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Editorials re the Trump Administration’s Family Separation Policycompiled by Roger W. SmithApril 2020Posted here is a synopsis of editorials and op-ed pieces about the Trump administration’s family separation policy that were published from March 2017 to January 2020.The title, author, and publication information for each piece is provided, as well as the URL for each. I have provided excerpts from each article.I have also posted below miscellaneous comments and statements made by critics of the policy which are excepted from various articles and on line postings.-- Roger W. SmithMarch 2020*****************************************************Nations have separated children from parents before. It never ends well.By Nara MilanichThe Washington PostMarch 17, 2017 Trump administration has already proposed a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, a ban on travel from six countries, a shutdown of the refugee program and extensive detentions and deportations of undocumented immigrants. This month, officials floated a new tactic: splitting families up. …The mass separation of these families would be catastrophic ….Child removal is an extraordinary act of modern state power that falls most heavily on the poor and the powerless: the colonized, the subaltern, the dissident. Authorities have wielded this power over individuals and groups in an effort to redeem, punish and deter them. Now, they threaten to do so once again on the U.S.-Mexico border.*****************************************************Gratuitous cruelty by Homeland Security: Separating a 7-year-old from her motherBy Editorial BoardThe Washington PostMarch 4, 2018 Trump administration has said that it is considering separating parents from their children as a means of deterring other families, most of them Central American, from undertaking the perilous trip necessary to reach the United States and seek asylum. Now, without any formal announcement, that cruel practice, ruled out by previous administrations, has become increasingly common, immigrant advocacy groups say. …Gratuitous malice toward children is not a characteristic one generally associates with the United States, but under Ms. Nielsen’s guidance, the Department of Homeland Security seems intent on changing that. ….*****************************************************Taken from their parents: There is nothing right about thisBy Raul A. ReyesCNNApril 23, 2018's hard to imagine a policy crueler than one reported by the New York Times on Saturday. A review of government data found, and federal officials confirmed, that about 700 migrant children had been taken away from their parents at the southern border since October. More than 100 were younger than 4. …This practice is inhumane. The migrant children have already experienced trauma, and being removed from their parents is the last thing they need. And there is no evidence that this policy will do anything to deter migrants fleeing to our southern border.*****************************************************The Trump administration traumatizes children in the name of scaring migrants awayBy Editorial BoardThe Washington PostApril 29, 2018, toddlers, tweens, teens -- Trump administration officials are less interested in the age of an unauthorized child migrant than they are in removing the child from his or her parents as a means of deterring illegal border-crossers. That plan, first floated by White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly last year when he was homeland security secretary, was widely regarded as so callous and such a radical departure from historical practice that it was unthinkable for any U.S. government. ….In fact, not only has the idea of systematically separating undocumented children and parents gained currency among top officials determined to turn the tide on illegal entry, it’s already happening with increasing frequency.*****************************************************Jeff Sessions’s breathtaking policy of malice toward migrantsBy Editorial BoardThe Washington PostMay 8, 2018 General Jeff Sessions is indifferent about whether undocumented immigrants crossing into the United States are simply seeking a better life for themselves and their families or whether they are fleeing domestic abuse, drug cartels, extortion rackets or political violence. It’s all the same to Mr. Sessions, who said Monday that all those who come into the country illegally would be prosecuted -- and separated from their children in the bargain. Thus has the top law enforcement official in the United States enshrined callousness as administration policy.Will babies be separated from nursing mothers? Will toddlers be housed in institutions far from parents? How many children will be traumatized by being carted away from their parents for weeks or months -- or longer? The attorney general doesn’t say or, apparently, care.*****************************************************Separating children from parents at the border isn’t just cruel. It’s torture.By Jaana Juvonen and Jennifer SilversThe Washington PostMay 15, 2018 two speeches last week in the border states of Arizona and California, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that as a matter of enforcement, if an unauthorized migrant brings a child across the United States-Mexico border without documentation, “we will prosecute you, and that child will be separated from you as required by law. …This means undocumented children and parents will be separated -- a tactic meant to deter migrant parents, including many asylum seekers, such as those who’ve traveled through Central America in a caravan in recent weeks, from crossing the border in the first place. Human rights organizations such as Amnesty International have argued that this policy change is inhumane, and it is. ….The practice of separating families at the border is morally reprehensible and -- based on the science -- goes against international and U.S. law, because the suffering it inflicts constitutes torture of children.*****************************************************Ripping children from parents will shatter America’s soulby Viet Thanh NguyenThe Washington PostMay 18, 2018 I was 4 years old, I was taken away from my parents. We were refugees from Vietnam, fleeing the end of the war in 1975. …I thought of this experience when I read the words earlier this month of Attorney General Jeff Sessions regarding his intent to separate children from undocumented parents at the border -- possibly even sending those children to detention camps on military bases. “If you are smuggling a child then we will prosecute you, and that child will be separated from you as required by law,” he said. “If you don’t like that, then don’t smuggle children over our border.”Sessions is a law-and-order man who believes he is protecting our country. I’m a man, a son, a father and a writer who worries about our nation losing its soul.The intent of this policy is punitive. In practice, it will undoubtedly lead to shattered families. …*****************************************************The US is ripping immigrants' families apart. That's tortureby Jessica ValentiThe GuardianMay 26. 2018 a parent, there are few things that haunt your nightmares more than the idea that you might somehow lose your child. That they would be taken from you, and that there would be nothing that you could do about it. The ability to protect your child – to make them feel safe – is as vital as oxygen.And so I can’t imagine what parents are facing as the US government forcibly separates families in an attempt to punish undocumented immigrants. It’s beyond cruelty – it’s torture. Particularly when you think about what young children, who don’t speak the language and who are in a new country, must be feeling as they’re treated like criminals.As low as politics in this country has gotten, this beneath even the worst of us. …*****************************************************Republicans’ inhumanity at the border reveals their grand scamby Catherine RampellThe Washington PostMay 28, 2018 October, more than 700 minor children have been separated from their parents at the border. More than 100 have been under 4 years old. …For decades, Republicans have championed traditional family values and having parents, rather than the state, take responsibility for their children.This Republican administration’s inhumane treatment of helpless children -- who are ripped from their mothers’ arms, detained in human warehouses and drop-kicked into “foster care or whatever” -- reveals such rhetoric to have been a scam.The Trump administration’s goal is to inflict pain upon these families. Cruelty is not an unfortunate, unintended consequence of White House immigration policy; it is the objective.*****************************************************The Trump administration’s immigration policies are impossibly cruel. That’s the whole point.by Paul WaldmanThe Washington PostMay 28, 2018 growing outrage over the Trump administration’s policy of separating children from their parents when families arrive at the border, many are asking how the administration can be so cruel as to literally tear children from their mothers’ arms. There’s a clear answer, one that runs through all of the administration’s policies on immigration:The cruelty is the whole point.It’s both a reflection of President Trump’s beliefs and those of his key advisers on immigration, and a practical tool they are using to reduce the number of immigrants coming to the United States. There won’t be a more humane set of policies coming out of this administration, because they have no interest in being humane. …So when you hear horrifying stories from the border of families being ripped apart, understand that the administration is perfectly happy for those stories to be told. They have no compassion for the human beings involved, and they want others who might consider coming to the United States to know how heartlessly they’ll be treated. It’s the whole point.*****************************************************Trump Immigration Policy Veers From Abhorrent to EvilBy Nicholas KristofThe New York TimesMay 30, 2018 as a nation have crossed so many ugly lines recently, yet one new policy of President Trump’s particularly haunts me. I’m speaking of the administration’s tactic of seizing children from desperate refugees at the border. …It’s true that immigration policy is a nightmare, we can’t take everyone and almost no one advocates open borders. Some immigrants bring small children with them and claim to be the parent in hopes that this will spare them from detention.Yet none of that should be an excuse for brutalizing children by ripping them away from their parents.*****************************************************Will we just stand by as migrant children are taken from their parents?by Francine ProseThe GuardianJune 3, 2018 the months since Donald Trump’s election, I’ve been surprised, and not especially pleased, by my own ability to absorb each new outrage, each new shock –and move on. But not this one. Perhaps because I’ve spent so much of my adult life around children, perhaps because I have children and now grandchildren of my own, the reports and images of these devastated families have been keeping me awake at night and haunting my daylight hours. And I believe that this should be keeping all of us awake.The fact that these things are occurring right now should be preventing us from conducting business as usual, from going on with our ordinary lives, from ignoring the promptings of conscience. We should be taking to the streets, boarding buses to see for ourselves what is transpiring at these border crossings, checkpoints and detention centers.Because if we know what is happening and do nothing, we will be no different from the “innocent bystanders” and witnesses to the mass arrests, the egregious violations of human rights and genocidal crimes – witnesses who, throughout history and after the fact, have claimed: we didn’t know. We didn’t see. There was nothing we could do.*****************************************************Trump’s Family Separation Policy Aims To Deter Immigration. That May Make It Illegal.By Roque PlanasHuffPostJune 7, 2018 aim of President Donald Trump’s new policy of splitting kids from their mothers at the border is, in a word, deterrence: The White House wants to discourage more immigrants from trying to enter the United States.Kirstjen Nielsen, Trump’s secretary of homeland security, is careful not to say this outright. …There’s a reason Nielsen and other administration officials shy away from attaching the word “deterrence” to the new policy: Changing immigrant detention policy as a way to deter undocumented people from coming to the U.S. is illegal, federal courts have repeatedly ruled. So now she and other Trump administration officials find themselves struggling to defend a family separation policy whose clear ambition is deterrence.*****************************************************First They Came for the MigrantsBy Michelle GoldbergThe New York TimesJune 11, 2018 are countless horror stories about what’s happening to immigrants under Trump. …. But what really makes Trump’s America feel like a rogue state is the administration’s policy of taking children from migrants caught crossing the border unlawfully, even if the parents immediately present themselves to the authorities to make asylum claims. …[Children] are being used as pawns to persuade parents to give up their asylum claims and to warn others against coming to America. … what is happening is the sort of moral enormity that once seemed unthinkable in contemporary America. …*****************************************************Trump and Sessions have created prisons for Spanish-speaking childrenby Eugene RobinsonThe Washington PostJune 14, 2018 moral outrages from the Trump administration come so fast that they blur together, but this one stands out: the unconscionably cruel policy of ripping the children of would-be immigrants away from their parents at the border.Officials do not even try to hide the fact that the purpose of this abhorrent and inhumane practice is to instill fear. …*****************************************************Opinion This isn’t religion. It’s perversion.by Dana MilbankThe Washington PostJune 15, 2018[T]he Trump administration [has] claimed that it had the divine right to rip children from their parents’ arms at the border.Officials justified the unique form of barbarism … by saying they are doing God’s will. …This isn’t religion. It’s perversion. It is not the creed of a democratic government or political party but of an authoritarian cult.*****************************************************I don’t recognize this country anymoreby Kathleen ParkerThe Washington PostJune 15, 2018 yourself in the room with immigration officials and try to imagine exactly which argument would convince you that separating children from their migrating parents would be a good idea. …Maybe some hardcore Trump supporters, who elected him president on a promise to get tough on immigration, can swallow this collateral cruelty as a necessary unpleasantness. But I can’t imagine that many of them are parents. As a mother, my heart breaks at the thought of a frightened and confused child being taken away from his or her parents and stashed like an orphaned animal in what amounts to a holding pen. … I don’t recognize this country anymore.*****************************************************Trump Administration Has No Idea Whether It Backs Family Separation at the Borderby Scott BixbyThe Daily BeastJune 17, 2018 United States has no policy of separating migrant families at the border. There is such a policy, but it’s all the Democrats’ fault. The policy was a “simple decision,” but one “nobody likes.” The policy is good, legal, and Jesus would approve.The Trump administration, confronted with increasing public criticism over its immensely unpopular policy of separating migrant children from their families when they cross the U.S. border, has responded to the crisis by taking wildly different positions on both the policy itself and the motivation behind it.*****************************************************Trump’s ‘zero-tolerance’ border policy is immoral, un-American -- and ineffectiveby Jeh Charles JohnsonThe Washington PostJune 18, 2018 hesitate to criticize my successors in office, who are burdened with the responsibility of keeping the U.S. homeland and its borders secure. I hesitate to cast doubt on the hard work of those who once worked for me in the Department of Homeland Security. But when it comes to certain offensive and wrongheaded government policies, those of us with a public voice and who understand the issue cannot stay silent.The current “zero tolerance” deterrent policy, resulting in the separation of 2,000 innocent migrant children from their parents, is immoral and un-American. Beyond that, the policy will in the long run prove to be ineffective.Jeh Charles Johnson served as secretary of homeland security from 2013 to 2017.*****************************************************When Did Caging Kids Become the Art of the Deal?By Editorial BoardThe New York TimesJune 18, 2018 President Trump blame Democrats for his administration’s inhumane practice of snatching immigrant children from their parents at the border evokes nothing so much as an abusive husband blaming his wife for the beatings he delivers: …As anyone paying even minimal attention to politics knows, this immoral policy is not “the Democrats fault for being weak and ineffective with Boarder Security and Crime.” … It’s not really Republicans’ fault, either -- at least not yet. … This bit of nastiness belongs entirely to Mr. Trump -- he has made a choice to torment undocumented families -- and his attempt to pass the buck is dishonest and gutless.*****************************************************Picture this: On your next flight abroad, as your family deplanes, legal authorities of that country physically separate your children and disappear with them. Despite your protests and the screams of the children, the foreign government claims that it has the right to tear the family apart and will not provide any information on where the children are going or, indeed, if you will ever see them again.Try to imagine how you would feel at that moment. I doubt that most of us can perceive the level of panic, confusion, anger and desperation that these children and parents experience.Now imagine how refugees of limited means and limited English language must feel as their children are kidnapped by the very state that they labored so hard to reach -- what guilt for their well-intentioned efforts to give them a better life away from violence and poverty.Forced separations will sow seeds of hate for generations. That the administration practices this depraved process erases any higher moral ground the United States may have once held. To separate babies and toddlers from their parent is unconscionable.-- Marjorie Rogalski, Hanover, N.H., letter to editor, The New York Times, June 18, 2008*****************************************************The Trump administration created this awful border policy. It doesn’t need Congress to fix it.by Editorial BoardWashington PostJune 18, 2018 administration officials have tried a number of stratagems to counter the near-universal condemnation of their policy of separating migrant children from their parents when apprehended at the border. Attorney General Jeff Sessions said he is heeding the Bible. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said she is just following the law. The president, of course, blamed Democrats.What no one in the administration has done is to try to justify breaking up families. That’s because there is nothing that can justify a policy that, in just six weeks, has resulted in nearly 2,000 children, some younger than 4 years old, being snatched from their mothers and fathers, and with no good plans to reunite them. …*****************************************************How They Defend the IndefensibleBy Dahlia LithwickSlateJune 19, 2018 can call it a “policy” (Jeff Sessions) or you can call it a not-policy (Kirstjen Nielsen) or you can call it a “law” (Sarah Huckabee Sanders). You can say that yes it’s a policy but nobody likes it (Kellyanne Conway) or you can say it’s a “zero-tolerance” enforcement of a Democratic law (Donald Trump) or a zero-tolerance enforcement of an amalgam of various congressional laws (Nielsen) or a zero-tolerance enforcement of the Department of Justice’s own preferences with respect to enforcing prior laws (Sessions). …You can say the Bible wants you to separate children from parents (Sessions). You can say again, incredibly, that the Bible wants you to separate children from parents (Sanders). …You can fact check and fact check and fact check these claims and it won’t matter that they are false. … every single version of this story ends with screaming children in cages. ….*****************************************************Trump’s Small HostagesBy Frank BruniThe New York TimesJune 19, 2018 don’t we call the terrified children whose incarceration is riveting the country what they are at this point?Not migrants. Not detainees. Not pawns, although that comes closest to the mark.They’re hostages.President Trump is using them as flesh-and-blood bargaining chips, hoping that their ordeal and reasonable Americans’ disgust with it will get him what he wants. …*****************************************************Families Belong Together: Stop Traumatizing ChildrenBy Alejandra Y. Castillo, CEO, YWCA USAJune 20, 2018 one wants to believe that they would turn their back on the cries of tormented children, yet we stand again as a nation with their tears staining our souls. Recordings of children crying out for their loved ones in utter terror have surfaced from border detention facilities -- but when it comes to our nation’s leaders, their pleading falls on deaf ears. Despite the Administration’s feigned concern for families the harm has already been done. …This is evil incarnate. …*****************************************************Trump's cruel border policies created a needless crisis. It's far from overby Richard WolffeThe GuardianJune 20, 2018’ll never know the truth behind Donald Trump’s humiliating reversal of his own brutal policy of separating thousands of immigrant children from their parents at the border.But we do know that Trump will lie about his actions, and will be utterly incompetent about fixing the crisis he created.So spare us the pretense – and the lazy reporting – about Trump’s newfound moral compass. …*****************************************************Repugnantby Editorial BoardThe Washington PostJune 20, 2018 zero-tolerance policy was implemented so chaotically, with so little forethought -- with about as much care as you would expend on infesting animals -- that one former U.S. immigration chief warned that some parents may never find their children again. Even for those who are reunited -- and children were being torn away at a rate of some 400 per week -- the trauma will cause lasting harm to some. Nor will the injury to America’s reputation abroad be easily repaired.*****************************************************Trump reveals he’s made of papier-macheby Karen TumultyThe Washington PostJune 20, 2018 is fitting that President Trump has been forced into retreat by babies. Cruelty should never be mistaken for strength. …What Trump has done is without precedent or basis in law, no matter how much he tries to gaslight the country into thinking otherwise.*****************************************************I am a mother and a grandmother, and I have been so outraged by President Trump’s policy of separating children from their parents that I hardly know where to begin. I never thought I’d see something like this happening in our country. It is almost impossible to wrap my head around the fact that Americans are forcing babies, young children and teens into concentration-camp-like facilities. How can anyone even sleep at night while this is going on?“Zero tolerance”? Also zero compassion, zero courage to do the right thing, and zero ability to see and understand the toll this is taking on our national soul. The ramifications of this inhumane policy will continue to haunt us, and there will eventually be a day of reckoning.-- Judith Jenkins, Raleigh, N.C., letter to the editor, The Washington Post, June 20, 2018*****************************************************A Moral Outrage We Must Not TolerateBy Andrew M. CuomoThe New York TimesJune 20, 2018 Trump administration’s inhumane treatment of immigrant children has left a dark stain on the history of our nation. It is a human tragedy and a threat to our values. …[Y]ou can’t un-abuse the more than 2,300 children who have been separated from their parents at the border with the swipe of a pen. The administration’s family separation policy has already done potentially irreparable harm to those children who were used as pawns in the president’s political agenda. …We cannot wash away this stain on American history. But we … we will not let what has been done go unanswered, and we will do everything we can to ensure that it never happens again.Andrew M. Cuomo is the governor of New York.*****************************************************Will Migrant Children Be Reunited With Their Parents? The Odds Are Devastatingby Jessicah LahitouBustleJune 21, 2018 Trump signed an executive order Wednesday that ended his administration's policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the border. But while this policy change will prevent more children from being taken from parents, it offers nothing for the 2,000-plus kids already detained -- and some experts said migrant children may never reunite with their parents.… the fate of kids already detained apart from their families does not seem to be a current priority for the president.*****************************************************How we can follow our laws at the border -- and still be a nation of graceby Ali NooraniThe Washington PostJune 21, 2018 Trump administration’s decision to implement a policy that separated children from their parents was as morally reprehensible as it was politically reckless. … Family detention is not the best alternative to family separation.Family detention wasn’t right when President George W. Bush did it, it wasn’t right when President Barack Obama did it, and it won’t be right as President Trump ramps up the new policy.*****************************************************Chaos on the Border, Chaos in TrumplandBy Ed KilgoreNew York MagazineJune 21, 2018 seems to know what the current policy is toward families detained for crossing the border at the wrong place.If the Trump administration’s original decision to separate families whose adults were arrested on the border was a political disaster and a policy fiasco, its retreat from that ledge has been, if possible, even more messed up.*****************************************************3 lessons from Trump’s immigration fiascoBy Aaron BlakeThe Washington PostJune 22, 2018 hours after President Trump signed an executive order reversing his policy of separating families who immigrated illegally at the border, the shards are still being reassembled.We still don't know what's happening with the 2,300 children already separated from their parents. … U.S. Customs and Border Patrol now says it will stop referring parents for prosecution, while the Justice Department says prosecutions will continue under its zero-tolerance policy. Put simply: It's a mess.