Salisbury University



[Parts of 8 Articles on Family Separations & Children in Detention at US-Mexico Border this summer – Counts as 1 reading for papers & notes]Trump administration to step up family separation at the border By TED HESSON 12:58 PM EDT2018-05-07T02:13-0400 The Trump administration will more frequently separate families at the southwest border under a new policy to be announced Monday, a DHS official told POLITICO.Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen signed a memo Friday that directs the department to refer all suspected border-crossers to the Justice Department for prosecution under a federal statute that prohibits illegal entry, according to the official.The stringent enforcement of federal immigration law comes as arrests on the border have climbed in recent months. Border Patrol caught about 38,000 people at the U.S.-Mexico border in April — more than three times the level during the same month a year earlier, though still well below the level in recent decades.The new DHS policy follows an April announcement by Attorney General Jeff Sessions that calls for U.S. attorney’s offices along the southwest border to prosecute cases of suspected illegal entry “to the extent practicable.” Nielsen’s coordinated measure will likely mean a broader pool of people caught at the border will face criminal charges — including parents who arrive with their children.Sessions announced the policy Monday at a law enforcement conference in Scottsdale, Ariz., according to the Justice Department. He said it will result in the referral of “100 percent of illegal southwest border crossings“ to the DOJ for prosecution. “If you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you and that child will be separated from you as required by law,” the attorney general said in prepared remarks. “If you don’t like that, then don’t smuggle children over our border.“…[cut rest for space reasons]What separation from parents does to children: ‘The effect is catastrophic’by William Wan 18, 2018This is what happens inside children when they are forcibly separated from their parents.Their heart rate goes up. Their body releases a flood of stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline. Those stress hormones can start killing off dendrites — the little branches in brain cells that transmit messages. In time, the stress can start killing off neurons and — especially in young children — wreaking dramatic and long-term damage, both psychologically and to the physical structure of the brain.“The effect is catastrophic,” said Charles Nelson, a pediatrics professor at Harvard Medical School. “There’s so much research on this that if people paid attention at all to the science, they would never do this.”That research on child-parent separation is driving pediatricians, psychologists and other health experts to vehemently oppose the Trump administration’s new border crossing policy, which has separated more than 2,000 immigrant children from their parents in recent weeks.The American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Physicians and the American Psychiatric Association have all issued statements against it — representing more than 250,000 doctors in the United States. Nearly 7,700 mental-health professionals and 142 organizations have also signed a petition urging President Trump to end the policy.“To pretend that separated children do not grow up with the shrapnel of this traumatic experience embedded in their minds is to disregard everything we know about child development, the brain, and trauma,” the petition reads…. MCALLEN, TX - JUNE 29: Karina Lopez's one year old daughter hugs her mother after they were detained by Border Patrol after crossing illegally into the United States on Thursday, June 29, 2017, in McAllen, TX. The mother and daughter with her 16 year old niece were coming to the U.S. in search of a better life. (Photo by Salwan Georges/The Washington Post) … “If you take the moral, spiritual, even political aspect out of it, from a strictly medical and scientific point of view, what we as a country are doing to these children at the border is unconscionable,” said Luis H. Zayas, a psychiatry professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “The harm our government is now causing will take a lifetime to undo.”Separation at the border: children wait in cages at south Texas warehouse Associated Press in McAllen, Texas Jun 2018 Inside an old warehouse in south Texas, hundreds of children wait away from their parents in a series of cages created by metal fencing. One cage had 20 children inside. Scattered about are bottles of water, bags of chips and large foil sheets intended to serve as blankets. One teenager told an advocate who visited she was helping care for a young child she didn’t know because the child’s aunt was somewhere else in the facility. She said she had to show others in her cell how to change the girl’s diaper. On Sunday, the US border patrol allowed reporters to briefly visit the facility where it holds families arrested at the southern border, responding to new criticism and protests over the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy and resulting separation of families. More than 1,100 people were inside