found repeated problems related to lax supervision dating back years. The Illinois Department of Children and Family Services has found that Heartland failed to provide appropriate supervision in cases involving an employee having an alleged sexual relationship with a detained teen, children having sex in a common room and children running away during a field trip.

Read Previous Reporting

Here’s What Happened to the 99 Immigrant Children Separated From Their Parents and Sent to Chicago
Confidential records reveal details about struggles to find parents and traumatic experiences during the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance crackdown.

As Months Pass in Chicago Shelters, Immigrant Children Contemplate Escape, Even Suicide
Internal documents reveal despair and tedium in one of the nation’s largest shelter networks for unaccompanied minors.
More than a dozen children have run away from Heartland facilities in recent years, including three teens who left a North Side shelter together last August.

A DCFS spokesman said the agency has two pending Heartland investigations, both involving Chicago shelters. ProPublica Illinois also has talked to several formerly detained children, in addition to former shelter employees, who said some shelter workers routinely threatened to slow reunification efforts when children refused to take part in daily activities.

Heartland officials have said such threats are not part of its policy.

Heartland Human Care Services, part of a larger nonprofit called Heartland Alliance, has provided shelter services for immigrant children and teens for more than two decades. But it expanded rapidly in recent years, opening the Des Plaines shelters about five years ago. Heartland’s five shelters in Chicago are in the Bronzeville, Rogers Park, Englewood and Beverly neighborhoods.

Nationwide, some 100 shelters house thousands of immigrant children and teens each year.

Heartland has long struggled with employee turnover at its shelters, and it has had particular trouble filling weekend and overnight shifts. The organization occasionally turns to temp agencies to staff its shelters. More than a dozen current and former employees have told ProPublica Illinois they felt overworked in emotionally draining jobs, as they dealt with children and teens who had often endured violence or other trauma in their home countries or on their treks to the U.S.

Leer Mas En Español

Esto es lo que pasó a los 99 niños inmigrantes separados de sus padres y enviados a Chicago
Documentos confidenciales revelan detalles sobre los problemas para encontrar a los padres y las experiencias traumáticas durante la política de tolerancia cero de la administración Trump.

Mientras pasan los meses en albergues de Chicago, menores migrantes contemplan fugarse y hasta suicidarse
Documentos internos revelan la desesperación y el tedio en una de las más grandes redes de refugios para menores en la nación.
In the memo to staff, Sinski said closing the Des Plaines shelters would help “streamline our efforts and maximize our efficiency in providing care.” The organization plans to move all its employees from Des Plaines to parallel positions at its Chicago shelters “so we should have plenty of staff for the work we do in Chicago!”

According to the memo, shelter staff told Heartland officials that “our teams on the frontlines” would benefit from increased staffing. In response, Sinski said the organization would add 11 new positions and offer training to better prepare workers to deal with trauma.

Jesse Bless, a Boston-based attorney who has represented more than a half-dozen children in Heartland’s care in their immigration cases, said he was glad Heartland is working to improve its programs. He said the restructuring corroborates “the terrible events of last summer.”

“It is an implicit admission that there were mistakes made and inadequate attention to the care of children,” he said. “They took a look at their procedures and they are saying, ‘We need to do better.’”


As Heartland maps out the closure of some of its shelters, Maryville Academy, a Catholic child welfare agency that operates two shelters for immigrant children in Illinois, plans to expand. Maryville is working to open an all-boys shelter on its existing Des Plaines campus — on the same site where Heartland is shutting down facilities — and hopes to open an all-girls shelter at St. Alphonsus Church in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood this year.

The federal government approached the agency about increasing its capacity and has already approved opening the boys’ shelter, said Sister Catherine Ryan, Maryville’s executive director.

“What we hear from the folks at [the Office of Refugee Resettlement], what we hear from the other agencies, is that the need is so great for these dear children,” she said. “We can’t serve great numbers of them, but we want to serve the children we can.”
https://www.propublica.org/article/hear ... rant-youth




This 28-page document is full of teenagers and not-yet-teenagers, who report being raped, and pregnant as a result, and here's Trump appointee Scott Lloyd, tracking information about these girls and using it to block them from being able to get the abortion they have asked for.
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: Fintan O’Toole: Trial runs for fascism are in full flow

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Mar 19, 2019 9:04 am


US government uses several clandestine shelters to detain immigrant children

By Aura Bogado and Patrick Michels / March 18, 2019

The federal government is relying on secret shelters to hold unaccompanied minors, in possible violation of the long-standing rules for the care of immigrant children, a Reveal investigation has found.