*****************************************************Family separations have stopped, but how will children and parents be reunited?by Daniel González and Mary Jo PitzlThe Arizona RepublicJune 22, 2018 Donald Trump signed an executive order ending the policy of separating children from parents at the border, but critics say the government failed to create an effective system for tracking the more than 2,000 children separated from parents.And, as a result, reuniting them will be extremely difficult.*****************************************************We need a humane solution to Trump’s humanitarian crisisBy Editorial BoardThe Washington PostJune 23, 2018 what it would be like to have your son or daughter yanked from your arms. To have no idea where they have been taken. Or how they are faring. To have to face the possibility even of never seeing your child again. Those are things too awful to contemplate. But today in the United States, they are the all-too-cruel realities for hundreds upon hundreds of parents who have been caught up in President Trump’s heedless decision to separate families.*****************************************************Separated immigrant children are all over the U.S. now, far from parents who don’t know where they areby Maria Sacchetti, Kevin Sieff and Marc FisherThe Washington PostJune 24, 2018 separations have stopped and the Trump administration has said that it is executing a plan to reunify the children with their parents before deporting them. Still, more than 2,000 children remain spread around the United States, far from their parents -- many of whom have no idea where their sons and daughters have been taken.*****************************************************We Must Not Forget Detained Migrant ChildrenBy Edwidge DanticatThe New YorkerJune 26, 2018 of the most distressing aspects of immigration detention, for both adults and children, is how invisible the detained can become, even when they’re imprisoned in our proverbial back yards. Had the world not seen the images of children wrapped in Mylar blankets and sleeping inside cages, and heard babies and toddlers crying for their parents, both as a result of the Trump Administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy, some might not have believed that these children had been yanked from their parents’ arms. ….Even in the light of clear and horrifying evidence, many would rather hold fast to their willful denial, branding the cages sets, the detained children actors, and the detention facilities the equivalent of boarding schools and summer camps. …At the moment, everyone seems to be paying attention. But these families and children, and others who find themselves in the crosshairs of this Administration’s draconian immigration policies, will still need us to keep paying attention, even when the media coverage wanes and we are no longer seeing photographs of children in cages, or hearing recordings of their pleas and cries.*****************************************************A judge says Trump’s family separation policy ‘shocks the conscience.’ We agree.By Editorial BoardThe Washington PostJune 27, 2018 federal judge [Dana M. Sabraw], surveying the emotional, administrative and logistical wreckage of the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy, which has ripped apart families while traumatizing parents and children, on Tuesday came to the same conclusion reached by millions of Americans who witnessed the chaos: Enough is enough. …The enduring feature of such a policy, coupled with its chaotic implementation, is, as the judge remarked, that it “shocks the conscience.” That is a legal standard; it is also a measure of common sense and of what most Americans find tolerable. In the case of dividing and traumatizing parents and children, that threshold has been crossed.*****************************************************The newest human rights outrage from Trumpby Jennifer RubinThe Washington PostJuly 1, 2018 Trump administration plans to detain migrant families together in custody rather than release them, according to a new court filing that suggests such detentions could last longer than the 20 days envisioned by a court settlement. …Contrary to uninformed talk-radio babbling, those who have come here, even those who come here illegally, have constitutional rights. Holding asylum seekers and their children indefinitely because the administration adopted a harebrained zero-tolerance policy presumes that the president has extraordinary power to create crises and then “solve” them by extraordinary, draconian means. Especially with this president, this is a frightful proposition.*****************************************************The White House tries to extend its cruel crusade against migrant familiesby Editorial BoardThe Washington PostJuly 4, 2018 the Obama administration argued, in 2015, that an influx of migrant families illegally entering the country was justification for detaining the families indefinitely, federal courts rejected that stance out of hand. Now the Trump administration is making a similar argument with a fresh twist: that a new court ruling ordering that separated children be promptly reunited with their parents amounts to a green light for federal officials to detain them -- together.That’s a neat bit of lawyerly jujitsu. It attempts to turn a federal judge’s reunification ruling last week, based partly on grounds of compassion, into a rationale for extending the current administration’s cruel crusade against migrant families. As a legal matter, it’s also unsupportable.*****************************************************The mess of migrant family reunificationsBy Editorial BoardThe Washington PostJuly 7, 2018 late June, Alex Azar, secretary of Health and Human Services, assured migrant parents whose children had been snatched away by U.S. border officials that there was “no reason” they could not find their toddlers, tweeners and teenagers. Then it turned out that Mr. Azar’s department, which is in charge of the children’s placements and welfare, doesn’t have a firm idea of how many of those children it has under its purview. … Or how parents and children might find each other, or be rejoined.A jaw-dropping report in the New York Times detailed how officials at U.S. Customs and Border Protection deleted records that would have enabled officials to connect parents with the children that had been removed from them. … The result is Third World-style government dysfunction that combines the original sin of an unspeakably cruel policy with the follow-on ineptitude of uncoordinated agencies unable to foresee the predictable consequences of their decisions -- in this case, the inevitability that children and parents, once sundered, would need at some point to be reconnected.*****************************************************Focus on the immigrant kids who are being used as pawns -- and who are still separated from parentsBy Mike LupicaNew York Daily NewsJuly 10, 2018 focus [now is on] all the children used as pawns and bargaining chips by the government of the United States in a shameful moment in our country’s history when people from places like Honduras were not just treated as potential criminals, but painted as potential terrorists by this President. ….Of course the administration keeps talking about the laws, and how if families want to stay together, they should enter the country legally, as if Trump is just a big-hearted guy standing there at the border for all those playing by the rules, more a symbol of freedom and inclusiveness than Lady Liberty. Even though from what we can see, the President only really likes foreigners when he can put them to work at Mar-a-Lago. …“They wanted to separate these children, even knowing that federal law says that a child can’t be in detention,” [New York Governor Andrew] Cuomo said. … “Plan A was the wall,” Cuomo said. “Plan B was, we take your kids.”*****************************************************Enough with the euphemisms. They’re not ‘family residential centers.’ They’re jails.by Yoshinori H.T. HimelThe Washington PostJuly 11, 2018 response to the outcry against its enforcement of the Trump administration’s family separation policy, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is seeking permission to build more “family residential centers” to detain immigrant families while their immigration cases make their way through the courts. By the benign label “family residential center,” ICE means what most of us would call a jail. ICE jails parents and children, many of whom are escaping violence and are using lawful procedures to apply for asylum. …We must seek the truth behind the Orwellian labels. We must be wary of officials using language to evade responsibility. We must not, as we have done in the past, permit official euphemisms to lull us into silent complicity. Let’s call this what it is: violating human rights.*****************************************************The Trump administration kidnapped children. Someone should go to jail.by Eugene RobinsonThe Washington PostJuly 12, 2018 Trump administration’s kidnapping -- that’s the proper word -- of the children of would-be migrants should be seen as an ongoing criminal conspiracy. Somebody ought to go to jail. …Kidnapping children. Failing even to account for them. Sending families home to be killed. Give us your huddled masses, this administration seems to say, and let us kick them in their little faces.*****************************************************What Trump wanted: Migrant family reunifications are sluggish, or nonexistent, by designBy Daily News Editorial BoardNew York Daily NewsJuly 12, 2018 in May, when he was blaming Democrats for a policy his White House devised and implemented, President Trump called the practice of forcibly separating migrant children from their parents “horrible.”Tuesday, as his administration failed abysmally to meet a court-ordered deadline to return, for starters, 102 toddlers to their mothers and fathers … Trump waved away concerns. …The obvious truth: His administration had no plan to reunite families because it had no intention of ever doing so.*****************************************************The immigration crisis is about the devaluation of loveBy Andrew SolomonCNNJuly 24, 2018 separation of immigrant families from their children is not merely a disgusting failure of sympathy by the American government, but also a surefire way to break thousands of children.One of the great advances of the 20th century was the understanding of parent-child attachment and the emergence of a society that prioritizes parental care; one of the worst developments of the 21st is this sudden disavowal of those principles. …Children need protection and security if they are to develop into functional adults. … Every day that they are kept apart from their parents is another day of damage.*****************************************************Zero Tolerance for Zero ToleranceThe children at the border are just the latest casualty of this deeply misguided approach to public policy.By Emily YoffeThe New York TimesJuly 25, 2018[T]he Trump administration faces a deadline handed down earlier this summer by a United States District Court judge: reunite the children separated from their parents at the border by federal law enforcement. There’s no way the White House will pull it off. Reports indicate that hundreds of parents will not be seeing their children because the government can’t locate the parents or has already deported them.This entire catastrophe isn’t just the result of a deliberately cruel and incompetently implemented policy, though it is certainly that. These sundered families are the latest casualty of “zero tolerance” -- a misguided mind-set that bludgeons the people it targets, no matter how vulnerable.To prevent such future injustices, and to address the many continuing ones, we should adopt a new approach: zero tolerance for zero tolerance.*****************************************************I am a pediatrician who cares for hospitalized children in Olympia. My professional obligation is to all children.Detention is not appropriate for children and families. The conditions noted in recent reports of detention facilities are appalling. …Our government continues to separate migrant children from trusted caregivers. These are children who have already been traumatized by violence and poverty in their countries of origin, and migration itself. We know, from a growing body of evidence, that adversity in childhood leads to disease throughout one’s life. Traumatic experiences cause permanent structural changes to a child’s brain, and impair their ability to learn and grow. One protective factor against the physical and mental effects of adversity is the presence of a loving adult.Our government’s policy of removing children cuts them off from any protection they may have had, and puts them at risk for illness. It harms their brains and bodies, and many may never recover. Please, call our representatives. Ask them to visit migrant children, and end separation and detention of migrant families. These are all our children.Dr. Emily Antoon, letter to editor, The Olympian, Olympia, Washington, July 26, 2019*****************************************************No, it’s not the ACLU’s job to reunite the families you sundered, Mr. PresidentBy Editorial BoardThe Washington PostAugust 6, 2018[T]he Justice Department … last week … argued that the American Civil Liberties Union, not the U.S. government, is capable of cleaning up the ongoing mess stemming from the Trump administration’s brief but incalculably damaging campaign to separate hundreds of migrant children from their parents. …The ACLU says it is ready to help reunite families, but it’s preposterous that the government would try to outsource the job and shed its own responsibility. When considering the tragedy visited upon hundreds of families by the heedless, ham-handed cruelty of the Trump administration’s family-separation foray, the statistics may mask the depth of suffering inflicted on individual children, including toddlers and tweens, by President Trump, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen.*****************************************************What to Care About When Everything Is TerribleBy Quinta JurecicThe New York TimesAugust 17, 2018 of Thursday, 565 migrant children -- 24 of them under the age of five -- remained separated from their parents after the Trump administration tore families apart at the United States-Mexico border. Though the administration backed away from its “zero tolerance” immigration enforcement policy after prolonged outcry, this level of casual cruelty is not so easily cleaned up: It lingers both in the children who have yet to see their parents again and in the lasting trauma done to even reunified families.*****************************************************Will Anyone in the Trump Administration Ever Be Held Accountable for the Zero-Tolerance Policy?By Jonathan BlitzerThe New YorkerAugust 22, 2018 date, no one in the Trump Administration has been held accountable for its family-separation policy, even after evidence has steadily mounted as to its immense human costs and administrative failures.*****************************************************The Trump administration’s legacy of orphansBy Editorial BoardThe Washington PostAugust 26, 2108 marked one month since the passage of a deadline, set by a federal judge, for the reunification of migrant children forcibly torn from their parents as a result of the Trump administration’s policy. Even as the date came and went, hundreds of those families remained sundered, in many cases with no immediate prospect of being rejoined, the children rendered effectively as orphans and wards of the U.S. government. …Eventually, now that the damage has already been done, the U.S. government will fly some of the children back to their parents; others, whose parents cannot be located, will remain without their moms and dads, casualties of a callous policy. As far as the Trump administration seems concerned, children and parents alike are the detritus of one of its many ongoing attempts to curb immigration: broken families; broken hearts.*****************************************************Most Undocumented Parents Whose Kids Are Still Detained Were Already DeportedBy Libby Watson, Splinter Newsrsn (Reader Supported News)September 1, 2018’s a predictable but no less shameful part of the way the news media works that the urgency and quantity of human suffering in a news story isn’t proportionate to the amount of coverage it gets and that, over time, even stories that have been covered well will slip out of dominant placement in national news. Such is the case for the children who were separated from their parents during the Trump administration’s experiment with psychological torture as a deterrent to border crossings. …This was the inevitable result of such a callous policy, deployed hastily and without any plan for reunifying families. Most of the separated families were reunited relatively quickly after a court ordered the government do so, but as time goes on, the kids who remain will be those whose parents are the hardest to find.So much damage has already been done even to those children who have been reunited. Even a short period away from parents for the very young can be traumatic, particularly with conditions as awful as those at many border facilities. These effects can be seen even in the viral videos of reunification: What should be heartwarming moment turns into a horrifying depiction of the deep psychological trauma these kids endured, with their blank stares and frozen expressions. Some children didn’t even recognize their mothers when they were reunited.The longer these nearly 500 children remain separated from their parents, the deeper and more indelible their trauma will become. It is a national disgrace and an emergency. But it won’t break the top five stories reporters are talking about today. …*****************************************************The Trump administration is back with a new plan to lock up migrant parents and childrenBy The Times Editorial BoardThe Los Angeles TimesSeptember 7, 2018 all the appalling things the Trump administration has done, the cruelest has to be arresting and detaining asylum seekers, and separating them from their children. Seeking to deter desperate families from entering the United States by detaining parents for weeks or months apart from their children is so hard-hearted it shocks the conscience. The cruelty has been compounded by ineptitude, as hundreds of migrant children have been stranded in the United States without their parents, who have been deported.Thankfully, the administration’s callousness has been held in check by a court order left over from President Clinton’s second term. The 1997 settlement agreement in Flores vs. Reno requires, among other things, that children facing deportation be held in detention for no more than 20 days, and in the least restrictive environment possible. …Now the Trump administration wants to scrap the agreement entirely … That’s beyond the pale. …It is fundamentally inhumane to incarcerate children -- with or without their parents -- while immigration courts try to figure out what to do with them. Psychiatrists warn of the damage even from short-term detentions. … in its obsessive quest to stop migrants from seeking asylum, the Trump administration is willing to, in essence, commit child abuse. That’s a stain not just on the presidency, but on the nation.*****************************************************“Presidential Lying Is Contagious”By Editorial BoardThe New York TimesSeptember 23, 2018, of course, there’s Kirstjen Nielsen, the secretary of homeland security, who this past spring was reportedly on thin ice with Mr. Trump for her failure to shut down migrant crossings at the border. By early summer, Ms. Nielsen found herself insisting that the administration did not have a policy of splitting apart migrant families even as she was aggressively enforcing and publicly defending that policy.*****************************************************Don’t forget immigrant children still locked upThe New Mexican, Santa Fe, New MexicoSeptember 28, 2018 news headlines out of Washington, D.C., change by the minute. …No wonder the outrage over immigrant children held in U.S. custody is so muted today -- that was last summer’s worry. Yet some 12,800 children remain in custody, looked after by the Health and Human Services Department. …It is difficult, as attention spans grow ever-shorter, to keep in mind the intractable problems that do not seem to be going away. Even as we call our senators about the Supreme Court, walk door to door in support of a candidate, or help out at our kid’s school, please remember the children sleeping without their parents. Again.*****************************************************I am afraid that we have forgotten the thousands of abused migrant children that our government as lost track of over the past two years. As any sensible and caring adult knows, when a child of any age, especially an infant or toddler, is forcibly torn from a parent and then shipped off to a detention center, we have a case of child abuse. What else to call it?Any parent can easily imagine the terror, the loneliness, the hours of screaming. Project that little person into the future -- decades of potential PTSD, therapy, poor health, poor school performance. Some say it is the parents’ fault for their illegal entry. That is irrelevant. Focus on what is important here. These are little, vulnerable human beings whose abuse is being funded by our taxes.Reports this month and this past April by Health and Human Services estimate the government has lost track of nearly 3,000 of these migrant children. Where are they? Not with their parents. …We lose car keys or glasses. What decent human being loses a child? Unless maybe she is a child of color.-- Chris Langlois, letter to editor, The Columbian, Vancouver, Washington*****************************************************67 days past judge's deadline, 136 kidnapped migrant children still separated from parentsby Gabe OrtizDaily KosOctober 1, 2018, October 1 marks 67 days since a federal judge’s migrant family reunification deadline, yet 136 children continue to remain separated from parents, according to the most recent numbers from the Trump administration. Of those kids, three are age 5 or under. The parents of 96 kids have already been deported. Of those children, two are age 5 or under.This, much like the record number of migrant children overall jailed by the U.S., is a crisis of the administration’s own making. Trump officials chose to make family separation at the border official policy, contrary to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Sec. Kirstjen Nielsen’s numerous lies. There was no plan on how to piece these broken families back together, until the administration was forced to by the courts. Now officials are struggling to reunite the remaining kids, making the very real possibility that some may never see their parents again a real possibility.*****************************************************Trump's Immigrant Child Detention Camps Are Not Gone. In Fact, They're GrowingBy Jacob October 1, 2018’s a lot going on in the news, and it’s difficult to follow the constant cycle of despair that is American politics. Between the Republicans’ insatiable desire to put a (second) credibly accused sexual assaulter on the Supreme Court in Brett Kavanaugh, the near-daily reminders that climate change is getting worse and the firehose of stories highlighting our immoral healthcare system, it’s just a circus of depression right now.But there is one immensely bleak story that we cannot let slip from our minds: America’s child concentration camps. They’re still here, and they’re growing. …*****************************************************Trump Admin’s Internment of Migrant Children is an Assault on Core Jewish, American Valuespress release, J Street, The political home of pro-Israel, pro-peace AmericansOctober 4, 2018 that the Trump administration has forced hundreds of undocumented children into what can only be accurately described as an internment camp, in Tornillo, Texas, demonstrate that this administration intends to continue -- and even intensify -- its barbaric policies toward migrant families.Earlier this summer, the Trump administration’s policy of imprisoning children crossing the US-Mexico border and separating them from their parents drew the shock and condemnation of the entire nation and much of the international community. Under court orders and popular pressure, the administration backtracked partially on that policy. Through its current actions -- as well as its unwillingness or inability to reunify all previously separated families -- the administration is again showing its xenophobia and blatant disregard for the wellbeing of children.As the descendants of immigrants, refugees and asylum-seekers, we are outraged and horrified to see a US administration in the 21st century target those seeking a better life and refuge in our country today with practices that recall some of the most devastating episodes of the Jewish people’s historical experience.*****************************************************Free the Children: Caging Migrant Children is Inhumane and Unjustby Bruce LesleyMediumOctober 14, 2018 nation is committing a huge injustice and enormous harm to children who have done nothing to deserve this treatment. It harkens back to our nation’s operation of internment camps during World War II. …During World War II, our nation violated every fundamental principle of human rights and Christian decency by rounding up and detaining Japanese-Americans while they tried to justify the policy as the opposite. Every president (other than Donald Trump) has since has apologized for this failure and human rights disaster.Sadly, 65 years later, Lynn A. Johnson, Assistant Secretary for Children and Families at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and others in the Trump Administration are doing it again. …Our government should not be in the business of warehousing children in converted box stores or making plans to place them in tent cities in the desert outside of El Paso. …In the future, our own children and grandchildren will look back and wonder how we as a nation could have possibly been so cruel and inhumane to children. We are bearing witness to government-sanctioned child abuse.*****************************************************Still Dodging the Truth on Migrant ChildrenThe Trump administration must be held accountable for family separations.By Editorial BoardBloombergOctober 17, 2018 Department of Homeland Security has mistreated migrant children, their parents and the very concept of truth. That, in a nutshell, is the conclusion of the DHS inspector general, who reported this month that the agency was never prepared, and remains unable, to responsibly carry out its border policy of “zero tolerance,” which resulted in separating migrant children from their parents.Yet there is no indication that the DHS intends to change its slapdash ways, or that anyone will soon be held accountable. Last weekend, President Donald Trump even said his administration is considering renewing family separations as a means of deterring migrants and asylum seekers.