the large, dark facility that was divided into separate wings for unaccompanied children, adults on their own and mothers and fathers with children. The cages in each wing open into common areas, to use portable restrooms. The overhead lighting stays on around the clock….. [Cut rest for space reasons]‘Deleted’ families: What went wrong with Trump’s family-separation effortby Nick Miroff, Amy Goldstein and Maria Sacchetti 28, 2018When a federal judge ordered the Trump administration?to reunify migrant families separated at the border, the government’s cleanup crews faced an immediate problem.?They weren’t sure who the families were, let alone what to call them.Customs and Border Protection databases had categories for “family units,” and “unaccompanied alien children” who arrive without parents. They did not have a distinct classification for more than 2,600 children who had been taken from their families and placed in government shelters.So agents came up with a new term: “deleted family units.”But when they sent that information to the refugee office at the Department of Health and Human Services, which was told to facilitate the reunifications, the office’s database did not have a column for families with that designation.?The crucial tool for fixing the problem was crippled. Caseworkers and government health officials had to sift by hand through the files of all the nearly 12,000 migrant children in HHS custody to figure out which ones had arrived with parents, where the adults were jailed and how to put the families back pounding failures to record, classify and keep track of migrant parents and children pulled apart by President Trump’s “zero tolerance” border crackdown were at the core of what is now widely regarded as one of the biggest debacles of his presidency. The rapid implementation and sudden reversal of the policy whiplashed multiple federal agencies, forcing the activation of an HHS command center ordinarily used to handle hurricanes and other catastrophes.After his 30-day deadline to reunite the “deleted” families passed Thursday, U.S. District Judge Dana M. Sabraw lambasted the government for its lack of preparation and coordination.“There were three agencies, and each was like its own stovepipe. Each had its own boss, and they did not communicate,” Sabraw said Friday at a court hearing in San Diego. “What was lost in the process was the family. The parents didn’t know where the children were, and the children didn’t know where the parents were. And the government didn’t know either.”…In court filings Thursday, the government said it had reunited more than 1,800 children with their parents or other guardians. But 711 children would remain separated for now, because their parents had been deported, had criminal records or otherwise had not been cleared to regain custody.… Suddenly, an idea?considered too extreme?by the Obama administration was?back in play, pushed by powerful supporters, including Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Trump policy adviser Stephen Miller and White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly.?But there were also top officials at DHS and other agencies who warned that it could go disastrously wrong.“Some of us didn’t think it would be good policy. Not because it wouldn’t be effective, but because it doesn’t reflect American values and because it would bring a huge blowback,” said James D. Nealon, a former DHS international policy adviser who resigned in February.?A woman identified only as Maria reaches for her son Franco, 4, as they are reunited Thursday at El Paso International Airport. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)The government previously had separated parents on a more limited basis, such as when human trafficking was suspected or the adult’s relationship to the child was in doubt……As the?system ramped up, thousands of children were funneled into shelters overseen by HHS, so many that the agency had to set up a tent camp?outside El Paso and plan for additional ones on military bases…In his?resignation?letter, Martin said the family separations were “executed with astounding casualness about precise tracking of family relationships — as though eventual reunification was deemed unlikely or at least unimportant.”?Another member who resigned, Elizabeth Holtzman,?said the failure to create records to track parents and children?demonstrated?“utter depravity.”?“This is child kidnapping, plain and simple,” she wrote in her resignation letter, urging?Nielsen to quit…. [Cut rest for space reasons]‘I want to die’: Was a 5-year-old drugged after being separated from his dad at the border?by Michael E. Miller 9, 2018MOULTRIE, Ga. — The boy stood at the window with clenched fists, watching a heavy rain fall on the overgrown yard outside. Three months earlier, the 5-year-old and his father had fled death threats in Guatemala, seeking asylum in the United States. Instead, Border Patrol agents had sent his dad to an immigration jail and Adonias to a children’s shelter in Chicago. Now, six days after their July 24 reunion, his father was sitting across the room from him in the shabby, shotgun house they shared with four relatives, asking Adonias what had happened in the 10 weeks they were apart.He