The Office of Refugee Resettlement, the government agency that cares for unaccompanied minors, has never made the shelters’ existence public or even disclosed them to the minors’ own attorneys in a landmark class-action case.

It remains unclear how many total sites are under operation, but there are at least five in Arkansas, Florida, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and Virginia, holding at least 16 boys and girls for the refugee agency, some as young as 9 years old.

Minors being held at the clandestine facilities initially were placed at known shelters around the country but later were transferred to these off-the-books facilities that specialize in providing for youth with mental health and behavioral challenges.

The refugee agency’s standards for transferring youth in its care state that the agency “makes every effort to place children and youth within the ORR funded care provider network,” but makes room for out-of-network transfers, adding that “there may be instances when ORR determines there is no care provider available within the network to provide specialized services needed for special needs cases. In those cases, ORR will consider an alternative placement.”

Under the Flores Settlement Agreement, a 1997 pact that sets the standards for how unaccompanied minors are treated while detained and calls for their swift release, the federal government is supposed to provide attorneys representing detained children with a regular and detailed census of each minor in the Office of Refugee Resettlement’s custody. The practice appears to violate the long-held agreement.


Holly Cooper, who represents the class of unaccompanied minors in the agency’s care, says the government failed in its obligation to report every minor’s location – and believes the refugee agency still is withholding information about other locations, even after being pressed to do so.

“Detained unaccompanied children with mental health issues are some of the most vulnerable children, and when the government does not provide access to their whereabouts, it calls into question the basic underpinnings of our democratic institutions,” Cooper said.

Cooper learned about one of the facilities months ago. After requesting information about additional sites, she learned about several others. Now, she told Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, she’s still getting credible information that the list the government provided to her is incomplete.

The Office of Refugee Resettlement acknowledged a request for comment but hadn’t yet responded to specific questions by the time this story was published.

Robert Carey, who directed the agency during the final two years of the Obama administration, said that as far as he knew, no such arrangements were in place before Donald Trump became president.

“If that was happening, it was something that I was not aware of,” he said.

Some facilities, he said, occasionally would subcontract specialized medical or educational services. But Carey said he wasn’t aware of children being housed outside of publicly disclosed shelters.

“We had pretty exhaustive oversight procedures and monitoring procedures,” he said. “If any of those standards are being lessened or compromised, that would obviously be cause for concern. These systems are in place for a reason. There’s an inherent vulnerability in the care for children.”

One of the care providers, Millcreek Behavioral Health in Fordyce, Arkansas, operates as a residential treatment center and is holding at least eight children in the refugee agency’s custody, according to information obtained by Reveal. Inspection reports obtained by Reveal do not suggest any serious state violations; 911 service call records to the facility were requested by Reveal in December, but the local office of emergency management hasn’t decided whether to release the documents.

Another provider, Rolling Hills Hospital in Ada, Oklahoma, is a facility for children and adults that is holding at least one minor in the refugee agency’s custody. An investigation by The Oklahoman published earlier this year revealed that patients complained of broken bones, along with “allegations of sexual harassment and physical abuse” at the hospital. A 2017 inspection report reviewed by Reveal describes multiple violations, including employees who said the hospital failed to provide staff orientation, patient records that indicated registered nurses had not provided necessary assessments, and a facility where patient deaths went unreported to the governing body for oversight.

Officials with the care facilities either declined to comment or did not respond to emails and phone messages from Reveal.

“I don’t have anybody that needs to comment,” said Pam Burford, an administrator at Millcreek Behavioral Health.

Néstor Dubón, a sponsor for an asylum-seeking cousin who’s being held at Millcreek, hasn’t visited the site but describes it as a better alternative to the Northern Virginia Juvenile Detention Center, a shelter whose federal contract came to an end in 2018, where Dubón’s cousin previously was held. Dubón was told that his cousin would be transferred to Arkansas but was unaware that the facility’s use as a shelter wasn’t public. No matter where his cousin is being held, Dubón’s chief concern is his cousin’s release. He said he’s met all the requirements asked of him by the Office of Refugee Resettlement to gain his cousin’s freedom.