*****************************************************Careless crueltyBy Scott ShuchartThe Washington PostOctober 25, 2018[In May 2018] the Department of Homeland Security, where I worked as a senior adviser in the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, had been making a show of prosecuting undocumented immigrant parents for weeks, cleaving them from their children without paying much attention to where the family members went or setting up any procedure for tracking and reuniting them later. …The government formally announced the family separation policy in April. The point was clear, as several officials later admitted: By threatening to separate their children, the administration hoped to deter Central American asylum seekers from coming here in search of humanitarian protection. …Many senior civil servants at DHS believed that the policy violated the civil and human rights of migrants. …My job was to ensure that the government did not violate clearly established individual rights, and the Trump administration was pushing a policy whose principal aim was to do just that. … Our research also suggested that threatening to detain children separately, and threatening civil detention generally to deter future conduct, was probably unconstitutional. …My colleagues and I learned while reviewing internal DHS documents through April and May that CBP had, the previous fall, undertaken a pilot project of prosecuting parents with small children who crossed the border illegally near El Paso, leading to a wave of separated families. But when we asked the acting second-ranking CBP official about it, he denied having any information. That was … false.Every attempt to raise civil rights concerns led nowhere. … The family separation crisis represented a new frontier in weaponizing DHS’s authority, and its borderline competence, to disastrous effect. … most culpable were the high-level appointees, unwilling to take ownership of what they’d decided to do; lying to their staffs in the expectation that nobody really cared what happened to poor Central American kids; cynical about the notion that most of us who swear an oath to uphold the Constitution actually mean it. … I realized there was no way to keep my oath and my job.Scott Shuchart was a senior adviser at the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. He resigned in the summer of 2018.*****************************************************Concentration Camps for Kids: An Open LetterAlberto Manguel, Maaza Mengiste, Valeria Luiselli, Margaret Atwood, and Colm Tóibín, et al.The New York Review of BooksNovember 6, 2018 Tornillo, Texas, in rows of pale yellow tents, some 1,600 children who were forcefully taken from their families sleep in lined-up bunks, boys separated from the girls. The children, who are between the ages of thirteen and seventeen, have limited access to legal services. They are not schooled. They are given workbooks but they are not obliged to complete them. The tent city in Tornillo is unregulated, except for guidelines from the Department of Health and Human Services. Physical conditions seem humane. The children at Tornillo spend most of the day in air-conditioned tents, where they receive their meals and are offered recreational activities. Three workers look after groups of twenty children each. The children are permitted to make two phone calls per week to their family members or sponsors, and are made to wear belts with phone numbers written out for their emergency contacts.However, the children’s psychological conditions are anything but humane. At least two dozen of the children who arrived in Tornillo were given just a few hours’ notice in their previous detention center before they were taken away--any longer than that, according to one of the workers at Tornillo, and the children may have panicked and tried to escape. Because of these circumstances, the children of Tornillo are inevitably subjected to emotional trauma. After their release (the date of which has not yet been settled), they will certainly be left with emotional scars, and no one can expect these children to ever feel anything but gut hatred for the country that condemned them to this unjust imprisonment.The workers at the Tornillo camp, which was expanded in September to a capacity of 3,800, say that the longer a child remains in custody, the more likely he or she is to become traumatized or enter a state of depression. There are strict rules at such facilities: “Do not misbehave. Do not sit on the floor. Do not share your food. Do not use nicknames. Do not touch another child, even if that child is your hermanito or hermanita [younger sibling]. Also, it is best not to cry. Doing so might hurt your case.” Can we imagine our own children being forced to go without hugging or being hugged, or even touching or sharing with their little brothers or sisters?Federal officials will not let reporters interview the children and have tightly controlled access to the camp, but almost daily reports have filtered through to the press. Tornillo, though unique--even among the hundred-plus US detention facilities for migrant children--in its treatment of minors, is part of a general atmosphere of repression and persecution that threatens to get worse. The US government is detaining more than 13,000 migrant children, the highest number ever; as of last month, some 250 “tender age” children aged twelve or under had not yet been reunited with their parents. Recently, the president has vowed to “put tents up all over the place” for migrants.This generation will be remembered for having allowed for concentration camps for children to be built on “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” This is happening here and now, but not in our names.*****************************************************No, Trump’s Migrant Child Separation Policy Isn’t The ‘Exact Same’ As Obama’sTrump separated more than 2,000 families at the southern U.S. border. Obama did not.By Willa FrejHuffPostNovember 26, 2018 Donald Trump falsely claimed that his policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the southern U.S. border was the “exact same” as the one implemented during the Obama administration.In complaining about a “60 Minutes” segment that aired Sunday, Trump tried to deflect criticism of his “zero tolerance” immigration policy by arguing that former presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush also separated immigrant families.“I tried to keep them together but the problem is, when you do that, vast numbers of additional people storm the Border,” Trump tweeted Sunday. “So with Obama seperation [sic] is fine, but with Trump it’s not.”Obama deported a record number of immigrants during his time in office. … Prioritizing the removal of people with criminal histories, Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported more than 2.7 million people between fiscal years 2009 and 2016.The administration worked to quickly detain and deport migrants for several months in 2014, in response to a surge in migrant arrivals. Yet children who had come into the country with their parents didn’t get separated from them, and if families got deported, they were deported together.But Trump administration has gone far beyond his predecessor, separating almost 2,000 immigrant children from their parents in the spring. Many were held in caged detention centers and exposed to severe health consequences. Trump has also tried to withdraw from the Flores settlement and put forth new rules to replace it, which could lead to children being detained indefinitely.*****************************************************Trump is failing miserably on his biggest issue. And he’s covering it up with lies.By Greg SargentThe Washington PostNovember 26, 2018. border agents fired tear gas into crowds of asylum-seeking migrants at the southern border Sunday, and you can be certain that President Trump will amplify the claim that this turmoil strengthens his case for getting his way on immigration. …In a series of tweets, Trump lashed out over the latest border clash. He blamed it on the fact that his administration has stopped separating families, claiming this now means “vast numbers of additional people storm the Border.” …To simplify, his basic claim is that Democrats and/or Congress will not change the law in a way that would allow Trump to detain asylum-seeking families all together for extended periods, which means the administration must choose between separating children or ultimately releasing parents pending their hearing.Trump had to drop the separations due to the political and legal backlash. He’s now saying that means he’ll have to release the parents, and that this will help adults game the system by disappearing into the interior -- what he calls “catch and release” -- thus encouraging more asylum-seekers to come. In short, Trump blames the current crisis on being hamstrung in one way or another from deterring them with cruel and inhumane policies -- he can’t separate the kids, and he can’t detain families indefinitely.But this whole argument is based on a lie. We already know that cruelty as deterrence doesn’t actually work -- and we know this because Trump’s own effort to do this failed.*****************************************************Jakelin Amei Rosmery Caal Maquin's death at the Mexico border is our fault, not her father'sBy Julio Ricardo VarelaNBC NewsDecember 15, 2018 seven-year-old Guatemalan girl named Jakelin Amei Rosmery Caal Maquin died last week in the custody of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and the Trump administration has chosen to blame the victim and her father for the death.This is the nation Trump has created: A country that continues to dehumanize and criminalize Central American migrants without any sense of compassion or explanation for the root causes of why people are fleeing their countries in the first place.Jakelin died from cardiac arrest caused by severe dehydration and shock a day after she and her father turned themselves in to CBP on the U.S.-Mexico border in New Mexico.But according to the Trump administration, her death was her fault, and it was her dad’s fault -- even though government officials confirmed that, after being held for several hours in a remote CBP station, Jakelin was put on a bus for 90 minutes to be transferred to a larger border station for processing before getting any emergency medical care for her symptoms, which included vomiting. By the time the bus stopped, so had her breathing.A child is dead and the current administration shows no remorse. Instead, just deflections about responsibility and cheap political talking points.*****************************************************Who Killed Jakelin Caal Maquín at the US Border?By Greg Grandin and Elizabeth OglesbyThe NationDecember 17, 2018 full name was Jakelin Amei Rosmery Caal Maquín, and she was from Guatemala. She turned 7 days before her death on December 8 from septic shock and cardiac arrest in the custody of the US Border Patrol. As public outrage mounts over reports of negligence on the part of the Border Patrol in delaying medical care for the child, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen blamed Jakelin’s family for their choice to “cross illegally.” …The past two decades brought changes in US border policy, with dire consequences for Central Americans. The militarization of the border since the 1990s, especially the sealing off of urban entry points, has pushed migrants to cross in remote and treacherous desert areas, where thousands have died. Border militarization also helps explain why people would bring their children on such a dangerous trek. In the past, men usually migrated alone. They would work for a while in the United States and then return to visit their families. But now, border militarization has ratcheted up the cost of making the journey. … The only way for families to stay together is for women and children to migrate. Yes, it’s dangerous, but so is staying in Guatemala.Jakelin and her father were among a group of 163 Guatemalans who turned themselves in to the Border Patrol at a remote entry point in the New Mexico desert on the night of December 6, intending to request political asylum upon entering the United States. This is legal. No matter how or where people enter the country, US law says they may make an affirmative claim for asylum. Of course, it’s far safer to make an asylum claim at a well-trafficked border entry point, rather than a remote one in the middle of the night. But we’ve all seen the brutal displays of how the Trump administration has blocked asylum petitioners at the US border, from shutting down bridges, to stringing razor wire, to tear-gassing children.Jakelin’s death puts into harrowing relief the brutal consequences of Trump’s crackdown on border crossers, and the inhumane conditions of immigrant detention. But the story of how this 7-year-old girl ended up dead has deeper roots in the patterns of US-backed violent displacement in Guatemala, as well as in decades of border militarization. If it takes a village to raise a child, sometimes it takes a nation to kill one.*****************************************************The death of 7-year-old Jakelin Caal Maquin in Border Patrol custody isn’t an isolated outrageBy Dara LindVoxDecember 18, 2018 Amei Rosmery Caal Maquin spent her seventh birthday on a trip she was overjoyed to take -- traveling with her father from their impoverished farm in rural Guatemala to the United States. …Instead, shortly after midnight on December 8 -- after barely a day in the United States, 11 hours of which were spent in the custody of US Border Patrol -- Caal Maquin was dead in a Texas hospital, with a swollen brain and a failed liver. …Many of the Trump administration’s critics blamed the Border Patrol -- saying Caal Maquin was either the victim of misconduct or neglect or that they simply did not do enough to save the girl. The Trump administration, led by Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, has blamed Nery Caal for taking his daughter to cross the US-Mexico border illegally over a particularly remote stretch of the New Mexico desert.The finger-pointing, in every direction, is motivated by the idea that Jakelin Caal Maquin had her childhood innocence stolen from her, and so a thief must be found. But the facts we already have about Caal Maquin’s life and death lead to a more sobering conclusion: that she, and the thousands of children like her crossing into the US each month, never had the option of a carefree childhood.The journey offered her that chance. It may also be what killed her.*****************************************************7-year-old Jakelin Caal Maquin died at the border. What happened to her is not an aberrationBy Francisco CantúThe Los Angeles TimesDecember 18, 2018Ever since the U.S. Border Patrol admitted that Jakelin Ameí Rosmery Caal Maquin, a 7-year-old Guatemalan girl seeking asylum with her father, had died in their custody, government officials have been trying to deflect blame for her death. …The U.S. government claims Jakelin had journeyed for days through the desert without food and water and was beyond help before she was taken into custody. However, her father says he saw to it that she was eating and drinking. The president of the American Academy of Pediatrics says her death was without doubt preventable. But Department of Homeland Security Director Kirstjen Nielsen blames the victim in this “heartwrenching” story: “This family,” she said on Friday, “chose to cross illegally.”The institutional culture of the Border Patrol regularly dismisses even the most basic needs of detained migrants. …There will be an investigation into Jakelin’s death, but in broad terms its causes are clear enough: heedlessness, a lack of compassion, poor accountability at the border. … What happened to Jakelin is not an aberration, but rather the predictable outgrowth of the dehumanizing practices that define U.S. border policy.Francisco Cantú was as an agent for the U.S. Border Patrol from 2008-12. He is the author of The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches From the Border.*****************************************************We warned DHS that a migrant child could die in U.S. custody. Now one has.By Scott Allen and Pamela McPhersonThe Washington PostDecember 19, 2018 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.… 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. …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. …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 given children like Jakelin a fighting chance.… 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.Dr. Scott A. Allen and Dr. Pamela McPherson are medical and mental health subject matter experts for the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.*****************************************************True Americans don't shut the doorby Ella RutledgeThe Roanoke (VA) TimesDecember 26, 2018 letter to Kirstjen Nielsen, Secretary of Homeland Security:The other night I saw you on the news and heard you say in reference to the death of Jakelin Caal Maquin that this was “a very sad example of the dangers of this journey.” Your callous disregard for the lives of the migrants massing at our southern border in hopes of entering this country prompts me to write this open letter to you.On Sept. 6, 1620 my ancestors set out from England in a ship crammed with 102 passengers, livestock, supplies and crew and spent the next two months crossing the stormy seas living in crowded, filthy and unsanitary conditions. By the time they arrived and settled down in what would later become Plymouth, Massachusetts, only 53 of the original 102 had survived. More would die during the bitter winter and harsh conditions that awaited them. The experience and suffering of my ancestors on their perilous journey is deeply ingrained in my DNA. These ancestral memories cry out in empathy as I have watched the current wave of the migrants from Central America making their determined way north to our inhospitable borders, braving all kinds of dangers so that they might enter the promised land, the United States of America. These memories cry out in protest as I watch the way our government treats these new arrivals at the border.Just who do you think you are? It is clear that you have no understanding of our history, why this country exists, and how that existence is justified. You have no clue about what a true American is or why people would choose to undergo danger and suffering in order to become one. Being a true American is not about gaining access to this land and then shutting the door on those who come after whom you happen not to like. Being a true American is about signing on to the unwritten mandate that requires us to work to build a more humane, more just, more loving society than what we are today and have been in the past. We are here to forward the principles of liberty, equality, and justice for all, including those who come knocking on our door asking to be let in, asking to be part of the great quest for these ideals, challenging those of us who came before to live up to them. This quest includes even or should I say especially those who were brought here against their will from Africa, but who now strive willingly to help all Americans achieve the dream.Imagine the suffering of the Mayflower 102, the suffering of the Africans in chains in the holds of those ships, the suffering of Europeans who came later to escape famine, oppression, and death. Imagine the tribulations of the thousands who have walked here from Central America, in search of a better life, in search of the promised liberty, equality and justice that you and the people you work for are now denying them because they are “illegal.”Were the Pilgrims “legal”? Are you saying they should not have come because they had no “legal” right to be here or because their journey was so dangerous? Of course they were “illegal.” They and those who came before and after took land that was not theirs to take and caused a great deal of suffering among the native people. Perhaps there is no justification for this “original sin.” But if there is any, it is this: that out of this original sin grew the ideals of our American constitution and the Bill of Rights. If we deny those rights and privileges to those who continue to come here and “take over our land,” then we lose all moral right to be here ourselves. Your words and actions reduce all of us and all our forebears to nothing more than land-grabbers and greedy me-firsters.Jakelin Caal Maquin did not die on her arduous journey. She died while in your custody on American soil. How dare you put the blame on her father for attempting to further the American dream? You are not a true American, so why don’t you go back to your ancestral homeland, Denmark? True, the country is plagued with high taxes and the horrifying burden of free medical care and free university education. But at least you won’t have to face the prospects of drug-related violence, extreme poverty, and a government riddled with corruption that Jakelin’s father will face once you have repatriated him to Guatemala.Kirstjen Nielsen, go back where you came. You are not a true American. The only true American in this sad story is Jakelin Caal Maquin. God rest her soul.*****************************************************Another migrant child death, we need a border truth commissionBy Elizabeth OglesbyThe HillDecember 27, 2018 awoke on Christmas morning to hear that another Guatemalan child, 8-year-old Felipe Alonzo-Gómez, died in the custody of the Border Patrol on Christmas Eve. This follows the death on Dec. 8 of 7-year-old asylum seeker Jakelin Caal Maquín, also while in Border Patrol custody. Caal Maquin's body was laid to rest in Guatemala on Christmas Day.Calls are mounting for an investigation into these deaths, including from family members, top Democrats and the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants. But an investigation must be more than an inquest into the two cases. It must encompass the broader border policies that gave rise to these tragedies. This cannot be accomplished from within the Department of Homeland Security. It must be assigned to an independent, national body. It's time for a truth commission for the border.The deaths of these two children spotlight problems that go well beyond the actions of individual border agents. While there are many instances of Border Patrol agents rescuing migrants in distress, there is also ample evidence of systematic abuse and inhumane conditions within the migrant holding facilities and detention centers, as well as a general lack of accountability within the border enforcement agency. …With the outcry over the deaths of the two Guatemalan children, and the threat of congressional hearings, DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen has been forced to pivot in her public statements. After blaming Jakelin Caal Maquin's family earlier this month for "crossing illegally," Nielsen's statement in response to Felipe Alonzo-Gómez' death included a pledge to expand medical screenings of migrants taken into U.S. custody. The question is, can we trust DHS to investigate and regulate itself on these matters? The answer is no.*****************************************************Trump’s tweets on children dying in U.S. custody are a new lowBy Karen TumultyThe Washington PostDecember 29, 2018 President Trump, there is no bottom. Every time you think you have seen it, he manages to sink even lower. … on Saturday, we saw yet another level of depravity when Trump made his first comments regarding the deaths in recent days of two migrant Guatemalan children after they were apprehended by federal authorities. It revealed not only callousness but also opportunism, as he sought to turn this tragedy into a partisan advantage in his current standoff with Democrats over the government shutdown.His statements came, not unexpectedly, over Twitter. First this:Any deaths of children or others at the Border are strictly the fault of the Democrats and their pathetic immigration policies that allow people to make the long trek thinking they can enter our country illegally. They can’t. If we had a Wall, they wouldn’t even try!And then, minutes later, this:...children in question were very sick before they were given over to Border Patrol. The father of the young girl said it was not their fault, he hadn’t given her water in days. Border Patrol needs the Wall and it will all end. They are working so hard & getting so little credit!Not a word of sympathy here -- much less remorse on the part of the government over the deaths of a 7-year-old girl and 8-year-old boy while in its custody. … we have a president who is willing to politicize the deaths of two young children to score points against the opposition party. And the most shocking thing about seeing him scrape along a new moral bottom is this: It is no longer shocking at all.*****************************************************The Moral Failure of Family SeparationTo separate children from their parents is an offense against nature and civilized society.by Ashley FettersThe AtlanticJanuary 13, 2019 fact of what was happening dawned before the scope of it did: In the summer of 2017, immigration lawyers and judges began reporting that parents were arriving at immigrant detention centers without their children, who had been placed in custody elsewhere, sometimes thousands of miles away. Not until April of last year, when a New York Times investigation found that some 700 children--many under the age of 4--had been separated from their parents after crossing the southern border illegally with them in the preceding six months, did the extent of the program become clear.Though Donald Trump’s administration has intermittently denied that family separation was ever its policy, the litany of horrors associated with the policy lengthens. Toddlers screaming as they’re wrested from their parents’ arms. Children sleeping on the bare floor of cages. Parents getting deported to their home countries while their children remain in custody here. Children falling ill in custody. Border Patrol losing track of where certain children have gone. … Separating families was not a rare and unintended consequence of a policy but part of the point of it. …It is an axiom of moral life among civilized humans that to separate young children from their parents is an offense against not just nature but society, one of the building blocks of which--as the Republican Party, in particular, has long been at pains to emphasize--is the family. Forcibly yanking children from their parents is of a piece with some of the darkest moments of American history: the internment of Japanese Americans; the forcible separation of American Indian children into special boarding schools; slavery. …Even for those children who survive the border-crossing ordeal, the damage will be lasting: Research on the toxic and enduring effects of early-childhood separation from primary caregivers is abundant. What the effect of this progressive coarsening of our moral sensibilities will be is yet to determined.*****************************************************The Lost Children of the Trump Administration*By Editorial BoardThe New York TimesJanuary 17, 2019 summer, a federal judge in San Diego said the Trump administration treated immigrant children detained at the border worse than chattel.“The unfortunate reality,” wrote Judge Dana Sabraw in ordering a halt to President Trump’s policy of separating the children from their parents, “is that under the present system, migrant children are not accounted for with the same efficiency and accuracy as property.”That was underscored on Thursday when the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services released a report revealing that thousands more children than previously disclosed may have been torn from their parents for months before the policy was even announced. …Such dysfunction goes beyond mere incompetence. To have so little regard for the damage done to so many children, for the heartache caused to so many parents, is to indulge in callousness, if not deliberate cruelty. President Trump doesn’t need a wall. He needs a heart.