knew there were allegations that Adonias had been injected with something that made him sleepy when he misbehaved — accusations state and federal authorities are investigating but could be difficult to definitively resolve.The shelter, which conducted its own investigation, adamantly denies wrongdoing, and the boy’s medical records — provided by his attorney with his parents’ permission — show no injections of anything except vaccines. But an independent psychological evaluation before his release from Casa Guadalupe found he was “exhibiting signs of trauma, particularly when triggered by [a toy] syringe.”Amid the controversy, the records offer a stark portrait of one child’s painful odyssey through the family separation process.Adonias’s case has become emblematic of concerns about the treatment of thousands of migrant children, especially those taken from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border during the Trump administration’s short-lived family separation policy.In recent weeks, there have been charges of sexual abuse of a 6-year-old and a 14-year-old at two Arizona shelters, and a federal judge ordered a Texas shelter for troubled children to stop giving them psychotropic medication without a court order or parental consent… … Some of these shelters, which are privately run but overseen by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement, have long been plagued by accusations of physical and sexual abuse.On April 16, days after the introduction of “zero tolerance,” a coalition of civil rights organizations and legal clinics asked a federal judge to take action against Shiloh Treatment Center, claiming the shelter near Houston routinely gave immigrant children “chemical straight-jackets” of psychotropic pills and sedative injections to control their behavior.After more than a dozen children at Shiloh said they were given drugs that made them sleepy, dizzy and nauseated, U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee last week ordered ORR to obtain parental consent or a court order before prescribing psychotropics except in cases of dire emergencies….… But nothing in the file explains what two older Brazilian boys told The Washington Post and the New York Times they saw happen to Adonias at Casa Guadalupe.“Almost every day, someone we called ‘the doctor’ would come into class after Adonias started misbehaving or did not calm down and the doctor would inject him with a shot that made him calm down right away and fall asleep,” Diego Magalhaes, 10, said in an affidavit provided to state investigators…… When Adonias was reunited with his father at the Port Isabel Detention Center in southern Texas, volunteers from Catholic Charities offered to put them up for a night at their nearby shelter.“Papi, I don’t want go,” the boy said after hearing the word “shelter,” according to his father. “They give lots of injections there.”He wasn’t just fearful. He was furious. At the Atlanta airport, Adonias had a meltdown in the terminal, refusing to go with his father and shouting that he didn’t love him.“The first couple of days, he would get angry easily and start shaking,” his father recalled.Slowly, the boy seemed to be getting better. But the games he played were darker than before. And he had a newfound fascination with knives and machetes.“He’s this way because they locked him up,” his father said. “I would have preferred they had just sent us back than for him to end up like this.”As he stood on the porch near a fallen American flag, his son sat in a motorized toy car, revving the engine and honking the horn.“Papi,” Adonias said, aiming the yellow car off the raised porch. “I’m going straight ahead in the car.”“Yo me quiero morir,” the boy added quietly. “I want to die.”A wind stirred the tall grasses.The father said nothing but put his foot out to block the car from falling.Children Separated Under Trump’s “Zero Tolerance” Policy Say Their Trauma ContinuesDebbie Nathan 26 2018On August 9, several reporters took a government-led tour through America’s largest detention facility for immigrant parents and their children: the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas. Sprawling over 50 acres of a repurposed oilfield workers’ camp, Dilley, as the center is colloquially known, has room for 2,400 detainees. It currently holds about 1,500 people — all mothers and their children, including babies.No interviews with the detainees were allowed, so reporters were left to record random sounds and observations: phalanxes of baby strollers, a salad bar in the cafeteria, and, as the Wall Street Journal noted, “a speaker blasting a Jimmy Buffett song.” But The Intercept has been in contact with some of the occupants of Dilley by phone — many of them children — and the circumstances they’re enduring are decidedly less sanguine than Buffett’s tunes...One call I received was from a 10-year-old girl. In a weary voice, she told me, in Spanish, that she is afraid to attend the school that Dilley maintains for child detainees. “I’m afraid to leave my mom and go to class,” she said. “I’m afraid that’s when they’ll separate me again from my mom, like at the dog pound.” “She cries in the morning,” her mother said.The girl has told immigration attorneys at Dilley