Advanced citizenship assignment
by Tom Sullivan
Willacy County Detention Center before being burned in 2015. via Texas Observer/ACLU.
America is advanced citizenship — Pres. Andrew Shepherd, The American President, 1995
For reasons Hullabaloo readers don’t need explained, I’ve often thought of the sitting president as a walking atrocity. But that was rhetorical, mostly. Now Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Donald J. Trump are planning internment camps for 2,000 immigrant children — some toddlers and babies — snatched from their parents under Sessions’s orders over the last six weeks and justified in the language of domestic abusers. And they’re just getting warmed up.
We learned this week where 1,400 of the boys are. The whereabouts of the girls and toddlers is unclear.
Which means ORR has not, until now, been running a massive childcare system for tender age children. But now, babies and toddlers are being taken from their parents and put…where? Who is caring for them and how? We need to see inside those facilities. Now.— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) June 14, 2018
Activists tell the BBC no other country separates families seeking asylum:
In the European Union, which faced its worst migrant crisis in decades three years ago, most asylum seekers are held in reception centres while their requests are processed – under the bloc’s Dublin Regulation, people must be registered in their first country of arrival.
Measures may vary in different member states but families are mostly kept together.
To make the Trump administration’s unconscionable policy worse, it proposes housing the separated children in tents … in Texas … in the summer.
They may not be open-sided tents a-la Sheriff Joe Arpaio, as if that makes it better. Nor are tents new. Housing immigrant families in “tent cities” began under George W. Bush and continued under Barack Obama, many run by the for-profit prison-industrial complex. They were characterized at the time as un-American. But families stayed together.
what part of It Is An Evil Bad Policy That Is The Fault Of Democrats But Also It Is A Good Policy That God Explicitly Wants Us To Obey seems inconsistent to you— Alexandra Petri (@petridishes) June 15, 2018
The Texas Observer adds:
There’s also precedent for warehousing immigrant children at military bases. In 2014, Obama temporarily held kids at an emergency shelter at Lackland AFB in San Antonio — a development that Ted Cruz and Greg Abbott were appalled by at the time. The photo at the top of this story — of Central American kids at a Border Patrol processing center — has been repeatedly mistaken as a recent, Trump-era image. In fact, it’s from 2014, during the Central American refugee surge.
Perhaps the dingiest outpost in the Bush and Obama eras was the Willacy County Correctional Center, aka “Tent City,” in Raymondville. Composed of 10 Kevlar-covered steel-frame buildings, the project was a $60 million no-bid affair that offered a little bit of government cheese to a number of prison industry rats. From the get-go, Tent City was a disaster. There were sexual abuses, maggots in the food, a tawdry corruption scandal that sent local officials to prison and an appalling lack of access to medical care and attorneys. In 2015, after years of turmoil, the immigrants literally burned the place to the ground — definitive confirmation that the construction work was subpar.
BREAKING: According to internal CBO documents obtained by @allinwithchris, from June 3-11, fully ***91%*** of parents being prosecuted at the border and forcibly separated from their children are being prosecuted for a *misdemeanor.*— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) June 16, 2018
Dahlia Lithwick and Margo Schlanger explain in brief what’s going on and provide a list of groups to support to fight back, be heard and felt. “Please call your elected officials, stay tuned for demonstrations, hug your children,” they write, “and be grateful if you are not currently dependent on the basic humanity of U.S. policy.”
Here is their list of contacts:
• The ACLU is litigating this policy in California.
• If you’re an immigration lawyer, the American Immigration Lawyers Association will be sending around a volunteer list for you to help represent the women and men with their asylum screening, bond hearings, ongoing asylum representation, etc. Please sign up.
• Al Otro Lado is a binational organization that works to offer legal services to deportees and migrants in Tijuana, Mexico, including deportee parents whose children remain in the U.S.
• CARA—a consortium of the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, the American Immigration Council, the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, and the American Immigration Lawyers Association—provides legal services at family detention centers.
• The Florence Project is an Arizona project offering free legal services to men, women, and unaccompanied children in immigration custody.
• Human Rights First is a national organization with roots in Houston that needs help from lawyers too.
• Kids in Need of Defense works to ensure that kids do not appear in immigration court without representation, and to lobby for policies that advocate for children’s legal interests. Donate here.
• The Legal Aid Justice Center is a Virginia-based center providing unaccompanied minors legal services and representation.
• Pueblo Sin Fronteras is an organization that provides humanitarian aid and shelter to migrants on their way to the U.S.
• RAICES is the largest immigration nonprofit in Texas offering free and low-cost legal services to immigrant children and families. Donate here and sign up as a volunteer here.
• The Texas Civil Rights Project is seeking “volunteers who speak Spanish, Mam, Q’eqchi’ or K’iche’ and have paralegal or legal assistant experience.”
• Together Rising is another Virginia-based organization that’s helping provide legal assistance for 60 migrant children who were separated from their parents and are currently detained in Arizona.
• The Urban Justice Center’s Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project is working to keep families together.
• Women’s Refugee Commission advocates for the rights and protection of women, children, and youth fleeing violence and persecution.
• Finally, ActBlue has aggregated many of these groups under a single button.
Besides donating, I prefer sending e-faxes to my congresscritters via a free service (faxzero.com, for example). I like the idea that staffers have to handle, categorize, file, and respond to physical documents that spit out in their offices rather than just log for/against phone calls. But that’s me.
Lithwick writes that numbness is not an option:
It’s unfair in the extreme, weary friends, but the fact of the matter is that every time we say we are tired, or giving up, or tuning it all out in the name of self-care, somewhere a Steve Bannon gets a new pair of wings. Or as [Rev. William] Barber put it to me, “We lose only when we get quiet.”
Please, get loud. Be best.
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