*****************************************************The Trump administration’s season of covert cruelty toward childrenBy Editorial BoardThe Washington PostJanuary 19, 2019 the early months of Donald Trump’s presidency, administration officials were in the habit of feigning indignation when questioned about cases involving family separations. No such policy existed, the officials declared. And in instances when children were taken away, they insisted, it was simply to protect them from traffickers who might be posing as parents, or from unfit or criminal parents.That turns out to have been untrue, as a report from the Department of Health and Human Services’ inspector general makes clear. In fact, starting just months after President Trump took office, the administration undertook family separation in earnest, as an experiment in which the guinea pigs were thousands of toddlers, children and teenagers.That gave rise to the administration’s full-blown war on immigrant families, which then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions unveiled last spring as part of a “zero tolerance” policy whereby migrant children would be wrenched routinely from their parents. It was abandoned six weeks later amid public outrage. …The uproar over family separations was a moment of clarity, but it followed a season of covert cruelty. Within eight months of the Trump administration assuming power, the percentage of separated minors taken into HHS custody had jumped more than tenfold from the last months of the Obama administration. For nearly a year, the American public was kept in the dark about that shift, which top officials suspected would trigger popular outrage. …A byproduct of that attitude was the administration’s cavalier attitude toward documenting the effects of its policy -- for months, no agency bothered to keep count of the children removed from their parents. …To paraphrase a saying often attributed to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin: One traumatized child is a tragedy; thousands are a statistic. That’s an apt description of the Trump administration’s callous attitude and actions.*****************************************************Did Kirstjen Nielsen Lie to Congress about Family Separation? New Evidence Emerges.By Jeremy StahlSlateJanuary 23, 2019 many ways, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen has been the face of family separation. When uproar over the program reached a peak in June, Nielsen took to the White House Briefing Room to defend the administration’s “zero tolerance” policy of prosecuting undocumented parents for illegal entry and taking away their children. …At the same time, though, Nielsen has remained insistent that the U.S. government had no actual policy of purposefully separating families. Her position has always been that the separations were a side effect of the administration applying previously unenforced criminal immigration law. …“We do not have a policy of separating families at the border. Period,” Nielsen tweeted the day before that White House briefing.In sworn Congressional testimony over the course of the past 10 months, she has been equally adamant that no such policy existed. …Finally, in an almost farcical appearance before the House Judiciary Committee just last month, Nielsen repeatedly rejected the premise of Democratic questions about the “family separation policy,” stating over and over again that there was no such policy.Last week, NBC published further evidence that there was such an official policy and that Nielsen has been lying to Congress. …This newly revealed memo also makes explicitly clear that the purpose of zero tolerance and its subsequent family separations was for the practice to be “reported by the media and … have a substantial deterrent effect.”*****************************************************Feds don’t know locations of ‘thousands’ more migrant kids, separated from familiesby EJ MontiniThe Arizona RepublicFebruary 4, 2019 child separation "zero tolerance" policy was even more cruel and inhumane than we thought, apparently, it went on for a lot longer than we thought it did, and the government now says that it may not be possible to completely fix it.Which means that America may be known as a country that separated thousands of migrant children from their families at the border, doesn't know how many there are out there, and may not be able to reunite them all.This particular horror came out in a recently released report on the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which has been charged with dealing with the administration's position of family separation. …Not only does the government not know where all the children are located, but they don't even know how many children we’re talking about. Only that it’s a lot. Maybe thousands more than we thought.And the manpower and cost of fixing the problem suggest that it's possible some of them may never be reunited with the families from whom they were taken.*****************************************************Trump still won’t take responsibility for reuniting separated familiesBy Helaine OlenThe Washington PostFebruary 5, 2019 all the awfulness of the Trump administration, the forced separation of migrant children from their parents at the nation’s southern border has stood out as the worst of the worst. Before the president’s State of the Union address, let’s remember that there are possibly thousands of children and their parents who might never see each other again. And we can blame that on the president, who apparently doesn’t believe reuniting these families is particularly important or necessary. …The Trump administration’s contempt -- for commonly accepted standards of human behavior, for the families forever traumatized and impacted by this terrible policy, for the children who might well never see their mothers or fathers again -- is extraordinary. It’s Trump administration officials who talk on and on about the need for a wall at the border, while barely deigning to mention these boys and girls. Trump needs to step up this evening and say he will take whatever actions are necessary to return them to their parents. Anything else is unacceptable.*****************************************************Separating Families is Inhumane (petition)American Civil Liberties UnionFebruary 22, 2019 Trump administration has cooked up a vile new scheme: ripping children away from their parents in order to discourage immigration. Separating families is more than cruel and unnecessary – it’s torture.ICE, Border Patrol, and other Homeland Security agencies are taking the children of immigrants and asylum-seekers and sending them to faraway detention centers. It doesn’t matter how young the child, how terrible their situation, or how unnecessary their separation. They have one goal in mind: to warn immigrants not to come here, or else they might lose their children.But the Trump administration is showing signs that it will bend to public pressure. That tells us that if enough of us raise our voices, we can end this practice for good.Recently the ACLU filed a lawsuit to reunite Ms. L and her seven-year-old daughter, who were separated for four months. Mother and daughter had traveled a long journey from the Democratic Republic of Congo to reach the United States, where they hoped to find safety. Instead, at the border ICE agents forcibly removed the child, who cried and screamed for her mother.The Trump administration is sending the clear message that immigrants aren’t welcome here – and they don’t mind sacrificing constitutional rights and basic human decency just to get that across. They want to scare people away from coming to this country to seek a better life and aren’t afraid to admit it. Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen even said so herself: “We're looking at a variety of ways to enforce our laws to discourage parents from bringing their children here.”We have the power change this cruel policy - if enough of us raise our voices. Sign this petition to tell Homeland Security to end the vicious and inhumane practice of separating children from their families.*****************************************************There are more than 10,000 Latino children being held in “detention” by the federal government. Their crime was coming to the United States, most with their parents, seeking asylum.According to a recent report, the average migrant held by immigration authorities will spend 400 days in detention, and for so many of those migrant children, those 13 months will irrevocably mar the rest of their lives.The United States’ immigration authorities have effectively stolen the childhood of those children and denied them a normal adult life -- and the other tens of thousands of children who have been processed through the system. The government admits that it cannot assure that they will ever be reunited with their families.This is criminal! And someone must be held accountable. The perpetrators of these crimes hide behind the uniform of the Border Patrol. But in every case, someone, some individual, made the decision to deprive these children of their basic human rights. Those individuals must be identified and held accountable. The officials who established the policy enabling those crimes are culpable and must likewise be held accountable.It’s time for every United States citizen to stand up to the government and say "enough." We owe these children protection from the government of this country. Failing to do so makes us a party to this barbarian scheme.-- Patrick Nugent, letter to editor, The Star Democrat, Easton, Maryland, February 26, 2019*****************************************************DHS Secretary Nielsen’s first public hearing before the new Congress was a disasterBy Aaron RuparVoxMarch 6, 2019 her first hearing before the new Democrat-controlled House of Representatives, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen insisted that the cages Customs and Border Protection (CBP) used to detain migrant and asylum-seeking kids aren’t really cages.“Sir, they are not cages, they are areas of the border facility that are carved out for the safety and protection of those who remain there while they’re being processed,” Nielsen said during an exchange with House Homeland Security Committee Chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS). …More than 2,700 children were separated from their parents and detained by CBP last year. Though President Donald Trump ended the practice with an executive order last summer, government data released last month indicated about 250 parents had been separated from their children since last June.During the hearing on Wednesday, Nielsen confirmed that some parents were deported without their children, but added that “there was no parent who has been deported to my knowledge without multiple opportunities to take their children with them.” Following the hearing, however, Rep. Kathleen Rice (D-NY) posted a tweet accusing her of lying about that. …At other points, Nielsen dodged questions about her dubious testimony last year that the Trump administration never had a family separation policy, admitted she’s broadly unfamiliar with research indicating kids are traumatized by being separated from their parents, and struggled to explain how the border wall the Trump administration is still pushing for would curtail the flow of smuggled drugs -- most of which come through ports of entry.Tasked with defending the indefensible, Nielsen is in an impossible position. …*****************************************************‘Sir, they’re not cages’: Kirstjen Nielsen walks a very fine line on family separationsBy Aaron BlakeWashington PostMarch 6, 2019 asked Wednesday how many children are detained at the southern U.S. border, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said she didn’t have the number handy. When asked how many “special-interest aliens” are detained at the northern border vs. the southern border, she said she had to check and would follow up.Nielsen apparently wasn’t prepared for these exchanges, but she was ready for semantic debates.Near the start of Wednesday’s hearing of the House Homeland Security Committee, Nielsen repeated her past assurances that the separation of families at the border wasn’t, in fact, a policy. “It’s not a policy; it’s the law,” she said.It’s true that the policy never said, “We will separate families,” but it was inherent in the “zero tolerance” policy that then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced in April 2018, because parents who are charged can’t be detained with their children. That policy was later abandoned amid an uproar.[In an exchange with Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson] Nielsen argued that the children who had been separated from their parents hadn’t been held in “cages.” …It’s clear that Nielsen would prefer that the Trump administration not be viewed as having put children in cages. That definitely carries connotations of much smaller enclosures and inhumane treatment. …Nielsen’s objection to “cages” is much like her objection to family separation being a “policy.” But just as a policy choice led to family separations, the facilities in which people are being held effectively serve to cage them.*****************************************************Kirstjen Nielsen And The Dehumanization Of Immigrant Childrenby Steve AlmondWBUR-FM, Boston, MassachusettsMarch 7, 2019, Kirstjen Nielsen, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, was forced to testify -- under threat of subpoena -- before a congressional committee.Her performance was among the most chilling spectacles of the Trump era. It wasn’t just that Nielsen refused to answer basic questions about her department’s policy, or that she defended the demagogic lies spouted by the president she serves. That kind of negligence and kowtowing is a standard feature of Trump appointees.What stood out was Nielsen’s robotic manner, her sheer bureaucratic heartlessness. Representative Lauren Underwood (D-IL), a former nurse, asked Nielsen a series of simple questions about the traumatic effects of removing children from their parents. … Underwood wanted to know if Nielsen had even the most rudimentary knowledge of how trauma affects children. She did not.Asked about the cages in which children are detained, Nielsen simply denied that the chain-link enclosures clearly visible on television were cages. …Over and over again, legislators asked Nielsen to reckon with the effects of tearing young children away from their parents. Nielsen responded with the kind of bureaucratic doublespeak more commonly associated with fascist regimes -- a rhetoric intended to eliminate the moral problem of her own conduct by dehumanizing the children her agency routinely traumatizes.These were not children, after all. They were, according to Nielsen, “UACs,” which is short for “unaccompanied minors.”Likewise, Nielsen recast the Trump administration’s conscious decision to separate families as a deterrent to asylum seekers as an unintended byproduct of its effort to take “operational control” of the border.So rather than admitting that the United States government is tearing kids from their parents and throwing them in cages, we got Nielsen’s version: UACs, abandoned by felonious guardians, are placed in detention areas for their own safety. Her manner was … brazenly Orwellian.*****************************************************Why Nielsen Continues to Lie About the Family Separation Policyby Nancy LeTourneauThe Washington MonthlyMarch 13, 2019 Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen testified before Congress last week on the Trump administration’s family separation policy. As she had done last April, Nielsen refused to admit that the policy existed and suggested that it was simply the outcome of prosecuting adults for illegal border crossings.But the record is clear that the Trump administration began talking about a family separation policy almost immediately after they entered the White House. … DHS had developed [a] deterrence model that included family separation by July 2017, long before [Attorney General Jeff] Sessions announced his zero tolerance policy. So why was Nielsen still lying about that as recently as last week? It comes down to the fact that the family separation policy was intended to be a deterrent. Philip Bump documented all of the times that Trump officials admitted as much. Now we learn that there was actually a “DHS Deterrence” model.As a lawyer, Secretary Nielsen is probably aware of the fact that what the Trump administration did was illegal. …A few months ago Adam Serwer wrote an important piece about Trump and his supporters, suggesting that “cruelty is the point.” Nowhere is that more evident than the two-pronged strategy the DHS adopted to deter migrants. The policy was designed to be cruel in a failed attempt to stop them from even trying to enter the U.S. But it wasn’t just cruel, it was also illegal. Those responsible need to be held accountable.*****************************************************The US Government Is Still Breaking Up Families at the Border, But Not Without a Fightby Araceli CruzBRIT + COMarch 14, 2019 week, Kirstjen Nielsen, the Homeland Security Secretary, testified once again in front of Congress in an attempt to justify the federal government’s ongoing actions against undocumented people at the border. Among her assertions, Nielsen said that the chain-link enclosures used to hold undocumented children could not really be described as cages, and that some parents who had been separated from their children at the border were subsequently deported without their kids. These grim updates to the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy of immigrant family separation shortly preceded a report from the New York Times that revealed the extent to which family separation remains ongoing -- despite a federal judge’s order to halt the practice some nine months ago. …But there is hope. Earlier this year, we reported that several law firms including the Southern Poverty Law Center have filed a lawsuit on behalf of 10,000 detained immigrant children due to allegations of unfit facilities, illegal prolonged stays, sexual abuse, and much more.On March 8, in a promising victory for undocumented families, US District Judge Dana Sabraw ruled in favor of a separate lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) against the Trump administration and said that “all migrant families separated during the government’s border crackdown should be included in a class-action lawsuit,” the Texas Tribune reports.“The hallmark of a civilized society is measured by how it treats its people and those within its borders,” Sabraw wrote in a 14-page ruling. “That Defendants may have to change course and undertake additional effort to address these issues does not render modification of the class definition unfair; it only serves to underscore the unquestionable importance of the effort and why it is necessary (and worthwhile).”*****************************************************Administration Said Migrant Parent-Child Separations Had Ceased. They Didn't.St. Louis Post-DispatchMarch 21, 2019 the nine months since President Donald Trump officially ended his unconscionable policy of separating migrant children from their families at the southern border, more than 200 more kids have been taken, according to court documents.The new separations, unlike the thousands of earlier ones, are technically based on alleged criminal activity by the parents or danger to the children. But details of some of those cases indicate the administration is still doing what the courts, Congress and whole world has condemned: yanking kids from their parents to deter other undocumented immigrants from coming to the U.S. …There's a persistent but false narrative among Trump's defenders that former Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush both enforced similar family separation policies. They did not. During both administrations, family separations did occur, but they were rare and happened only for reasons like serious crimes committed by the parents or indications existed that the children were in danger.Under bipartisan pressure and criticism even from his own family, Trump ended his zero tolerance policy by executive order on June 20, technically returning to the previous policy of separating families only in extreme circumstances.Yet since then, … 245 children have been removed from their families and put in shelters or foster care. There are disturbing indications that many of those separations weren't justified by the circumstances.Reasons given for separations, a New York Times review found, have included old citations for driving under the influence, 20-year-old nonviolent criminal convictions or vague claims of gang affiliation. … It isn't hard to see what's going on here. Border officials … are still actively trying to separate children from their families, using any excuse they can.The administration's policies toward migrant children will go down in history as one of America's most shameful episodes. If members of Congress -- including congressional Republicans -- don't demand answers and take action to stop these continued family separations, they'll deserve the same infamy.*****************************************************Trump twists circumstances of a migrant girl's death: AP fact checkby Associated Pressposted on NBC News siteMarch 31, 2019 Trump is misrepresenting the circumstances of a 7-year-old migrant girl's death as he seeks to steer any potential blame for it away from his administration. Mr. Trump, after mockingly painting asylum seekers as a "con job" in a rally the previous night, asserted on Friday that Jakelin Caal Maquin was given no water by her father during their trek to a remote border area and that the dad acknowledged blame for his daughter's death Dec. 8.Those assertions are not supported by the record. …Mr. Trump [has] insisted in tweets that the girl and another Guatemalan child who died in custody, Felipe Gomez Alonzo , were "were very sick before they were given over to Border Patrol."But the boy also did not arouse any concern in initial screenings. He was in U.S. custody for five days before suddenly falling ill.In his Michigan rally Thursday night, Mr. Trump entertained his supporters with an apocryphal story of a "heavyweight champion of the world" pleading a hardship case while seeking asylum. "It's a big fat con job, folks. It's a big fat con job."He said "you have people coming up here" who are coached by lawyers to "say the following phrase: 'I am very afraid for my life. I am afraid for my life.' OK."On Friday, he said of the children's deaths when asked about them: "It's a horrible situation. But Mexico could stop it."Dr. Colleen Kraft, the former president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said Jakelin's death could likely have been prevented with better medical treatment.*****************************************************Opinion: Where Is Our Humanity?by Dr. Eve KriefHuntington NowMarch 31, 2019 the past several weeks, we have been confronted almost daily with stories and images from the border that haunt us, and we must ask ourselves: WHERE IS OUR HUMANITY? …Where is our humanity when instead of being placed with their relatives, thousands of children are being held in unlicensed for-profit detention facilities for months on end, where there is no love or warmth and even siblings are not permitted to touch each other?Where is our humanity when a 9 year old American girl crosses the border from Mexico to the US as she does every day, but because she cannot properly explain herself to border officers, she is detained alone, away from her family for almost 2 days? …Where is our humanity when parents who were deported after their children were ripped from their arms were somehow able to make it back into the US to find their children only to be placed in detention, still separated from their children?Where is the humanity of a government that saw fit to separate what is suspected to be thousands of children from their parents for nearly one year before announcing their separation policy, but never bothered to keep records of these children’s whereabouts which may make it impossible to ever reunite them with their parents?*****************************************************America’s Dirty War on Immigrant Childrenby Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco and Nancy Scheper-HughesBlog// Los Angeles Review of BooksApril 3, 2019 Trump is right about one thing: there is an emergency; indeed we would call it a humanitarian catastrophe at the U.S. Southern Border. It is also a demographic, political and moral catastrophe. However, the chaotic ‘solutions’ devised by former Attorney General Sessions and embraced by ICE and Homeland Security has brought us ever deeper into the unthinkable, Primo Levi’s ‘Grey Zone’. Nine months after a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to reunite thousands of immigrant children taken from their parents at the border, the whereabouts of thousands of children remains unresolved. Some 15,000 migrant children are in government detention. …America’s littlest desaparecidos, some of them still in diapers, crying inconsolably, begging and screaming for their mothers, wetting their beds, became so traumatized that they stopped speaking to their government-supplied caretakers. These motherless children began to give up and move inside their little selves, eventually accommodating to a cruel new world, bereft of tenderness and abandoned to caretaker strangers who were not allowed to touch them, lest they be accused of physical or sexual assault. Months later we have learned that many of these missing children will never be reunited with their parents. …The chaos of parent-child separations, the missing records, missing parents, and missing children echoes other historical traumas in the history of childhood in the United States: African slavery, for one, US government Indian boarding schools for another. The underlying rationale behind these government policies is that white, wealthy and middle class parents are deemed as more able, more intelligent and more worthy than the migrant children’s parents who risked their lives to protect their children. Here lies the foundation for a dirty war against Latino migrants fleeing from violence and extreme poverty to risk their lives to save their children. …Our history is rift with hidden tortures and violent separations of families that were later described by sociologists as “broken.” Today’s torture is the separation of children from their parents, too many of which will be permanent. We are being made complicit in this political and moral catastrophe.