that “bad people” in Honduras injured her mother and threatened her — in part because the family is Mormon. She said that when she and her mother crossed the border into South Texas in early June, Customs and Border Protection separated?them?and put the?girl?in the cage-like “dog pound” room. They told her she and her mother would be reunited in two days. In reality, it?took almost five weeks.After the separation, officials told the child she was being flown to New York to see her mother, even though her mother was in detention in South Texas. The child was put in a shelter in New York for 32 days.Now, back in Dilley, she is hyper aware of the government’s desire to deport them both. “If we leave them just for a minute they start crying,” said another mother, also in a phone call. “They don’t even want to see us signing a paper because they’re afraid it’s about deportation. ‘Mami, no te vayas!’ they say. They’re terrified.”……Susan Henner, an immigration lawyer from White Plains, New York, says that her Guatemalan client at Dilley, a woman named Mirza, was also put onto a plane with her young son and deported at the behest of the Dilley court. This happened even though a court in Arizona, where Mirza first entered the system, had just granted the woman permission to remain in the U.S. for a hearing scheduled for October. Henner did not learn of Mirza and her son’s sudden exit until several days after it happened. By then, mother and child were long gone, and Henner hasn’t been able to track them. The story of their deportation has lingered at Dilley, providing grist for the anxiety mill.While caged in the “dog pound,” and throughout their stays in shelters around the country, some of the separated children were issued Notices to Appear—mandates to show up in immigration court and tell a judge why they fear returning to their countries. The children whom The Intercept spoke with have plenty of reasons.The 10-year-old fears religious persecution.?The 12-year-old Honduran told her lawyer that a gang threatened to kill her, and that she was abused?by her father, who also threatened her life. But the children were not given an opportunity to convey these fears to immigration authorities via “credible fear” interviews, which, under normal circumstances, would start the asylum process. … [Cut rest for space reasons]Kids as young as 1 in US court, awaiting reunion with familyBy ASTRID GALVAN. 08, 2018Kids as young as 1 in US court, awaiting reunion with familyBy ASTRID GALVANJul. 08, 2018 Link copied!PHOENIX (AP) — The 1-year-old boy in a green button-up shirt drank milk from a bottle, played with a small purple ball that lit up when it hit the ground and occasionally asked for “agua.”Then it was the child’s turn for his court appearance before a Phoenix immigration judge, who could hardly contain his unease with the situation during the portion of the hearing where he asks immigrant defendants whether they understand the proceedings.“I’m embarrassed to ask it, because I don’t know who you would explain it to, unless you think that a 1-year-old could learn immigration law,” Judge John W. Richardson told the lawyer representing the 1-year-old boy.The boy is one of hundreds of children who need to be reunited with their parents after being separated at the border, many of them split from mothers and fathers as a result of the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance policy.” The separations have become an embarrassment to the administration as stories of crying children separated from mothers and kept apart for weeks on end dominated the news in recent weeks.Critics have also seized on the nation’s immigration court system that requires children — some still in diapers — to have appearances before judges and go through deportation proceedings while separated from their parents. Such children don’t have a right to a court-appointed attorney, and 90 percent of kids without a lawyer are returned to their home countries, according to Kids in Need of Defense, a group that provides legal representation…. [Cut rest for space reasons]Texas detention camp swells fivefold with migrant children The Tornillo camp originally had a capacity to house 400 children temporarily, now it has 2,400 beds and will remain open at least until the end of the yearEdwin Delgado in Tornillo, Texas Oct 2018 It was meant to be small and temporary. But the precise rows of US government tents by the lonely border crossing just a few feet from Mexico keep multiplying. The detention camp for migrant children in the south-west desert at Tornillo, Texas, not only remains in place weeks after it was expected to shut down, but is expanding fast.Children are being brought by the busload and kept here on this remote patch of federal land surrounded by scrub and pecan nut farms. Hidden from public view on the ground, its proliferation is clearly visible from the air.The camp sprouted up four months ago in the midst of Donald Trump’s crackdown on unauthorized border crossings and immigration, starting with about two dozen neat, brown tents and one or two larger, white communal tents.It came to wider attention when the administration escalated the practice of tearing families apart and detaining adults and children separately, after the government’s “zero tolerance” declaration in May on unlawful immigration. A small number of those children at the time were expected to end up at Tornillo, alongside teenagers already there who had been apprehended after crossing the border alone.Trump ended the policy of family separations on 20 June following huge public outcry. But the controversial camp at Tornillo persists and grows….The camp is next to the Marcelino Serna port of entry between the US and Mexico, on Department of Homeland Security (DHS) land 20 miles south-east of El Paso in west Texas. It is being used to accommodate more and more of the surging numbers of children being held by the government, despite rising opposition.