“I’ve given my fingerprints three times – three times!” Dubón said. “I’ve obtained and shared birth certificates and powers of attorney from Honduras and for what? He’s still there.”

Dubón’s 16-year-old cousin has been in the agency’s custody since he first entered the United States more than two years ago.

Both Millcreek and Rolling Hills are owned and operated by Acadia Healthcare. Reveal has determined that 50 of Acadia’s facilities – operating in 23 states and Puerto Rico – provide residential care for minors, but it’s unclear how many of those facilities serve youth in the refugee agency’s custody.

Acadia has been publicly traded on the NASDAQ for nearly a decade. With hundreds of facilities and a capacity of over 18,000 beds, it is one of the largest treatment networks in the country. Its services include care for behavioral health and addiction.

In November, a critical investor detailed a litany of abuse allegations at Acadia-run facilities, including Rolling Hills. A December 2017 lawsuit accused Acadia and Rolling Hills of permitting ongoing sexual abuse inside a facility for children, destroying video evidence and refusing access to a state investigator.

Former Acadia CEO Joey Jacobs has acknowledged that regulatory problems led some states to temporarily stop referring people to Acadia facilities. But Jacobs announced those problems had been resolved, at least in a call with investors in November 2018.

“We’re a large company with a large number of facilities,” he said. “So at any time, we can have an inspection go bad or an incident occur or an investigation be instigated.”

Jacobs left the company in December. Acadia has accumulated $3.2 billion in debt from buying up local care centers, prompting critical attention from investors who doubt that it can be paid off.

Acadia Healthcare did not return a call for comment for this story.

The Office of Refugee Resettlement also hasn’t disclosed that it houses children at Devereux, a nonprofit behavioral health organization based in Pennsylvania that operates in multiple states, Reveal has confirmed. One of its facilities in Florida is holding at least five minors for the federal agency. The previously undisclosed care network also includes residential treatment centers operated by KidsPeace and Youth For Tomorrow. These two organizations already contract with the government as shelter providers, offering general care. But they don’t have public agreements to provide the more intensive behavioral and mental health care of a residential treatment center.

KidsPeace communications director Bob Martin told Reveal that there were “a very small number of cases” in which his organization has accepted children from other refugee agency shelters for placement in its residential treatment center. In those cases, he said, no new contracts were signed, beyond what he called a “letter of agreement” with the agency.

“It’s been an extremely rare occurrence,” Martin said.

Martin said any questions about government oversight in those cases should be answered by the Office of Refugee Resettlement.

Courtney Gaskins, director of program services for Youth For Tomorrow, confirmed that the refugee agency has requested that her organization take children in its residential treatment wing.

“We’ve gotten requests for those,” she said. But Gaskins declined to say whether her organization has ever agreed to do so. “I wouldn’t comment if we did,” she said.

Reveal reviewed federal contract and grant awards to Youth For Tomorrow and KidsPeace but found no mention of residential treatment center services.

Some of the nonprofit organizations involved in this network are well-monied and hold powerful connections in the media and government. Devereux’s board includes James H. Schwab, who, according to his LinkedIn profile, was the president of Vice Media until December and remains a board member and senior adviser at Vice. Oliver North and Fox News analyst Brit Hume sit on the Youth For Tomorrow board of directors.

In a statement to Reveal, Sen. Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat, called the arrangement “incredibly disturbing.”

“Imagine being a child in a strange country, hundreds or thousands of miles from where you grew up, surrounded by people who may not speak your language. You would be incredibly vulnerable – which is exactly why ORR is supposed to follow strict regulations governing where these children can be held and what child welfare standards must be met.”

Merkley has introduced a bill that would require shelter operators to grant access to members of Congress.

“ORR needs to provide answers immediately about where they are holding asylum-seeking children, and what, if any, child welfare regulations those facilities are meeting,” he said.

The lack of disclosure of facilities where unaccompanied minors are held leaves a vacuum of public oversight. It’s unclear how the refugee agency regulates and inspects these facilities. For its publicly listed shelters, the agency sets a minimum staff-to-children ratio and training requirements and conducts announced and unannounced inspections. One possibility is that shelter providers are subcontracting the care of certain children to another care provider.