*****************************************************Kirstjen Nielsen Enforced Cruelty at the Border. Her Replacement Could Be Worse.The Department of Homeland Security is being cleaned out and remade in Stephen Miller’s image.By Editorial BoardThe New York TimesApril 7, 2019 finally ran out for Kirstjen Nielsen, President Trump’s beleaguered secretary of homeland security.The terms of Ms. Nielsen’s departure are unclear. She met with the president on Sunday evening to discuss continuing problems at the southern border. At the conclusion of the meeting, Mr. Trump announced on Twitter that Ms. Nielsen “will be leaving her position.” …It’s no secret that Mr. Trump had a problem with Ms. Nielsen, whom he considered “weak” on matters of border security. The president and Stephen Miller, his hard-line immigration adviser, have long grumbled privately about the secretary’s insufficiently brutal approach to the surge in migrant families across the border. Last May, stories surfaced about Mr. Trump berating her in front of the entire cabinet for failing to stop the crossings. …Ms. Nielsen’s response to her boss’s displeasure and abuse was often both morally anemic and strategically incoherent. Last summer, as Republicans and Democrats -- and much of the American public -- protested the administration’s practice of tearing migrant children from their parents at the border, Ms. Nielsen rushed to defend the policy. Scratch that. She insisted, repeatedly and bizarrely, that the administration had no such policy, even as her agency was enforcing and justifying it. …For now, Ms. Nielsen’s acting replacement will be Kevin McAleenan, the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection. This leaves Homeland Security without a top official at either of its critical immigration agencies. ,,, Whoever takes Ms. Nielsen’s place, it seems likely that greater influence will be exerted by [Stephen] Miller, who inspires and reinforces Mr. Trump’s harshest impulses on immigrants and immigration. …If Ms. Nielsen is inclined to perform one last act of public service, she should come clean about the costs of the policies she enforced over the past year and a half, not only to the desperate migrants seeking a better life in the United States, but also to the thousands of employees of her department charged with carrying out an inhumane and ineffective agenda.*****************************************************The Long-Term Damage of Trump’s War on ImmigrantsBy Chas DannerIntelligencerApril 7, 2019 Friday, the Trump administration revealed that it may need up to two more years to identify thousands of migrant children who may have been separated from their families at the southern border. The depressing acknowledgement, made a full year after the separation policy was originally announced, underlines the long-term impact of one of the Trump administration’s most shameful acts. It also demonstrates how ill-equipped the government is when it comes to dealing with the consequences of Trump’s reckless war on immigrants. …The Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy toward migrants mandated that all undocumented adults crossing the border face criminal prosecution and be placed in federal custody even if they were traveling with children. The official line from the Trump administration and its allies was that the policy was about following the letter of the law, but it was really meant to discourage migrants from wanting to ever come to the U.S. in the first place. …Almost a year later, most [of the separated children] have been reunited with their mothers and fathers. But HuffPost spoke with six parents who said their kids remain deeply traumatized. They describe how their once affable sons and daughters are now angry, withdrawn and unable to sleep. … And at least 200 children remain permanently separated from their parents who were deported. ….[I]f the intended purpose of the separation policy, or any of the administration’s other anti-immigrant efforts, was to deter migrants -- it’s failed spectacularly. A decade-high number of migrants have tried to make the journey to and over the southern U.S. border in recent months, a surge which many immigration experts believe was prompted by Trump’s ever-present anti-immigrant rhetoric and repeated empty threats to close the border.*****************************************************Kirstjen Nielsen’s season of cruelty and futilityBy Editorial BoardThe Washington PostApril 8, 2019 Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who announced her resignation Sunday, is blamed by President Trump for failing to head off and contain what has become a bona fide migrant crisis at the border. The irony is that Mr. Trump himself deserves the main blame. His anti-immigrant bombast and threats have contributed to the calamity. His decision to cut off aid to migrant-producing countries is likely to exacerbate it, and his refusal to accept a compromise with Congress on immigration law reform is preventing any solution.Ms. Nielsen’s distinction, if you can call it that, was that in attempting to placate a president for whom no anti-immigrant measure is beyond the pale, she presided over a season of gratuitous, inept and ultimately futile cruelty. In the process, she bent the truth, sought to evade accountability and did incalculable damage to the prestige of the United States. It is a miserable record.In wrenching thousands of blameless children away from their migrant parents, it is Ms. Nielsen and her deputies who failed to establish any system by which to track and ultimately reunify families they were so intent on sundering. The stain of that policy will long endure.*****************************************************Cancel Kirstjen NielsenHer role in terrorizing children should make her a permanent pariah.By Michelle GoldbergThe New York TimesApril 8, 2019 Nielsen did not create Trump’s monstrous policy of separating migrant families, but she should be known forever as the person who carried it out. She put babies in cages, traumatized children for life, and then appears to have lied to Congress about what she had done. She did this evil work with either blithe incompetence or malicious sloppiness, failing to create a system to properly track kids who were ripped from their families.What happens to Nielsen now can serve as an example to other people in the administration as they decide whether to just follow orders. … The fact that she evidently didn’t go as far as an erratic and out-of-control Trump wanted is immaterial; she should be a pariah for going as far as she did.*****************************************************Fact-Checking Trump’s Family Separation Claim about Obama’s Policyby Linda QiuThe New York TimesApril 9, 2019“President Obama had child separation. Take a look. The press knows it. You know it. We all know it. I didn’t have -- I’m the one that stopped it. … But President Obama had the law. We changed the law, and I think the press should accurately report it. But of course they won’t.”Mr. Trump has escalated a misleading defense of his administration’s practice of breaking up families to outright revisionist history. There is no law that mandates family separation, let alone a law enacted under Mr. Obama. The practice is the result of a policy enacted by the Trump administration, and ended by Mr. Trump last June.*****************************************************Donald Trump’s America treats dogs better than migrant childrenby Lucian K. Truscott IVSalonApril 10, 2019’ve all seen the photographs of migrant children huddled under those ineffectual mylar “blankets” inside chain-link cages after they had been separated from their parents. … We’ve read the reports of quite literally thousands of migrant children shipped to shelters all over the United States where they were promptly lost in a bureaucratic maze of faulty record keeping, cobbled-together privately run children’s “welfare” shelters, and haphazard travel arrangements involving everything up to but not including railroad boxcars.Last week, the Trump administration notified a federal court in Southern California that it could take up to two years to identify as many as 47,000 children who were separated from their families before Attorney General Jeff Sessions ordered his “zero tolerance” border policy in the spring of 2018.What they could not have foretold was the criminal neglect with which the parents and their children would be treated by Donald Trump’s Department of Homeland Security. Kirstjen Nielsen spent most of the last year lying to one congressional committee after another, that the Trump administration never had a policy of family separation at the border, despite the fact that we now know it didn’t take a formal “policy” to rip 47,000 children away from their parents. …In Donald Trump’s America, we handle animals better than migrant children. Under the Animal Welfare Act of 1966, and the Food, Agriculture, Conservation and Trade Act of 1990, standards were set for the treatment of animals as they are housed, transported, and examined medically for potential disease and distress. …None of these procedures were followed by the Department of Homeland Security when they separated children from their parents at the border in 2017 and 2018. DHS failed to keep accurate records of the names of the children and their parents. They didn’t keep accurate records of where the children were sent and where the parents were confined. They didn’t provide adequate health care to the children, and at least one child died because of neglect by DHS officials at the border. It would have taken a bare minimum of record keeping by DHS in order to follow the recent court order and locate the 47,000 children who are missing.… in Donald Trump’s America, more than 2,500 children were taken from their parents under the so-called “zero tolerance” policy of 2018. It took months for most of them to be reunited with their parents under court orders, and some are still missing. Now we know that 47,000 more children remain separated from their parents and it will take up to two years simply to identify all of them, much less reunite the families. …Kirstjen Nielsen and every other DHS employee who presided over the unconscionable separation of migrant children from their parents need to face a moral reckoning and public shaming. … Forget Russia “collusion” and obstruction of justice. For his policies that sanctioned the kidnapping of migrant children from their parents and lost them in an incompetent, inhumane dystopic maze, Donald Trump needs to be removed from office in a vote that will condemn him forever to the hellfires of history.*****************************************************Lie No. 10,000 is really a whopperBy Editorial BoardThe Washington PostApril 29, 2019 President Trump zoomed past a lowly personal milestone -- his 10,000th false or misleading statement in his 27-month-old presidency, according to The Post Fact Checker -- he let fly a series of whoppers on a subject that logic would suggest he’d be better off leaving unremarked: family separation. The president, whose own administration imposed and then rescinded a systematic policy of wrenching migrant children from their parents, with no protocol in place to reunite them, now poses as a paragon of compassion that ended cruel laws in place before he took office. This is false.During an interview with Fox News on Sunday, Mr. Trump suggested that his heartless policy had continued practices in place under the Barack Obama and George W. Bush administrations, among others. In contrast to his predecessors, Mr. Trump said, “we’ve been on a humane basis . . . we go out and stop the separations,” he said. “The problem is you have 10 times as many people coming up with their families. It’s like Disneyland now.”In fact, the “zero tolerance” policy was formulated (with White House approval) by Mr. Trump’s then- attorney general, Jeff Sessions. … Neither Mr. Obama nor Mr. Bush prosecuted policies remotely similar to Mr. Trump’s.*****************************************************Trump's war crimes against migrant childrenby Pam SohnChattanooga Times Free Press, Chattanooga, TennesseeMay 4, 2019 a year after President Donald Trump announced the end of his inhumane and child-abusing "zero-tolerance" immigration policy -- the one that cruelly and with no reasonable purpose led to the separations of thousands of children from their families at our Southern border -- we learn that those separations were made with no intention and no method to ever reunite the children with their families.Last June, the Department of Homeland Security released a fact sheet claiming the administration knew, from a "central database," the location of all children in its custody and had "a process established to ensure that family members know the location of their children."But, of course, the "fact sheet" was not fact-based.In fact, it was just another lie. … the administration had no database with information for both parents and children and no clear way to match children with parents. …Now, almost a year later, several dozen children separated from their families under the zero-tolerance policy still remain in HHS custody.This was nothing short of child abuse when it began. Now we learn that there was never -- never -- an early plan to put those families back together.If we had a war declaration, these atrocities would be war crimes.*****************************************************Migrant kids are dying in U.S. custody. We can’t let this stand.By Editorial BoardAustin American-Statesman, Austin, TexasMay 25, 2019 someone in the audience at one of his recent rallies suggested that migrants crossing into the U.S. should be shot, President Donald Trump did not, like someone in good conscience might, admonish the supporter. Instead, he joked about it. …In the last eight months, six migrant children have died in U.S. custody after being apprehended by immigration authorities. On Wednesday officials acknowledged the death of a 10-year-old girl from El Salvador last September after she was detained by border agents. Why authorities had not previously disclosed her death is unknown. …The deaths of migrant children in U.S. custody raise grave humanitarian concerns and set off alarms. Medical experts, human rights groups and children’s advocates long have decried unsanitary and crowded conditions at the facilities where children and families are detained for days before they are transferred to shelters or released with notices to appear before a judge. These experts have warned that the living conditions, coupled with the physical and traumatic effects of migrants’ grueling journeys here, exact a punishing toll that endangers the children’s lives. …Federal scrutiny of the immigration detention facilities holding children and families is urgently needed. Americans deserve a full accounting of the deaths and a plan for averting more tragedies. The U.S. must guard its borders, but it must do so responsibly, ensuring the welfare of the children it holds in its custody. Detaining 10-year-olds in fenced-in pens who are not a threat to this country and who, with their families, are merely seeking protection is punitive and not what America stands for. If the administration cannot adequately care for the children in its custody, it must re-examine its detention policy.*****************************************************Stop this inhumane madness with caging migrant kids and separating them from their parentsBy Paula DockerySouth Florida Sun SentinelJune 6, 2019’m mad as hell and I want to do something about it.Migrant children don’t belong in cages. These children shouldn’t be separated from their families. These children shouldn’t be trapped in a van for 39 hours waiting to be reunited with their families.Yet it’s happening here in the United States.Migrant children shouldn’t be sexually abused. They shouldn’t be denied medical care. They shouldn’t die in the custody of the U.S. government. But they are.There have been seven deaths -- that we know of -- of migrant children from 2 ? to 16 years old over the past two years.How many children have been separated? How many have been reunited? How many are lost? How many have been sexually abused? How many have been adopted without their parents’ knowledge? How many have been trafficked?We don’t really know -- our government doesn’t either. If they do know, they’re not telling us much. Incredibly, they had no plan and no process put in place to reunite these children before they separated them. ….Where is the outrage?*****************************************************Trump Bets We’ll Stop Caring About Migrant KidsOne year ago, Trump outlawed family separation. It hasn’t stopped.By Michelle GoldbergThe New York TimesJune 21, 2019 one year ago on Thursday, after a national uproar, Donald Trump signed an executive order ending his administration’s policy of separating migrant children from their parents. Six days later, a federal judge ordered the reunification of thousands of parents and children whom the American government had torn apart. … At the time, it seemed that one of the ugliest chapters of this vicious administration had ended.But if there’s one thing this administration rarely backs down on, it’s cruelty. Family separation, it turns out, never really stopped. …To continue separating families, immigration agents appear to be taking advantage of a loophole in the court decision. The injunction doesn’t apply when parents have criminal histories or communicable diseases, which might require them to be quarantined away from their children. Nor does it explicitly apply when children are accompanied by relatives like siblings or grandparents rather than parents, unless those relatives are their legal guardians. And it permits family separation when a parent is deemed a danger to the child.On the surface, these exceptions seem perfectly reasonable, particularly given the threat of human trafficking. But [Anthony Enriquez, director of the unaccompanied minors program for Catholic Charities] said they “left a big gaping hole that the government is driving a truck straight through.”As part of the case the court ruled on, the A.C.L.U. receives lists approximately every month of separated families, with brief notations about the government’s justifications. Some of the misdeeds that are listed … are extremely minor. … In some cases, the parents hadn’t been convicted of anything at all, but border agents claimed that they had gang affiliations. …[I]t’s hard to remain focused on all the terrible things Trump is doing in our name. Just this week, a government lawyer argued in court that migrant children needn’t be given luxuries like soap and toothbrushes. … There are kids in this country being systematically brutalized by the American government, and it’s hard to keep that in the forefront of your mind all the time without going mad. I understand why, bombarded with stories about the Trump administration’s sadism, people can just shut down. One some level, I think Trump understands this as well. … The question is whether, over the course of this numbing year, we’ve learned to tolerate what just last June seemed intolerable.*****************************************************Detained migrant children got no toothbrush, no soap, no sleep. It’s no problem, government argues.By Meagan FlynnThe Washington PostJune 21, 2019 government went to federal court this week to argue that it shouldn’t be required to give detained migrant children toothbrushes, soap, towels, showers or even half a night’s sleep inside Border Patrol detention facilities.The position bewildered a panel of three judges in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit on Tuesday, who questioned whether government lawyers sincerely believed they could describe the temporary detention facilities as “safe and sanitary” if children weren’t provided adequate toiletries and sleeping conditions. One circuit judge said it struck him as “inconceivable." …The government was in court to appeal a 2017 ruling finding that child migrants and their parents were detained in dirty, crowded, bitingly cold conditions inside U.S. Customs and Border Protection facilities along the southern border. …But although the conditions that were the subject of the 2017 ruling date back to the Obama administration, the testy court exchange comes as the Trump administration confronts an unprecedented migrant surge that has overwhelmed facilities and caused serious health and safety risks within them. At least six child migrants have died since September, mostly after falling ill at detention facilities in the Rio Grande Valley. … [T]he Trump administration has continued to fight the 2017 ruling that sought to remedy deplorable conditions within these same facilities, at times blaming Congress for not providing enough resources to address the crisis. …The 1997 consent decree, known as the Flores Settlement Agreement, didn’t say anything about providing a “toothbrush,” “towels,” “dry clothing,” “soap,” or even “sleep,” the administration has argued.Therefore, the government now reasons, they shouldn’t be found in violation of the “safe and sanitary” requirement for not providing those necessities.*****************************************************Families Belong Together, One Year Laterby Dr. Eve KriefHuntington NowJune 21, 2019 has been one year since thousands of us around the country raised our voices and rallied against family separation. It was through our public outcry and a court order that nearly 3,000 children were reunited with their parents. It has been one year and yet the horrors continue.We learned earlier this year through an inspector general report that thousands more children had been separated from their parents in the year before the administration announced their zero tolerance separation policy. While the government scrambled to reunite the children separated last spring, they hid the fact that there were thousands more separated children that no one knew about. These children have never been reunited. …This country continues to hold over 13,000 children in detention facilities around the country. Many of these children already suffer from the emotional scars of the physical and sexual abuse which they endured in their home countries. Instead of being permitted to stay with relatives or sponsors in loving communities, they are held in detention facilities for months on end, far exceeding the 20-day limit required by the Flores Agreement that has been in place for the past two decades to ensure the human rights of children in detention. …Seven children have died while in federal custody since last year due to inadequate access to trained pediatricians. The administration has repeatedly refused input from the American Academy of Pediatrics to help with medical oversight of the care children receive when in detention. Children dying in a country fully capable of properly addressing the healthcare needs of children is unacceptable.When they first arrive in our country legally seeking asylum, children are kept in cold overcrowded ‘ice boxes’ for days on end where the lights are kept on day and night, where they are fed uncooked frozen food and the water tastes like bleach; where they sleep on cement floors surrounded by chain link fences in what are essentially human dog kennels. These facilities were never meant to house children who are left in these inhumane conditions far beyond the 72 hour legal limit. These conditions are morally reprehensible for any human being, let alone children.We have read other reports of vital prescription medications being confiscated upon entry to the country and not replaced. We have read that some pregnant women who have given birth after entering the U.S. have had their babies taken away from them. We have learned that transgender individuals and immigrants with mental disabilities are sometimes placed in solitary confinement for prolonged periods ‘for their own safety.’These are all atrocities. These are all human rights violations that are ,antithetical to our American values and to who we claim to be as a nation. Although it is easy to feel helpless and powerful against a government machine that seems to do whatever it wants, however repugnant, we must not remain silent.*****************************************************Trump’s ‘Concentration Camps’The cruelty of immigrant family separations must not be tolerated.By Charles M. BlowThe New York TimesJune 23, 2019 have often wondered why good people of good conscience don’t respond to things like slavery or the Holocaust or human rights abuse. …Maybe people grow weary of wrestling with their anger and helplessness, and shunt the thought to the back of their minds and try to simply go on with life, dealing with spouses and children, making dinner and making beds. …I believe that we will one day reflect on this period in American history where migrant children are being separated from their parents, some having been kept in cages, and think to ourselves: How did this happen? …Folks, we can use any form of fuzzy language we want, but the United States under Donald Trump is currently engaged in an unconscionable act. He promised to crack down on immigrants and yet under him immigrants seeking asylum have surged. And he is meeting the surge with indescribable cruelty.Donald Trump is running concentration camps at the border. The question remains: what are we going to do about it?*****************************************************America should be horrified by thisBy Editorial BoardThe Washington PostJune 24, 2019 wearing clothes filthy with snot and tears and food. Children locked in cells nearly all day long, sleeping on cold concrete floors. No windows. Always hungry. No toothbrushes, toothpaste or soap. Children alone, even the littlest among them.These are the conditions in which hundreds of immigrant children are being held at Customs and Border Protection facilities along the U.S. border. Most pets get better treatment. The United States should be horrified and demand that the president and Congress take action, immediately, to provide humane care for these vulnerable young people. …“We’re doing a fantastic job under the circumstances,” President Trump had the temerity to say on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday. He and Vice President Pence, appearing on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” sought to put the blame on congressional Democrats for any problems.“If the Democrats would change the asylum laws and the loopholes, which they refuse to do because they think it’s good politics, everything would be solved immediately. But they refuse to do it,” Mr. Trump said.Congress shares in the blame for its failure to address some of the issues that have led to an increase in illegal border crossings. …But if congressional action is irresponsible, it is also understandable, given the contemptuous way Mr. Trump speaks of migrants; his loathsome policy of family separation last year; his current lies about that policy; and his constant use of fear, threats and ultimatums in place of an effort to work toward immigration reform. First and foremost, he is responsible for how these children are being treated. The U.S. government should be capable of providing toothbrushes, soap, showers and safe and humane shelter for these most vulnerable human beings.*****************************************************Quit arguing about what to call the migrant camps near the border. Children are dying. Don’t look away.By Rex HuppkeChicago TribuneJune 24, 2019 are suffering in migrant camps along our southern border. They are living in cramped, filthy conditions. Many are sick. Six have died since last year.These are children. They have done nothing wrong. How they got here shouldn’t matter. Whose fault it is that they’re here shouldn’t matter. They are here, and one of the wealthiest and most powerful countries in the world is failing to care for them in even the most marginally humane way. …And what have we been doing? We’ve been debating whether it’s fair to call these places concentration camps. The Justice Department last week had an attorney in court actually arguing that the government shouldn’t be required to provide these children -- children, for God’s sake -- with soap or toothbrushes or beds.Forget the politics that surround immigration. You can love or hate the idea of a border wall. You can feverishly demand tougher immigration and asylum laws and hunger to see undocumented immigrants rounded up and deported, or you can scream that such steps are draconian and plead for more compassionate policies.You can shout “We’re a nation of laws!” until you’re blue in the face, or bellow the clearly incorrect words “We’re better than this!” ad infinitum.But you cannot call yourself an American and say that children -- any children -- deserve to suffer at our hands. You cannot say that.