“We’re causing irreparable harm to thousands of children and I think it’s deplorable, despicable, inhumane and un-American and we need to put a stop to it,” said David Stout, a member of the El Paso county commissioners court.On this pleasant sunny morning there was no sign from above in the barren outdoor spaces of the 2,000-plus children believed to be detained at the fenced-in camp with air-conditioned tents. Limited access for some reporters and politicians back in the early summer yielded reports of kids playing soccer in the dust and scorching temperatures. HYPERLINK "" \l "img-3" Facebook Twitter Pinterest Children and workers are seen at the newly built detention camp in Tornillo, Texas, on 19 June. Photograph: Joe Raedle/Getty Images According to recent HHS statistics released to Congress and some media outlets, HHS now has in its custody across the country 12,800 undocumented minors – a fivefold increase in the span of 16 months.The Tornillo camp was previously contracted to operate until the end of August, then extended to the end of September, and now will remain open until the end of the year, with the potential to expand its capacity further if needed.When it first opened, the facility had a capacity to house 400 children. It has since grown to 2,400 beds and a further 1,400 beds will be placed on reserve status in case the number of minors being held in detention continues to rise, HHS said, while declining to answer questions regarding the exact number of detainees there now… Texas state senator José Rodríguez was given a restricted tour of the facility in July. “This has continued for too long and frankly, I don’t find the federal government to be reliable in terms of having a plan to close the facility. I wouldn’t be surprised if at the end of December they extend the contract again,” Rodríguez said.Immigrant advocacy groups say a memorandum of understanding between DHS and HHS, signed in April, is slowing down the release of the minors from federal custody because of new restrictions on sponsors – typically a relative or family friend already living in the US may agree to act as a guardian to an unaccompanied minor crossing the border.The new procedure requires potential sponsors for the children to submit to fingerprinting of all the adults in the household. Opponents say that acts as a deterrent for sponsors, who may fear the authorities.“It’s absurd. More and more children are being detained by Ice [Immigration and Customs Enforcement],” said Fernando Garcia, executive director of Border Network for Human Rights, an El Paso-based advocacy organization. “Ice’s [previous] unwillingness to reunite the children, combined with the hardline immigration enforcement, has resulted in this new crisis.”Last month it was reported that Ice had arrested 41 individuals who came forward as potential sponsors for undocumented migrant children between July and September. And the White House announced plans to sidestep the Flores settlement, a 20-year old agreement which limits the time the federal government can detain immigrant minors to not more than 20 days. According to federal data, the average detention length has risen from 40 to 59 days.Garcia compared the Tornillo facility to the internment camps for Japanese Americans in the US during the second world war and says it is a government tactic to “dehumanize immigrants”. “Unfortunately the attitude towards these migrants has been one of painting them as criminals and a threat to society. That represents a problem because with that you can justify having them in prisons, you justify building walls,” he said. Indeed, earlier this week, the New York Times reported that, as shelters and foster accommodation across the US fill to bursting with children apprehended and detained after crossing the border alone, many are being taken by surprise at dead of night and moved to the Tornillo camp.Border Network and numerous other advocacy groups, as well as politicians, have had more recent requests to tour the Tornillo camp and check on resources for the children ignored or denied. “It’s a shame because it shows neglect and lack of transparency at a time when civil oversight is needed the most,” Garcia said….Rodríguez said he had asked the authorities about education and mental health services for the children and was told they weren’t provided because the children are there for a short period of time.But “it’s not a short period of time any more,” he said. ................
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