According to cooperative agreements between the refugee agency and residential care providers, which Reveal acquired after filing a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act, shelters may subcontract services to other entities. In those cases, the federal agency holds the shelter responsible for ensuring that “sub-recipients” maintain the same standards of care required by law.

Reveal filed FOIA requests in the fall for information about any subcontracts or out-of-network care contracts to care for unaccompanied children. The government has yet to respond.
https://www.revealnews.org/article/us-g ... -children/
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: Fintan O’Toole: Trial runs for fascism are in full flow

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Mar 22, 2019 8:23 am

ICE sets record for arrests of undocumented immigrants with no criminal record

Alan GomezUpdated 4:03 p.m. ET March 21, 2019
Protesters gathered outside Atlanta Immigration and Customs Enforcement office Monday in response to President Trump's national emergency declaration. (Feb. 18) AP

Federal immigration agents under President Donald Trump have set a new record for arrests of undocumented immigrants who don't have a criminal record, according to data released Thursday.

Under President Barack Obama, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents focused their efforts on arresting undocumented immigrants who had been convicted of crimes while living in the U.S. During Obama's final month in office, 82 percent of people arrested by ICE had a criminal record, meaning just 18 percent of all arrests were of people who were simply undocumented and had committed no other crimes.

Trump campaigned on a promise to target "bad hombres" – including murderers, violent criminals and gang members – but after assuming office he ordered ICE to arrest all undocumented immigrants it encountered, no matter their criminal background. That has led to a consistent drop in the percentage of people arrested by ICE who have a criminal record.

According to data released Thursday, that percentage fell to 63.5 percent in December, the lowest monthly figure since ICE started categorizing arrests in 2012. That means 36.5 percent of the arrests were simply undocumented with no criminal history.

More: Divided Supreme Court makes it easier to detain noncitizens with criminal records

Douglas Rivlin, communications director for America's Voice, a group that advocates for immigrants, said Congress provides ICE with only enough money to deport about 400,000 people a year. Using those limited resources on undocumented immigrants with no criminal record, he said, shows that Trump views the issue as more of a political issue than a law enforcement one.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at a home in Atlanta on Feb. 9, 2017, during a targeted enforcement operation aimed at immigration fugitives, re-entrants and at-large criminal aliens.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at a home in Atlanta on Feb. 9, 2017, during a targeted enforcement operation aimed at immigration fugitives, re-entrants and at-large criminal aliens. (Photo: Bryan Cox, Bryan Cox, AP)

"We're wasting resources deporting a lot of people who are assets to their communities who have families and mortgages and careers and car notes, and we're going after them with the same vigor that we're going after kidnappers and murderers and bank robbers," Rivlin said. "That's not a smart approach to law enforcement."

(article continues after chart)

ICE officials say all undocumented immigrants have technically committed a crime, either by entering the U.S. illegally or by staying in the country after his or her visa expired.

"One hundred percent of those arrested ... are immigration violators," Nathalie Asher, acting executive associate director for ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations, said during a call with reporters on Thursday.

The dramatic change in the way ICE arrests undocumented immigrants came following a February 2017 directive from the Department of Homeland Security that instructed all immigration agents to target all undocumented immigrants.

Under Obama, ICE agents pursuing a specific undocumented immigrant with a criminal record were under orders not to round up everyone else they found along the way. That meant ICE agents raiding a house to find an undocumented immigrant with a violent criminal record, for example, were not supposed to question everyone else living there about their immigration status.

Through a series of Homeland Security memos issued in February 2017, one month after Trump took office, those restrictions were removed.

"Department personnel have full authority to arrest or apprehend an alien whom an immigration officer has probable cause to believe is in violation of the immigration laws," one memo read. "They also have full authority to initiate removal proceedings against any alien who is subject to removal under any provision of the (Immigration and Nationality Act)."

ICE agents have followed through. They have arrested an average of 4,219 undocumented immigrants without a criminal record each month of the Trump administration. In the final two years under Obama, the agents averaged 1,352 such arrests a month.

The new numbers released Thursday also show a drop in the overall number of arrests made by ICE agents. The 11,178 undocumented immigrants arrested in December mark the lowest monthly total of the Trump administration, which Asher said is a direct result of the migrant caravans that have been flooding the southwest border.