*****************************************************Immigrant Kids Keep Dying in CBP Detention Centers, and DHS Won’t Take AccountabilityBy Cynthia Pompa, Advocacy ManagerACLU Border Rights CenterJune 24, 2019 recent months, at least seven children have either died in custody or after being detained by federal immigration agencies at the border. These children came to the United States desperate for shelter and safety, but found inhumanity and suffering, under our government’s care, instead.Their deaths reveal just how dire the conditions are under which U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) are holding hundreds of children. Detention facilities are dangerously overcrowded, where migrants are forced to wear soiled clothes for days at a time. To make matters worse, CBP also appears to be holding children for extended periods of time in direct conflict with the Flores agreement, a set of legal guidelines that provide humane conditions for immigrant children in detention -- guidelines the Trump administration is now attempting to dismantle, arguing in court that it doesn’t require CBP to provide basic toiletries to keep children clean.The government may argue that their hands are tied by a lack of resources, but the truth is that these horrors are simply the latest attempt to dehumanize asylum-seekers and migrants, including children, and deny them basic care and dignity.*****************************************************U.S. Cruelty Toward Migrant ChildrenReaders express dismay and discuss whether the term “concentration camp” is apt.Re “Trump’s ‘Concentration Camps,’” by Charles M. Blow (column, June 24)The New York TimesJune 25, 2019. Blow only begins to scratch the surface that is the horror of our nation’s treatment of children held in concentration camps. Imagine being a 10-year-old child stolen from your parents and sent to a freezing prison, where you are forced to live in unsanitary conditions and receive little food and no medication or soap. And you must somehow care for frightened and ill toddlers.Child separation is immoral, but the Trump administration policy is barbaric cruelty. It is a crime against humanity, and those who ordered and administer it should be prosecuted. And it is a stain on our country that can never be cleansed.-- Michael Eisen, Glen Ridge, N.J.Ever wonder how deeply rooted racism is in American society? Ask yourself a simple question: If those children at the border were not “brown” but “white,” would Americans tolerate for one minute the way they are being treated?-- James Collins, Arlington, Va.The debate over whether we are holding children at the border in concentration camps or detention centers is a distraction. People hear the words “concentration camp” and immediately think of the cruel inhumanity of the “Final Solution.” In fact, the earliest use of the term dates back to the Boer War in the late 19th century, and it was used as recently as the late 20th century to describe the internment of Muslims during the wars in the Balkans. It is not unique to the Holocaust.We need to get past the idea that because the Nazis co-opted the phrase, it can never be used again. Children at the border have been confined in cages and deprived of beds, soap, playtime, emotional care, health care, sleep and adult support. These detention facilities are concentration camps. We need to focus on the real issue of how we as a country can condone this shame.-- Amy Silver Khoudari, New York*****************************************************Trump has no excuse for mistreatment of childrenBy Jennifer RubinThe Washington PostJune 25, 2019 Trump as usual refuses to accept responsibility for his administration’s ineptness and cruelty. He insists the Obama administration was the one to start separating children from their families. But … the Obama administration did not create a zero-tolerance policy that resulted in the detention of thousands of children, a situation the administration has never sufficiently prepared for.Trump also blames Congress for the intolerable conditions. However, cumulative months have been spent on a government shutdown, snatching money from defense to build a useless wall, threatening Mexico with tariffs (and then negotiating a largely empty deal), slashing aid to Central American countries from which the migrants are fleeing, threatening raids on noncriminal illegal immigrants and cooking up plans to ship the asylum seekers elsewhere. Had the administration put such nonsense aside and requested a stand-alone bill to greatly increase the number of immigration judges (thereby speeding up the processing of asylum requests) and expand facilities -- or simply discontinue automatic incarceration of innocent women and children -- we would not be faced with a human rights disaster of Trump’s own making.*****************************************************What US is doing to migrant children is an unspeakable disgraceBy John KasichCNNJune 28, 2019's war on children must stop.What's happening on our southern border -- migrant children in overcrowded, unsanitary and unsafe conditions, separated from their families -- is an unspeakable disgrace and a stain on this nation we may never wash away.Watching and reading reports about the gross neglect and mistreatment we're inflicting on kids is appalling. I ask myself, "Can this be America? Is this the way we in this country treat any human being, let alone the youngest, most fragile and most innocent among us?" But it's true. What we're seeing now is undeniably un-American, inhumane and shameful.John Kasich served as governor of Ohio from 2011 to 2019 and was a member of Congress from 1983 to 2001.*****************************************************The Treatment of Migrants Likely ‘Meets the Definition of a Mass Atrocity’By Kate Cronin-FurmanThe New York TimesJune 29, 2019 debate over whether “concentration camps” is the right term for migrant detention centers on the southern border has drawn long-overdue attention to the American government’s dehumanizing treatment of defenseless children. A pediatrician who visited in June said the centers could be compared to “torture facilities.” Having studied mass atrocities for over a decade, I agree.At least seven migrant children have died in United States custody since last year. The details reported by lawyers who visited a Customs and Border Protection facility in Clint, Tex., in June were shocking: children who had not bathed in weeks, toddlers without diapers, sick babies being cared for by other children.Many Americans have been asking each other “But what can we DO?” The answer is that we call these abuses mass atrocities and use the tool kit this label offers us to fight them. … Children are suffering and dying. The fastest way to stop it is to make sure everyone who is responsible faces consequences.*****************************************************Inhumane detention of children at the border is nothing new -- and it must end nowBy Editorial BoardThe Philadelphia InquirerJuly 5, 2019 to a report released last week by the Office of Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security, in June, almost 2,700 children were held in overcrowded facilities with limited or no access to basic hygiene supplies, showers, hot meals, or clean clothes. About a third of these children were detained for more than 72 hours -- longer than what is permitted under law. Fifty children were below the age of 7. Also detained were about 5,300 adult immigrants.The DHS inspector general concluded that these conditions represent an “immediate risk to the health and safety” of the people detained. … Largely, the Trump administration does not dispute these conditions. …The origin of the current situation at the border is child separation practices from last summer, part of a larger policy of zero tolerance. The goal of that effort was to deter immigrants from making the long journey to the U.S. To be an effective deterrent, the treatment of immigrants crossing the border needs to be worse than the conditions that they fled in the first place. That requires a deliberate effort to make America not a shining city on a hill but a place scarier for children than some of the most infamous pockets of violence and poverty in the world.*****************************************************Donald Trump earns place in history with how America treats migrant childrenBy Editorial BoardUSA TodayJuly 10, 2019 a subject as fraught as immigration, there's plenty of room for disagreement about border security, workplace enforcement, paths to citizenship and other policies. But when the topic is the well-being of kids crammed into federal immigration centers on the southern border, there ought to be no room for debate.For young children, toddlers and infants guilty only of being carried or led into the United States, it's unconscionable for federal officials to banish them for days or weeks to squalor.For now, there's lasting damage -- to the children. Many already traumatized by violence they fled in their home countries risk severe mental health consequences after being separated from parents and subjected to squalor in U.S. immigration centers. …Trump covets a place in history. With his administration's cruelty toward Central American migrants, he might well have earned it.*****************************************************The “Pro-Life” Movement Is Silent About Children Dying at the BorderBy Kendra Stanton LeeTruthoutJuly 13, 2019 are mobilizing to protest the mistreatment of children seeking asylum at U.S. borders. …Nothing on the homepage of National Right to Life, which spent $270,000 lobbying against abortion in 2018, would suggest the containment of children in cages on U.S. soil is among its most pressing concerns. Its Instagram feed does not feature any images of migrant jails nor of migrant children -- some of whom are infants -- separated from their asylum-seeking parents. …It’s unfathomable that the same rhetoric “pro-life” activists use to defend the rights of what they consider to be unborn children clearly does not apply to defending actually living, asylum-seeking children undoubtedly suffering tremendous abuse after being separated from their parents. Many of these children have been observed by lawyers allowed to visit migrant jails, reporting a total lack of access to beds, soap, toothbrushes and adequate food.They are silent as the administration fumbles in trying to reunite separated families, having grossly underestimated the number of children who were separated over the first two years of the Trump administration. Further, former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen reported that a child in U.S. Customs and Border Protection custody had not died in more than a decade until this past December, from which time at least six other children have died in Border Patrol custody.Children are dying at our doorstep, exhausted, underfed and alone. It is revealing of the so-called pro-life’s movements true motivations that this horror is being ignored by its leading organizations.*****************************************************Close the Campsby Isaac ReeseThe Daily Utah Chronicle (The University of Utah)July 13, 2019 is undoubtable that the U.S. government and U.S. border patrol are currently placing thousands of migrants into what should be considered concentration camps. Since Donald Trump was elected, the U.S. government has become responsible for at least 24 deaths within these camps, seven of them children. They are also responsible for the effects of the inhumane immigration policies perpetrated by the Trump administration, which have resulted in the deaths of many migrants as they journeyed to the U.S. in search of safety. In 2019, the U.S. government has been responsible for each instance of sickness, pain and death that have occurred behind the walls of their chain link cages. It is imperative that these camps be closed.There is no reasonable argument to suggest that the implication of these camps and the inhumane treatment within them are not similar to other detention camps of the past. While the U.S. government may not be using “extermination” techniques such as gassing, the enclosure of human beings in unsanitary and crowded conditions is not far from other despicable actions within Nazi Germany. Anne Frank and her sister, Margot, some of the best known victims of Nazi Germany, died not from gas chambers but rather from typhus caused by the unsanitary conditions of the Nazi concentration camps.*****************************************************Forcefully separating Christian children from their Christian parents is called government-sanctioned kidnapping. Imprisoning the parents, deporting them, and putting the children up for adoption are some of the horrific acts of the Trump administration. These acts are encouraged and defended by Fox News, other conservative news and the Republican Party. Clearly, these acts are un-Christian and un-American.Escaping violence for safety, these children are not unlike baby Jesus escaping Bethlehem into Egypt. Trump’s acts are reminiscent of King Herod.Our president and his party can be defined by greed and cruelty. If you like the greed/money that the stock market and the tax cuts are making for you, you love him. If you are affected by the cruelty toward these migrant families who are requesting asylum, you are appalled. The dichotomy of this administration is clear: Greed and cruelty. These emotions will decide the 2020 election.The problem is that too many Americans are content with their greed. Rising stocks, tax cuts and economic growth make us complacent about the cruelty of this administration. We ignore the cruelty, satisfied in our lives and unempathetic toward asylum-seekers.We should care about these migrant children and families because they are like baby Jesus and his holy family seeking asylum. We should develop our empathy toward their situation by making ourselves knowledgeable. We should stop judging them by calling them illegal, which is grounded in a superiority complex and racial prejudice. They are the living we are commanded to love.-- Ajay Marwaha, letter to editor, LNP (Lancaster, Pennsylvania), July 16, 2019*****************************************************Does anyone care to join me in guessing in how many fundamentalist/evangelical pulpits this weekend the subject of the sermon was the Trump administration’s despicable treatment of migrant babies and children at our southern border? My bet is that it was somewhere between zero and 10 percent, despite what Jesus had to say on the subject. But on abortion, which Jesus said nothing about, I’ll bet it was lively.-- Tom Fuelling, letter to editor, The Columbian, Vancouver, Washington, July 16, 2019*****************************************************We Created Border Orphanagesby Kari HongWBUR-FM, Boston, MassachusettsJuly 18, 2019 United States ended orphanages in the 1960s. We did so because there is no such thing as a "good" orphanage. Children are not to be institutionalized. It is established science that children are best cared for by families, whether their own, adopted or in foster care. It is stunning that the "Make America Great Again" siren call is creating orphanages on our southern border, a crime against humanity, perpetrated for misguided political purposes.Two separate United Nations delegations recently visited the United States to observe our treatment of children at the border. These very visits are a heartbreaking twist on how our country, which once set the gold standard for human rights, is now being investigated for violations. It is highly unusual for a country that demands others meet international obligations fails to live up to that very standard. …Despite being denied direct access, the U.N. delegates saw enough to be “shocked.” Michelle Bachelet, the U.N. human rights chief, former president of Chile and pediatrician, unequivocally condemned the United States for detaining children and separating families as “cruel and inhumane treatment prohibited in international law.”The U.N. condemnation is correct. There are at least 2,000 children housed in Border Patrol stations. These children are without medical care, receive only one meal a day, are not given showers and soap and do not get exercise or play in sunshine. Older children are holding toddlers and babies because adults are not. … Since 2016, at least seven children have died in immigration detention centers. From 2006 to 2016, not a single death occurred.[T]he Border Patrol stations are now overcrowded because Trump never, in fact, ended the family separation policy. …Why … is our country doing this? Former DHS Secretary John Kelly explained that family separation and -- now, apparently -- systematic child abuse are part of a desire to “deter” immigrants from coming to the U.S.But this policy is ineffective. If a woman fled a burning house, asked for help from a neighbor and the neighbor responded by kidnapping and torturing her child, her neighbor is a sadistic criminal. The house is still on fire, causing others to continue to flee.It is also illegal. In 2015, a federal court enjoined the federal government from using the immigration detention to deter families from seeking asylum -- so yes, this is another court order that this administration ignores.And morally, the policy is a stain on our standing. Instead of the country that helped champion international human rights, we are in the company of Boko Haram, another group that also kidnaps, imprisons and rapes children for political purposes.*****************************************************Why are we permitting federal child abuse at our border?By Shanta TrivediThe HillJuly 20, 2019 Judiciary Chair Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) recently said that border security officials involved in the separation and decidedly unsafe, un-sanitary treatment of migrant children at the border should be prosecuted for child abuse. Nadler gets it half right. On the one hand, criminal prosecution rarely, if ever, solves our problems. On the other, it is certainly vital to shine a light on the wrongdoing and hypocrisy in which the government is engaged. The wrongdoing has been well chronicled. …As for the hypocrisy, think about it this way: State governments routinely drag poor and minority parents through family court proceedings for failing to do many of the things these officials are being accused of. Yet, in most cases, these parents simply do not have the resources to buy the toothbrushes, toothpaste and blankets they so desperately want to provide. If those same parents blatantly admitted that child cruelty was the point -- as President Trump just tweeted -- the state almost certainly would investigate and remove their children immediately, and possibly forever. Yet, here, the federal government gets to continue to “care” for these children without official repercussions, rules or oversight.… Under Texas law, if a parent fails “to provide a child with food, clothing, or shelter necessary to sustain the life or health of the child,” the parent could be found neglectful and the children would be placed into foster care -- indeed, thousands of families are separated this way every year. Yet our federal government refuses to acknowledge that the most basic of needs exist for these children and, even worse, argues in court that it has no obligation to provide for them.It is painfully clear that, as with the child welfare system, this likely would not happen to white children. The majority of children in the child welfare system across the country are children of color. In America, it seems, it’s much easier to subject people to horrible injustices when they are in the minority. Just ask your Japanese friend whose parents were forced into a camp. Or your black friend whose mother was separated from her family for days, months, or even years based on nothing more than unaffordable cash bail. Or your Muslim friend who no longer can visit relatives because of the travel ban.[T]he family separation crisis at the border is just the most recent and visceral manifestation of our country’s addiction to separation, prosecution and cruelty writ large. What happens at our border happens inside it as well.*****************************************************America, what have we become?Orlando Sentinel, Orlando, FloridaJuly 24, 2019 date, thousands of children have been ripped from their parents’ arms when seeking refuge at our borders, and these kids are put through catastrophic living conditions. Babies are sleeping on cold floors, and youngsters are held for weeks without access to soup, clean water, showers, or even a change of clothes. Occasionally, facilities holding migrant children are so crowded that there is a lack of space to sleep. Inside these detention centers, youngsters have been sexually assaulted, abused, hospitalized, and have even died.Even while disregarding these atrocious facilities, the mere separation act inflicts stark trauma on these kids, according to the American Association of Pediatrics. Indeed, the conditions the U.S. is forcing these children to undergo amount to torture. …What has our country become? The nation that former president Ronald Reagan once called a “shining city upon a hill” is placing toddlers in distress, tearing children from their parents and, yes, even torturing kids by placing them in hellish living conditions.Through the President’s obsession with harming migrant communities -- who have historically built our country -- children have been the ones to suffer most. Despite that many of their families chose to legally present themselves to the government as asylum seekers, our country is placing them in torment. …Trump’s new asylum rule promises to produce more family separations. Given the administration’s continuous, callous efforts to rip families apart, it’s fair to assert that this calamity will only end with the 2020 presidential election. Americans must come together and boldly assert: We are better than this. We will not tolerate the traumatization of children. As the Statue of Liberty so elegantly depicts, the U.S. is an immigrant haven, not the antithesis.****************************************************Trump’s Declaration of Inhuman Rights Includes Children in Migrant JailsBy Karen J. GreenbergTruthoutJuly 25, 2019, I’ve been thinking about the Grimm’s fairy tale, Hansel and Gretel. Terrified by cruel conditions at home, the brother and sister flee, winding their way, hungry and scared, through unknown woods. There, they encounter an old woman who lures them in with promises of safety. Instead, she locks one of them in a cage and turns the other into a servant, as she prepares to devour them both.Written in nineteenth-century Germany, it should resonate eerily in today’s America. In place of Hansel and Gretel, we would, of course, have to focus on girls and boys by the hundreds fleeing cruelty and hunger in Central America, believing that they will find a better life in the United States, only to be thrown into cages by forces far more powerful and agents much crueler than that wicked old woman. In the story, there are no politics; there is only good and bad, right and wrong.Rather than, as in that fairy tale, register the suffering involved in the captivity and punishment of those children at the U.S.-Mexican border, the administration has chosen a full-bore defense of its policies and so has taken a giant step in a larger mission: redefining (or more precisely trying to abolish) the very idea of human rights as a part of the country’s identity.This week, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo left no doubt: the reality of those children locked in cages, deprived of the most basic needs, and brazenly abused by the administration he works for has been an essential part of the Trump team’s determination to abandon human rights more generally. That willingness to leave children unprotected is part of a far larger message, not merely an unfortunate byproduct of ill-thought out and clumsy actions by an overwhelmed border police force. …No wonder at least seven children have died while in such circumstances and many more are suffering from lice, scabies, chickenpox and other afflictions. Yet when doctors from the American Association of Pediatricians traveled to the camps to offer their help, their services were refused. Michelle Bachelet, the U.N. Commissioner for Human Rights, herself a pediatrician, has labeled the situation of the migrants “appalling” and noted that “several U.N. human rights bodies have found that the detention of migrant children may constitute cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment that is prohibited by international law.” Others have been less circumspect, explicitly comparing the treatment of the children to torture. …While those on the ground have claimed helplessness in the face of the challenge, the rest of the administration refuses even to admit to the appalling conditions. (“They are run beautifully,” said President Trump of the border facilities, blaming the Democrats for any problems there.) Instead, top officials have repeatedly called the disgracefully unacceptable acceptable. Former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who bore responsibility for creating much of the mess, assured Congress that the children were “well taken care of,” claiming that “we have the highest standards.” Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions echoed her words. “The children,” he insisted, “are well cared for. In fact, they get better care than a lot of American kids do.” …In whose world are filth, disease, and persistent emotional cruelty acceptable? In what America is the brutal incarceration of children not a violation of founding principles? In what America is rejecting the advances in protections that have been a hallmark of U.S. and international policy since the Second World War standard operating procedure? Since when do American officials just throw up their hands and declare defeat (as a kind of victory of cruelty) rather than muster their best talents, energies, and resources to confront such a problem? The answer, of course, is in Donald Trump’s America. And don’t for a moment think that this is just a matter of the piling up of unintended consequences. It’s not.*****************************************************Trump’s family separations suggest that humane and decent conduct is optionalBy Editorial BoardThe Washington PostAugust 1, 2019 TO U.S. Customs and Border Protection: Migrant children are not chattel. They are not contraband. They are not instruments of deterrence. They are children, and they are fragile, and some Border Patrol agents, albeit a relatively small number, seem hard-pressed to absorb and be guided by that basic human information.The fact that the Trump administration continues to break apart families even when the pretext for doing so is slight -- a minor crime on a parent’s record; a soiled diaper used as “proof” of neglect; an unsubstantiated hunch that an adult is not actually a child’s parent -- suggests that basic principles of humane and decent conduct remain optional. Even after a federal judge ordered the government to reunify families in June 2018, following the administration’s disastrously cruel policy that outraged the nation, the practice of wrenching children away from their parents did not stop; it merely slowed.The Trump administration ended the “zero tolerance” policy that resulted in systematic family separations 13 months ago but, since then, 911 children have been separated from their parents, according to a court filing by the American Civil Liberties Union. According to government records, 678 of those separations were for alleged criminal offenses involving the parents.But in the information it provided the court, the government made little distinction between crimes that were proved or alleged, serious or minor, recent or long ago. And in many cases detailed by the ACLU, the reasons for taking a child from their parents were flimsy at best: a father whose speech impediment kept him from answering a Border Patrol agent’s questions; convictions for marijuana possession; driving without a license. …The problem is that the administration continues separating some children from their actual, competent parents -- caregivers who pose no threat to their offspring. Which raises a question: How could anyone imagine that a child is better off under the protection of government agencies than in the care of their parents?The ongoing practice of shattering families is evidence of the administration’s callous indifference -- to migrant children, including toddlers and many others under the age of 10, who are at risk of lasting emotional and psychological scars; and to migrant parents, whose suffering is unimaginable.*****************************************************Trump administration is using any excuse it can find to separate migrant familiesThe Los Angeles Times Editorial Boardposted on Arizona Daily Sun siteAugust 1, 2019 federal government has continued to separate migrant children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border despite a court order that sought to severely curtail the practice. Over the course of a year, 911 more children were taken, the American Civil Liberties Union charged in a court filing Tuesday. And where did the ACLU get those details? From the government itself.U.S. District Court Judge Dana M. Sabraw in San Diego had ordered the government in June 2018 to end family separations -- a policy concocted to deter migration from Central America -- and to reunite more than 2,000 families. But that ruling also allowed the government to continue to separate families under what was supposed to be a narrow set of circumstances -- a determination that “the parent is unfit or presents a danger to the child.”On the face of it, that sounds reasonable. … But the records cited by the ACLU show that the government’s arguments for separating families are often weak and its reasoning spurious. In many cases, the government justifies it by citing past acts that seem to have no bearing on someone’s fitness as a parent: decade-old convictions for minor criminal acts here in the U.S., for instance, or unsupported allegations of criminal activity or gang affiliations in home countries, or crimes that, on closer examination, turn out to be traffic infractions. Or, worse, mere allegations with no convictions.But an ancient conviction for a minor crime or traffic infraction is not evidence of a current threat. A bad driving record does not make one a bad parent. An unchanged diaper is not evidence of abuse, but the government cited it in separating one family. …Common sense says these are not reasons to inflict psychological pain on minors, or to inflict heart-wrenching agony on parents. According to the ACLU’s analysis, the average age of the separated children is 9 years old; 20% of the children are under age 5. Two 1-year-old infants were taken away and not reunited with their parents for five months. …Far too often, this administration has acted against the best interests of migrant children, whether it’s warehousing them in ill-maintained detention centers in defiance of the 1997 Flores agreement, which requires minors be held in the least restrictive conditions possible for no longer than 20 days, or these heartless decisions to take them away from their parents.Underlying all of this is that these are mostly asylum seekers -- families fleeing dangerous neighborhoods or life-threatening poverty and hoping to find sanctuary here in the U.S. Whether they receive that help is a matter for the immigration courts, but in the meantime, the government should not be treating them as criminals, and it certainly should not be abusing children psychologically by spiriting them away without a damned good and well-justified reason to do so.*****************************************************Time for 'zero tolerance' toward child separations at the border.By Editorial BoardSt. Louis Post-DispatchAugust 4, 2019 Americans had been led to believe it’s over, one of the most horrific stories of the Trump administration is still happening. An American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit alleges the administration is still separating children and babies from their migrant parents at the border on a massive scale, exaggerating parents’ minor infractions to get around a judge’s order banning the practice except when children’s safety is in jeopardy. …As administration officials have admitted at various times, the original “zero tolerance” immigration policy of separating migrant families at the border was a deliberate attempt to terrorize future migrants from making the journey. When Americans … became rightly furious about the policy, Trump and his supporters tried to claim it was merely a continuation of the separation policy authorized by former President Barack Obama. As fact checkers have established again and again, this is false.Previous administrations took children away from parents rarely, only when the children faced imminent danger. The Trump administration, by contrast, separated thousands of children as a matter of policy, not because they were in danger but to deter immigration. History’s judgment will be harsh.A federal judge last year ordered the separations stopped, saying the government could take migrant children from their families only upon evidence the children would be in danger if they weren’t separated -- essentially, applying the same policy of previous administrations. Trump, finally bowing to public outrage, ordered the practice stopped despite his earlier defense of it.Either border agents have been told to proceed anyway, or they are deliberately defying the president and the court. The ACLU suit alleges that more than 900 children have been taken from their parents since the judge’s order that the practice stop.To get to that number, border authorities have gotten creative about what constitutes “danger” to the children. They have separated families over minor traffic infractions, old resolved criminal charges and unproven allegations of gang affiliation. One father had his baby daughter taken because she’d slept in a wet diaper. Another lost custody because his speech impediment prevented him from answering agents’ questions.It should be clear by now that when it comes to immigration enforcement, this administration’s penchant for cruelty is matched only by its contempt for the law. The courts should impose their own “zero-tolerance” rule and finally force an end to this outrage.*****************************************************I am a father and an advocate for children’s rights and reading “Over 900 Migrant Children Separated” (U.S. News, July 31) made my stomach turn. Over the past year, somewhere along the U.S.-Mexico border, our government has pulled children apart from their parents at a rate of more than two a day. The average age of children being separated is 9. Think back to when you were 9-years-old and imagine being in a foreign land and being torn from your parents. It’s overwhelming and cruel no matter your politics. These continued actions by our government are unacceptable, unconscionable and, simply put, un-American. Using children as pawns and collateral to deter immigration is indefensible.-- Mark K. Shriver, Save the Children, letter to editor, The Wall Street Journal, August 6, 2019*****************************************************Fact-Checking Trump’s Claim That He Didn’t Start Family Separations at BorderBy Linda QiuThe New York TimesAugust 21, 2019 President Trump Said“President Obama had separation. I’m the one that brought them together.” -- in remarks to reporters on WednesdayFalse.Mr. Trump’s immigration policies were in the news again on Wednesday with the administration’s release of a regulation that would allow it to detain indefinitely migrant families who cross the border illegally.Questioned about the new policy, which is sure to be challenged in court, Mr. Trump continued his pattern of blaming “loopholes,” nonexistent laws and former presidents for his own administration’s practice of separating migrant families who cross illegally. President Barack Obama, in particular, has been wrongly cast as the instigator of the practice by Mr. Trump at least two dozen other times.Under Mr. Trump, the Justice Department announced its “zero-tolerance policy” for illegally entering the United States in April 2018, describing it as “new” and in response to an increase in unauthorized border crossings that spring.The policy called for the criminal prosecution of everyone who enters the country illegally. As a result, nearly 3,000 children were forcibly separated from adult family members who were detained under the new policy, which multiple top Trump officials have characterized as a deterrent.Mr. Trump signed an executive order in June 2018 that was meant to end the practice of family separation.While previous administrations did break up families, it was rare -- for example, in cases in which there was doubt about the familial relationship between a child and an accompanying adult, according to former officials and immigration experts. …Mr. Trump’s aides and political allies have misleadingly claimed a 1997 consent decree known as the Flores settlement necessitated family separation. That court agreement limited how long the government could hold migrant children and set standards for their care.After a surge of families from Central America began arriving at the United States’ southwestern border in 2014, the Obama administration opened family detention centers. That prompted criticism and more lawsuits, which argued that the move had breached the Flores settlement by not releasing children swiftly.In 2016, the Ninth Circuit of Appeals ruled that the Flores settlement “unambiguously applies both to minors who are accompanied and unaccompanied by their parents.” It also overturned a Federal District Court’s decision that the government must also release the parents.The new rule unveiled by the Trump administration on Wednesday, if carried out, would replace the standards set by Flores and allow for the indefinite detention of families.*****************************************************Trump’s latest assault on migrant children definitely won’t flyBy Editorial BoardThe Washington PostAugust 22, 2019 first time the Trump administration attempted an end-run around a two-decades-old federal court decree that mandates humane treatment for immigrant children -- and by extension, the practice of releasing asylum-seeking migrant families -- it employed family separation. That didn’t go well.Now, apparently hoping that gambit last year has receded in memory, along with the nation’s revulsion, the administration is pushing another workaround of the rules that ensure minors’ welfare. It would scrap the 1997 consent decree known as the Flores settlement, which established standards of care and a 20-day limit on detaining families with children in immigration jails. In place of those rules and the judicial oversight that enforced them, the administration proposes a new system that would allow the detention of families indefinitely while their cases are adjudicated.That won’t fly. Where it concerns the treatment of immigrants generally and migrant children in particular, the administration’s credibility is nil. …*****************************************************If a Child Is Jailed and No One Is There to Hear Him Cry: New Trump-administration rules stand to block the public from knowing anything about the treatment of migrant children in America’s detention facilities.By Barbara Bradley HagertyThe AtlanticAugust 22, 2019 months at a time, the detention of migrant children seems to fall off the national radar, somehow fading to the background, behind the daily dramas of scandals big and small. And then suddenly, news will erupt: The children don’t have soap. They are freezing. The food is rotten.Where this information comes from is not primarily from journalists but monitors--lawyers and advocates who regularly visit the nation’s detention facilities and border-patrol facilities to document the conditions. They do so not because these sites request the monitoring, but because that monitoring is allowed by what’s known as the Flores settlement, a 22-year-old consent decree that governs the care of migrant children in custody.But with new rules that the Trump administration is expected to publish this week, even that single, infrequent geyser of information could go away. As part of a sweeping proposal to scrap the Flores regulations--including a change that would enable the Trump administration to detain migrant children in secure facilities indefinitely--the administration will lose the existing monitoring requirements entirely, according to two lawyers familiar with this area of law. The result will be that the long-term detention of migrant children would carry on out of view from advocates, the American public at large, and the entire world. …Also part of the proposed changes will be the ability to detain children for longer stretches of time. Under the Flores consent decree as it is now, which has been overseen by a federal court since 1997, the government is not allowed to detain children under 18 for more than 20 days. This provision has bothered President Donald Trump. He has called it a “catch and release” loophole that allows migrants to enter the U.S. illegally, and he has been urging the Department of Homeland Security to replace Flores with a new rule for more than a year. “We’re being very strong on the border,” Mr. Trump told reporters yesterday morning. “You see the numbers are way, way down.”The administration has “no intent” to hold families for a long period of time, Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Kevin McAleenan said yesterday. But, he said, “no child should be a pawn in a scheme to manipulate our immigration system,” and that abandoning Flores “plays a vital role in the strategy to restore the integrity to our immigration system and our national security.” In other words, in the administration’s view, the changes will make it impossible for people to rely on Flores to get their children into the country after a limited amount of time in a facility. …Yet even without making the changes, the administration has failed to abide by Flores’s provisions, and has detained hundreds of children for weeks or months as part of its effort to deter migrants from even attempting to cross the border. In fact, … the administration has disregarded Flores from the start, as epitomized in the zero-tolerance policy that separated children as young as four months old from their parents at the border and held them for months. That policy officially ended in June 2018, after a federal judge issued an injunction and ordered the government to reunite the families, although the ACLU has found that nearly 1,000 children have been detained apart from their parents since then, some being held long beyond Flores’s 20-day limit. …President Trump says the situation distresses him: “Let me just tell you,” he said yesterday, “very much I have the children on my mind. It bothers me very greatly.” And yet, the endgame for the president is slowing the flow of migrants, and he says his new rule will achieve that. “When they see you can’t get into the United States, or when they see if they do get into the United States, they will be brought back to their country … they won’t come.” …That’s an “absurd” prediction, according to [Warren] Binford. Detention in a U.S. facility pales compared with what many migrants face back home.*****************************************************Plan to incarcerate migrant families unjustifiableeditorialThe Los Angeles TimesAugust 23, 2019posted on site of The Keene (NH) Sentinel Trump administration announced its plan Wednesday for a network of detention centers to hold migrant families for potentially as long as it takes to process their applications for asylum. This is the same government, of course, that faces lawsuits and harsh criticism over how poorly it has managed adult detention centers -- let’s be honest and call them prisons -- and where, among other allegations, they left a man with a parasite in his brain linger for a year without medical attention. And it thinks it can build a better prison for families?Let’s be clear from the outset: It is harmful to children to incarcerate them with or without their parents and siblings. In fact, a 2016 report by the Department of Homeland Security’s Advisory Committee on Family Residential Centers concluded that “detention is generally neither appropriate nor necessary for families -- and that detention or the separation of families for purposes of immigration enforcement or management … is never in the best interest of children.” The panel, which included health and legal experts, said families should be detained only if there is a legitimate fear of flight or public safety, and even then for as short a period as possible. “Every effort should be made to place families in community-based case-management programs that offer medical, mental health, legal, social, and other services and supports, so that families may live together within a community.”So, of course, the Trump administration is doing the opposite in a bald-faced attempt to use the imprisonment of people who are primarily asylum-seekers to scare others who might follow into staying home or seeking asylum in another country. At a minimum, that is contrary to the spirit of federal immigration laws and international agreements establishing asylum -- and to any common notion of basic human decency.*****************************************************Trump Is Legalizing Concentration Camps for Immigrant Families: The administration’s new rules will eviscerate key features of the landmark 1997 Flores decision, which mandates protections for immigrant children.By Sasha AbramskyThe NationAugust 23, 2019 Wednesday, the Trump administration announced that it would be fundamentally changing how undocumented immigrant children are to be treated by the federal government. If the new rules--due to be officially published today--are allowed to stand, we will have entered a new era. From now on, the full might of the US government will be devoted to indefinitely detaining immigrant children in facilities that, to all intents and purposes, are concentration camps--places as bleak and lacking in human dignity as one of the original concentration camps, in which the British held tens of thousands of Boer families during the South African wars of the late 19th century. …For the past 22 years, how the federal government treats detained immigrant children has been guided by the terms of the Flores settlement. … Anti-immigrant groups have long held up Flores as a bugbear, arguing that it provides an incentive for undocumented migrants to use children as get-out-of-jail-free cards. …All of this, as we have seen in recent actions, is unlikely to result in anything good. After all, confronted with stories of hungry, sick, immigrant children sleeping on concrete floors, federal attorneys dared to go to court recently to argue that they weren’t obligated to provide them with soap, toothpaste, toothbrushes, bedding, and even food fit for human consumption. ….The ghastly new rules will also enable indefinite family detention, thus utterly gutting the central feature of Flores and further fueling the creation of an archipelago of immigrant concentration camps. …Flores was put in place to protect children from agencies that were clearly damaging their physical and mental well-being. Now Trump is proposing giving those agencies unlimited power over children, shredding the state licensing authority aimed at providing a modicum of protection to them, and barring the outside monitors required under Flores from interviewing inmates about the conditions of their imprisonment. …Day by day, Trump’s team is finding newer and ever uglier ways to lock down America, to make us all complicit in acts that ought to be considered crimes against humanity. Putting children in cages in border camps for indefinite periods of time is not simply a regulatory “tweak”; it is a monstrous and criminal violation of basic rights and human dignity.*****************************************************What Will Indefinite Detention Do to Migrant Kids?By Leah Hibel and Caitlin PatlerThe New York TimesAugust 27, 2019 Trump administration last week announced a new regulation that would allow the government to indefinitely detain migrant families who cross the border. If it goes into effect, it would terminate an agreement known as the Flores settlement that has been in place since 1997 to ensure that children are kept in the least restrictive setting possible, receive certain standards of care, have access to lawyers, and are generally released within 20 days. The effect would be to extend the well-documented suffering of migrant children in detention centers.Six children have died while in Border Control custody in this fiscal year alone. Reports have detailed inhumane conditions in immigration detention centers, with children sleeping on cement floors and suffering from hunger, inadequate health care, and a lack of toothbrushes and soap.While a recent appeals court ruled that the Trump administration must provide hygiene products at migrant facilities, this offers little comfort. Numerous studies have made it clear: No detention center is healthy and safe for children. If the new rule -- which is now the subject of a legal challenge by a group of states and the District of Columbia -- is carried out, it will increase the length of time children are detained and magnify the harmful effects.Detention centers are stressful, chaotic and unpredictable environments, especially for children. Developmental science tells us that children’s developing brains and bodies depend on a safe environment, rich with language and activities, where they can explore, move, play and create during the day, and have calm restorative sleep at night.Many detention centers are not equipped to provide these necessities. … detention centers do not provide the necessary stimulation for normal development. Simply providing food, hygiene and a place to sleep is not sufficient. Endangering children by placing them in detention centers is contrary to all available research evidence on child welfare.Young children are particularly susceptible to stress and trauma, and research shows that the longer the duration of the exposure, the worse the outcomes for the child. …We don’t incarcerate children for other civil law infractions and we never jail American children when their family members commit a crime. The government should not be in the business of harming and traumatizing migrant children either. Instead, the government should be working to comply with the Flores settlement and to design immigration policies that keep children and families out of detention, provide the right to seek asylum, and create pathways to citizenship.*****************************************************How the US systematically dehumanizes migrant childrenBy Annalisa MerelliQuartzAugust 28, 2019 decency of a country, it seems fair to posit, is measured in the way it treats the weakest, and the ones to which it recognizes the least rights. By this measure, the treatment of war prisoners, civil prisoners, and minorities have time and again shown that the land of the free isn’t the human rights beacon it considers itself.But few examples in recent history compare to the deliberate and systematic abysmal treatment of asylum seekers and migrants--particularly children--detained in border facilities. Separated from their families, these people have been so successfully dehumanized by the hateful political discourse promoted by Donald Trump and his allies that they are effectively not treated like humans.*****************************************************We’re in the midst of Trump’s War on ChildrenBy Catherine RampellThe Washington PostSeptember 5, 2019’ve heard of the Wars on Drugs, Terror, Poverty, even Women. Well, welcome to the War on Children.It’s being waged by the Trump administration and other right-wing public officials, regardless of any claimed “family values.”For evidence, look no further than the report released Wednesday by the Department of Health and Human Services’s own inspector general. It details the trauma suffered by immigrant children separated from their parents under the Trump administration’s evil “zero tolerance” policy.Thousands of children were placed in overcrowded centers ill-equipped to provide care for them physically or psychologically. Visits to 45 centers around the country resulted in accounts of children who cried inconsolably; who were drugged; who were promised family reunifications that never came; whose severe emotional distress manifested in phantom chest pains, with complaints that “every heartbeat hurts”; who thought their parents had abandoned them or had been murdered.Such state-sanctioned child abuse was designed to serve as a “deterrent” for asylum-seeking families, as then-Chief of Staff John F. Kelly and other administration officials made clear.Of course, they failed to recognize just how horrific are the conditions these asylum-seeking children are fleeing -- conditions that further decreased HHS’s ability to adequately care for them. …But hey, Trump believes these kiddos must be punished further for the crime of seeking refuge -- a.k.a., the “invasion” of America.Despite this and other abundant evidence that government facilities are not able to care for children for extended periods, last month, the administration also announced a new policy that would allow it to keep children (along with their families) in jail-like conditions for longer periods of time. …Whatever the opposite of Trump’s War on Children is, that’s what Democrats should be running on.