Border Patrol agents and Customs officers are the ones who first come into contact with Central American families and unaccompanied minors that have been crossing the southern border in record numbers in recent months. But Asher said she's been forced to reassign ICE agents to help process those migrants for prosecution, detention, asylum interviews and deportation.

"I have a finite number of officers," Asher said. "We are having to work lock-step with (Customs and Border Protection) redirecting countless numbers of deportation officers to address what’s occurring on the border at this time."
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/pol ... 232476002/





The American Bar Association says US immigration courts are 'on the brink of collapse'

An attorney for an immigrant child appears before a judge in a Virginia immigration court in 2018.
(CNN)The American Bar Association is proposing a major overhaul of the US immigration system, calling the courts that decide whether to deport immigrants "irredeemably dysfunctional."

"The immigration courts are facing an existential crisis," the association says in a report released Wednesday. "The current system is irredeemably dysfunctional and on the brink of collapse."
The only way to fix "serious systemic issues," the report argues, is to create what's known as an Article I court. Akin to tax or bankruptcy courts, this would be a court that's independent from the Justice Department.

It's an idea that's been proposed before by advocates and immigration judges. And the American Bar Association listed a similar proposal as an option for reform in a 2010 report on the US immigration system.
Its report on Wednesday warns that recent policy changes have made a system that was already stretched at the seams even worse.

New wave of 'fake dates' cause chaos in immigration courts Thursday
"The state of the U.S. immigration court system has worsened considerably since our 2010 report," this report notes, specifically mentioning an unprecedented backlog of cases, increased wait times, policy changes that aim to accelerate cases without allocating enough funding, over-reliance on video teleconferencing during court proceedings and possible bias in the hiring of judges.

The Justice Department, which runs US immigration courts, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the ABA report.

But the department has previously addressed some of the issues the ABA report raises.

Federal office says progress being made


In a response to questions from Sen. John Cornyn last year, the director of the Justice Department's Executive Office for Immigration Review said the department opposes making immigration courts Article I courts.

"The financial and logistical hurdles ... would be monumental and would likely delay existing cases even further," James McHenry wrote.
And in recent congressional testimony, McHenry said that "considerable progress" had been made in restoring his office's "reputation as a fully functioning, efficient and impartial administrative court system capable of rendering timely decisions consistent with due process."
McHenry noted that his department had increased its number of case completions for the third consecutive year. And he said that every day, the office decides immigration cases "by fairly, expeditiously and uniformly interpreting and administering the nation's immigration laws."

Members of the bar association's immigration commission, who authored the report, warned Wednesday that officials have become overly focused on speed and are overlooking the importance of due process.

"While our current immigration system is confronting substantial challenges with respect to delays and backlogs, we would all agree, we must never lose sight of the tenets that underpin our legal system and reflect this country's values," said Wendy Wayne, who chairs the commission. "The rights that our laws provide to those subject to our immigration system, those cannot be sacrificed in the name of efficiency."

The report also alleges that judicial independence has been called into question "with a resurgence of alleged politicized hiring and the adoption of policies that arguably undermine immigration judges' ability to perform their role as a neutral arbitrator of fact and law."

In response to allegations of politicized hiring, a Justice Department official said that at least 51 immigration judges hired under the Trump administration received conditional offers for the positions while President Barack Obama was in office.

Bar association reiterates recommendations


The bar association's report lists more than 100 recommendations, including when video conferencing should be used in court and rescinding the recently imposed quotas and metrics used to evaluate immigration judges. Many of the recommendations were also made in 2010 but were not followed, the report acknowledges.
He knows his chances are slim

"There have been virtually no new immigration laws addressing issues covered by the 2010 Report, and few of the 2010 recommendations were adopted by either the Obama or the Trump administrations," it says. "At the same time, certain policies that were in place at the time of the 2010 Report and that promoted the fairness, efficiency, and due process of the immigration system have been undermined."

This time around, the association says it's recommending "more drastic reforms."

"Recent political and legal developments have exposed the fragility of our administrative systems," the report says. "Today, our immigration courts and other adjudicative systems face untenable backlogs, yet efforts to reduce those backlogs have been largely ineffective, or, at worst, counterproductive to the goals of an independent judiciary."

More than 800,000 cases are currently pending in US immigration courts, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. At the time of its 2010 report, the ABA says there were about 262,000 cases pending.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/20/politics ... rce=twCNNp
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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