*****************************************************Report on migrant children documents the painfully obviousBy Ruth Ellen WasemThe HillSeptember 10, 2019 Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of Inspector General (OIG)’s new report found the Trump administration’s policy changes in 2018 exacerbated the mental health needs of “unaccompanied alien children” in their custody. The unaccompanied alien children in this study are overwhelmingly asylum seekers from Central America. No one should be surprised that the OIG found two particular policies -- separating children from their parents and prolonging the time children are in custody -- are especially harmful to the children’s mental health.Researchers, mental health professionals and policymakers have known for years that refugee children are likely to have experienced traumas that challenge their mental health. Studies in the United States and in Europe have established that asylum-seeking children and adolescents are likely to have post-traumatic stress symptoms, anxiety, depression and externalizing behaviors. Given that the escape of many of these Central American children was prompted by violence and deprivation in their home countries, they certainly are at high risk of developing mental disorders.Last year I wrote that the Trump administration “knew it would cause lasting harm, and still took children from parents.” In July 2018, Jonathan White, the former deputy director of children’s programs in the HHS Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), testified to Congress that he had warned administration officials, early in the discussions to ramp up the zero tolerance toward asylum seekers, about the harm such policies pose to children. White argued that the separation of children from parents entails “significant risk of harm to children” as well as “psychological injury.” But administration officials overruled White.The policy of family separation happens less frequently now; the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reported that 911 children were taken from their asylum-seeking parents in the year after the June 26, 2018, court order to stop the practice. About 30 children whom DHS took from their parents during the peak of the policy in 2018 still remain separated from their parents. The new OIG report documents the deleterious effects this policy has had on the mental health of these children. …If you are thinking that these compelling, thorough reports are prompting an end to this human tragedy -- enter stage right the new DHS rule for the “Apprehension, Processing, Care and Custody of Alien Minors and Unaccompanied Alien Children.” This regulation takes aim at the 1997 court-ordered consent decree, known as the Flores settlement, that limits the detention of children and set standards for their care. Among other things, the new rule would allow DHS to indefinitely detain migrant families, including those arriving to seek asylum. …However, the new rule eliminates the requirement that facilities holding families with children be state-licensed facilities. DHS would be responsible for licensing the family detention centers. Given the reports this summer of squalid conditions at facilities overseen by DHS, including a scathing “management alert” report by DHS’s Office of Inspector General, a new policy of prolonged detention of families and children seeking asylum is frightful. Attorneys general representing 20 states have sued to stop the policy change.Two wrongs don’t make a right -- but they do make a place in this administration’s immigration policies.*****************************************************A report documents the systematic abuse inflicted on migrant childrenBy Editorial BoardThe Washington PostSeptember 15, 2019 Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy, which triggered the automatic separation of thousands of toddlers, tweens and teenagers from their families last year, was an act of systematic child abuse orchestrated by a White House bent on prosecuting a war on undocumented migrants. The misery caused by that callous policy was glimpsed at the time -- through photographs of sobbing children and accounts from devastated parents -- by Americans whose revulsion prompted Mr. Trump to reverse course. Only now has the children’s suffering been methodically documented by a government agency.A report on the emotional and psychological toll of those family separations, by the Office of Inspector General at the Department of Health and Human Services, makes for harrowing reading. It is a poignant reminder of the human damage intentionally caused by a callous government. …But blaming the bureaucrats is senseless when the policy itself was at fault. It was then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions who announced “zero tolerance” at the direction of the White House -- a strategy of deliberate cruelty explicitly designed to deter Central American asylum seekers from crossing the border. Brutality was not an accidental feature of the administration’s approach; it was the whole point.Medical groups have warned that children separated from their families are likely to suffer long-term, possibly lifelong, deleterious effects. Long after the Trump administration leaves office, its malice will linger in the lives of those it damaged.*****************************************************Only now do we understand the true cruelty of Trump’s family separationBy Editorial BoardThe Washington PostOctober 29, 2019 the spring of 2018, U.S. Customs and Border Protection had no system in place to track migrant children who were separated from their families. That was the case even though, it now turns out, the Trump administration, in its first months in office, had already begun wrenching scores of babies, toddlers, tweens and adolescents from their parents to deter illegal border crossings. Then, beginning in April last year, the administration doubled down, systematically breaking apart migrant families upon apprehension at the border -- still with no means of tracking and reuniting the families it had sundered.Only now, 16 months after a federal judge ordered migrant families reunified, has the scale of the administration’s cruelty become understood. Most Americans thought the policy detestable. It was far worse than they imagined.Having resisted demands that it compile a definitive listing of the families broken apart by its policies, the administration finally relented this spring when U.S. District Judge Dana M. Sabraw ordered a full accounting. Last week, hours before the deadline set by the judge, the government submitted the numbers to the American Civil Liberties Union. …,No, it was not only the 2,814 traumatized children who had been separated and were in custody under the government’s policy of “zero tolerance” for unauthorized border crossers when Judge Sabraw ordered families reunified in June last year. It turns out that an additional 1,556 children had been separated in the preceding 12-month period, beginning in July 2017. Of those, more than 300 were 5 years old or younger.Imagine, if you can, the suffering visited upon those children, including many still in diapers and requiring afternoon naps, by the administration’s cavalier brutality and incompetence -- the anguish of little girls and boys removed from their parents for weeks or months because of a president lacking a conscience and a government whose data systems were not suited to the task of reunification. Those wounds won’t heal easily, or ever.Incredibly, having shattered so many families, the administration threw up its hands and declared the task of reuniting them beyond its capabilities. Even now, volunteers working under the coordination of the ACLU are going door to door in Guatemala and Honduras, seeking to ascertain whether families have recovered their children.More than 1,000 additional migrant children have been separated in the past 17 months on the grounds, the government says, that their parents or guardians endangered or abused them, or were unable to care for them, or were criminals, or were not actually their parents. The ACLU maintains that in some cases, those separations are also unjustified, triggered by minor offenses committed by the parents, such as shoplifting or driving without a valid license. It has asked Judge Sabraw to set a narrow standard for separations.In all, the administration has taken at least 5,460 children from their parents. That is a stain on Mr. Trump, on the government he leads and on America.*****************************************************“Trump's Treatment of Women Was His Original Abuse of Power”by Amanda CarpenterTimeOctober 30, 2019 lack of respect, dignity and empathy Trump reportedly displayed toward women in his civilian life is evident in the way he’s behaved toward myriad more people as someone bestowed with the awesome powers of President of the United States. For far too many people, there’s simply no escaping the abuse now.His Administration’s family-separation policy at the Southern Border is one grim example. While a President is entitled provide policy guidance, it is usually not as ill-considered and politically craven as this. In its desire to deliver on his campaign promise to secure the border, the Trump Administration cracked down on the most vulnerable. Migrant children were ripped from the arms of their mothers and fathers under Trump’s “zero-tolerance” policy where the cruelty of separation was, infamously, the point. Rather than feeling any concern about the lasting harm his policy, which was met with tremendous public outcry, may have caused to these children, Trump said in April that ending the practice was a “disaster.”*****************************************************The incarceration of migrant children is tantamount to genocideby Rachel CardNorth Texas DailyNovember 7, 2019 initial, entirely warranted nationwide indignation that followed Donald Trump’s mass incarceration of migrant children has since been reduced to a familiar sense of resignation for many of his opponents.The sheer amount of scandal defining Trump’s presidency has had the undoubtedly intended effect of overwhelming his detractors. While their subsequent burnout is understandable, it is also indefensible, because both the actions and inactions inflicted on these children have proven tantamount to genocide.*****************************************************For Thousands of Immigrant Children, Separation Was Just the Beginningby Jess Morales RockettoNewsweekNovember 19, 2019 family separation and detention crisis at the border is even worse than we thought. News last week revealed that the Trump administration detained nearly 70,000 children in immigration custody in the past year, surpassing all other countries in the world and reaching unprecedented levels for the United States. The continued revelations are a chilling reminder for all Americans that the family separation and detention crisis is far from over and remains a moral stain on our country.Hundreds of thousands of people came together across every state last year to protest the horrific family separations that resulted from the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" immigration policy, and that public outrage helped force President Donald Trump to back down and end its most extreme iteration. Yet we now know the administration has taken advantage of loopholes to quietly continue ripping thousands of children from their parents' arms.Separation, however, is only the beginning of this administration's cruelty toward immigrant children. In immigration detention centers across the country, the Trump administration continues to warehouse migrant children and families in de facto internment camps under inhumane living conditions. With Trump's blessing, children are being locked up in cages without adequate food or water. Many are going without bathing, clean changes of clothes or other basic sanitary needs, like toothbrushes.In many of these camps, the administration does not provide beds for children, forcing them to sleep on cold concrete floors. And, outrageously, children as young as 8 have been asked to serve as caretakers for toddlers, who are alone and terrified after being separated from their parents and family members. Given these conditions, it is no surprise that outbreaks of the flu and other diseases at these detention centers have created a real public health crisis--and that at least six migrant children and many more adults have died in U.S. government custody since last September.For months, pediatricians, lawyers and advocates have warned that conditions in these camps are not safe, yet the Trump administration has been unrepentant and shown no remorse for its actions. …We are living in a historic moment that future generations of Americans will look back on with shame.*****************************************************Why We Will Never Know Exactly How Many Immigrant Families Were SeparatedBy Angelina ChapinHuffPostNovember 27, 2019 year, the Trump administration ripped apart thousands of immigrant families despite knowing it did not have a tracking system in place that would ensure they could be reunited, according to a new report from the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services.As a result, the public will likely never know how many immigrant children have been separated from their parents. …The Trump administration has admitted that it didn’t have a proper system to track separated families across both DHS and HHS. HHS is responsible for unaccompanied immigrant children, including those taken from their families at the border. …While the stated goal of the zero tolerance policy was to prevent immigrants from being apprehended and released into the U.S. while they awaited legal proceedings -- a process derisively known as “catch-and-release” -- the result was that children were traumatized and detained for record amounts of time.*****************************************************Families are being systematically torn apart, mistreated and marginalized by the institutions of a so-called “nation of immigrants” simply because they are perceived as the “wrong” kind of immigrant. As a first-generation American and the child of refugees, this is a personal matter. I think it should be a personal matter to everyone.Children pay a steep cognitive, emotional and social price for our current immigration policies. Family separations can set the foundation for problems such as depression, anxiety, maladaptive behaviors, substance abuse and poverty, to name a few.This is not a matter of politics, but of humanity. This is about children suffering and being neglected. This is about taking away the right of the parent to do the best they can for his or her child.-- Sophia Pino, letter to editor, The Seattle Times, November 29, 2019*****************************************************Taking Children From Their Parents Is A Form Of December 9, 2019 children from their parents is a tried and true form of terrorism. This intentional practice has been used throughout history, and it is happening today throughout the world. Specifically, at the Mexico-US border and in Russia, government officials and law enforcement officers wield the forceful removal of children from their parents as a weapon, and it isn't OK.The Trump administration has been removing the children of asylum-seeking parents at the US-Mexico border. According to the Times, this practice was chosen specifically to discourage immigrants from attempting to cross the border illegally.At a law enforcement conference in Scottsdale, AZ, Attorney General Jeff Sessions was clear that forceful separation of children from their parents at the border is policy. Backing up what the Trump Administration is already actively practicing, he stated, "If you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you and that child will be separated from you."While illegal immigration is certainly a debatable topic, separating and holding children away from their parents is a human rights issue. These children have already experienced the horrors that force a family to flee their home. They have already made the dangerous journey across the deserts. Kidnapping them from their parents is not excusable. It's an act of terror. …Certainly, governments worldwide have a responsibility to keep order and enforce the law. However, there is no need to separate children from their parents and it is simply not right.When kids are taken away at the US-Mexico border, they are not being cared for properly. They are taken as prisoners and treated like criminals. The conditions are cold and dirty, with little to eat and drink and no proper bed to sleep in. They are packed into close quarters and not necessarily vaccinated from common and contagious illnesses like the flu. Children are dying while in custody.Think about something else: kids are being punished and suffering just as much as their parents, and probably even more. Children and babies face the psychological damage of being taken and held away from their families. They suffer in an environment not physically fit for children. They're dealing with circumstances that would be considered illegal abuse and neglect by the same law officials that put them there.But children are completely innocent. Whether or not one believes that the parents have done something wrong by attempting to enter the US illegally, that is on the parents. Kids do not deserve to face punishment for something that is out of their control.*****************************************************It is the time of the year children love. It begins with the excitement of Halloween and the energy builds to Thanksgiving and then to Christmas. Children of all ages are bubbling with energy and expectations of presents, family celebrations and holiday activities.In contrast there are over 4,000 children in our border states confined in facilities separated from their families. The children range in age from babies and toddlers to teenagers.Many have lost contact with their families and many may never find their parents who wereforced to surrender their children to U.S. authorities and leave the U.S.The children have no idea if or when they will ever be released and where they will go. Many feel sad, alone, and depressed. Children in detention and separation from family lose their sense of self worth and value as human beings.We are responsible for these children one way or another. We elected the politicians who created the programs, the policies and new vetting laws. Our lack of protest against current programs and policies keep the programs going.The children have few advocates who can speak on their behalf. Their immigrant parents have no legal power or voice.We are a generous society and we care for and help many people. We also have a history of mistreating different groups because they are politically “unacceptable” and later we regret our actions. Will we be the Americans responsible for the confinement and resulting emotional damage to over 4,000 children?These children need our support, our prayers and our political advocacy now. Our voices matter; our votes matter; and our prayers matter too.Catherine Nelson, letter to editor, Bozeman Daily Chronicle, Bozeman, Montana, December 11, 2019*****************************************************“Kerry Kennedy on the chaos and cruelty at the U.S.-Mexico border” (excerpts)By Kerry KennedyAmerica: The Jesuit ReviewDecember 11, 2019“[F]amilies are still being separated, … despite the Trump administration’s formal end to the “zero tolerance” policy. And there is no guarantee of family reunification, a grim reality confirmed by a recent Department of Homeland Security report that found the Trump administration had “no way to link” separated children with their parents. …Our immigration system is cruel and capricious, a contrast to Pope Francis’ call to “tear down walls and build bridges.” …There is no legal requirement for family separations; the purported justification by the Trump administration was to deter asylum seekers from coming to the United States in the first place. Yet deterrence fails. People are willing to endure the cruelty of the Trump policies because there is no other option but to return home to certain death.*****************************************************Nativity scene with Jesus, Mary and Joseph in cages makes people uncomfortable. But that’s the pointBy Sandy BanksThe Los Angeles TimesDecember 15, 2019 didn’t surprise the locals when Claremont United Methodist Church unveiled its annual outdoor Nativity scene this week. In keeping with its spiritual leanings and activist traditions, this was no tender Christ-child-in-the-manger tableau.Instead, Joseph, Mary and the baby Jesus had been separated and locked up in individual chain-link pens, topped by barbed wire fencing.What shocked people in this suburban LA County college town was what happened next: An image of the scene posted online by the Rev. Karen Clark Ristine ricocheted across the country. Propelled by social media, it was showcased by virtually every major media outlet and drew a mix of outrage and applause.The Nativity scene was intended to reflect the plight of immigrants and asylum seekers whose families were separated on our southern border -- a process many in the church consider a moral abomination.*****************************************************The holidays are no excuse. Impeachment is no excuse. There is no excuse for forgetting or ignoring that, in 2019, 69,550 migrant children have been held in U.S. government custody. It’s not that 70,000 unaccompanied minors decided to flee to the States; we are actively separating children from their parents, so much that we can almost fill Ohio Stadium.Imagine yourself in their place. Are your children old enough to know their names? Your name? Defend themselves? Comfort themselves? Understand what’s going on?It just as easily could have been any of us in their shoes. I hope that all Americans of conscience are as furious and sad as I, taking to the streets to demand justice of their government.Silence from any American right now is inappropriate. Silence is acquiescence and unacceptable in the face of such cruelty.-- Zarah Myers, letter to editor, The Columbus Dispatch, Columbus, Ohio, December 19, 2019*****************************************************Sorry, World, Our Doors Are Closedby Dr. Eve KriefHuntington NowDecember 23, 2019 we approach the season of giving, of families gathering and of holiday lights, we should take a moment to reflect upon the plight of the immigrants. We should think of those desperate people whose families have been separated and from whom the light of hope has been snatched away. We should think of the onslaught of policies that have been enacted by this administration that target asylum seekers at the southern border and our immigrant neighbors and friends.From placing the futures of DACA and TPS holders in jeopardy to threatening our most vulnerable immigrants by proposing changes to public charge, immigrants have been under attack by this administration. At the heart of all of these attacks is the underlying threat of deportation and family separation. …The most cruel and hateful of policies was zero tolerance. The separation and traumatization of what we now know was over 5,000 children at the southern border, including infants and toddlers – that was a crime against humanity, a crime for which we must continue to demand accountability, particularly for those children who will never be reunited with their parents.We are a nation of immigrants. We must continue to raise our voices in opposition to these cruel and heartless policies that defy morality and defy what America claims to represent to the world.*****************************************************Let’s Remember What Christmas Is All AboutBy Ewelina U. OchabForbesDecember 24, 2019 Christmas approaches, there is a final rush to finish that last assignment before setting the out of office, a desire to spend more money on gifts than is necessary, a requirement that you spend hours wrapping gifts which will be opened within seconds and hours of preparation of festive meals. This is what it takes to be ready for the festivities. But is this what Christmas is about?This Christmas season, one picture stuck in my mind; the nativity scene in metal cages. This picture refers to the installation by the Claremont United Methodist church portraying Jesus, Mary and Joseph as a caged immigrant family. Explaining the installation, Rev. Karen Ristine of the Claremont United Methodist church asked a few important questions: “What if this family sought refuge in our country today? Imagine Joseph and Mary separated at the border and Jesus no older than two taken from his mother and placed behind the fences of a Border Patrol detention center as more than 5,500 children have been the past three years.”*****************************************************“The Most Horrible Thing I’ve Ever Done.” A Border Patrol Agent Talks About Separating Children from Parentsby Rebecca Hamiltonposted on Patheos, a non-denominational, non-partisan online media company providing information and commentary from various religious and nonreligious perspectivesJanuary 21, 2020 whosoever shall offend one of these little ones that believe in me, it is better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea. Jesus Christ.Bless their hearts.The border patrol agents who have been tasked with separating children from their families are doing things that neither time nor political Yakkity-yak will erase from their hearts and minds. They are inflicting deep wounds on their own souls by obeying the evil directives which have been handed to them.Good jobs with adequate pay and benefits are scarce. The stock market may be going up, but ordinary people are still working 60 and 70 hour work weeks to get by. Quasi military type jobs like being a border guard carry added demands for conformity.“I was just following orders,” lost its excuse value forever at the Nuremberg Trials after World War II. The phrase was further degraded when Adolph Eichmann resorted to it in his own self-defense at his trial.The truth is, we are all responsible for what we do to other people. None of us gets out of this life without doing things we regret. I say that as someone who has plenty of regrets of my own.Perhaps that’s why I feel such sorrow for the plight of America’s border guards as they must decide, each on his or her own, whether to follow orders and do the wrong, cruel, thing, or give up their livelihood.I come from a working family. My father was a mechanic. My husband and I struggled to live on one income during the 16 years I was a stay-at-home, full-time mom. I know how hard it is to make a living, how close you have to cut things to pay the bills and provide for a family. I understand the way poverty grinds people down and wears them out.I get how precious a job can be.I also know how terrible it is to realize that you have been someone’s monster. I know the horror of realizing that you are responsible for the suffering and even death of innocent people.Nothing can compare to the agony of remorse, shame and grief that comes with a full understanding that you have done horrible things to other people and you can never undo it. I believe that this suffering is part of what we must endure in Purgatory. I have known enough of it in this life to realize that it is not something to be taken lightly.That’s why I say bless their hearts. It’s why I pray for them. It’s also why I am writing this today.If you are a border guard who is being commanded to participate in separating children from their parents, I have some tough advice for you.Do not do it.Just don’t.Spare yourself the grief of remorse in this life, and the agony of enduring what you have done and how it hurt others in the next life. Do not let an amoral, self-serving politician use you to further his agenda for himself by compelling you to do terrible things to other people.As Nancy Reagan once famously said about taking drugs, “Just say no.”If you are a Christian, it would be a glorious witness to Our Lord if you would say something along the lines of “In the name of Jesus Christ, I will not do this.”Stand for Jesus by standing in His Name against the evil you are being asked to do.Jesus said that if anyone hurts one of these little ones, it would be better for them if a millstone was tied to their necks and they were cast into the sea. If you believe in Jesus, what you are doing separating those babies from their parents? What are you doing?It is wrong to do this to little children and you know it’s wrong. Let me repeat that: You know it’s wrong.So the next time you get an order to do it, say no. Say it in Jesus’ name. Instead of building a mountain of remorse and regret that you will have to carry all the rest of your life, you will be adding stars to your eternal crown.As for the rest of us, the list of people we need to pray for is long and getting longer as the Trump worship virus infects more and more people. Our task is also to stand for the truth, even in the face of the hellfire and damnation our idolator brothers and sisters heap upon us.In the name of Jesus Christ, we will not worship false political idols, even if every religious leader in America tells us to.In the name of Jesus Christ, just say no. ................
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