#federal judge for now halts border separation of families

[malenipshadows]

   *** Overnight, the president suffered yet another setback, and this time, it's his "zero tolerance" policy that's in trouble.    A federal judge in San Diego ordered immigration agents on Tuesday to stop separating migrant parents and children who have crossed the border from Mexico and to work to reunite families that have already been split up while in custody.    U.S. District Court Judge Dana Sabraw issued a preliminary injunction in a lawsuit filed by an anonymous woman from the Democratic Republic of Congo and backed by the American Civil Liberties Union, which pursued it as a class action as U.S. authorities began a "zero tolerance" policy in early May.    It's been a week since T-rump signed an executive order on family separations, but as part of this case in California, the administration's attorneys conceded that the government has not yet reunited roughly 2,000 families. In fact, there are still questions about whether the administration is fully aware of where the isolated children are. ***

[socialjusticeartshare]

ICE Expels Migrant Children Without Trial, Making Them ‘Impossible To Find’

A teenage girl carrying her baby arrived at the U.S. border this summer and begged for help. She told federal agents that she feared returning to Guatemala. The man who raped her she said had threatened to make her “disappear.”

Then, advocates say, the child briefly vanished — into the custody of the U.S. government, which held her and her baby for days in a hotel with almost no outside contact before federal officers summarily expelled them from the country.

Similar actions have played out along the border for months under an emergency health order the Trump administration issued in March. Citing the threat of COVID-19, it granted federal agents sweeping powers to almost immediately return anyone at the border, including infants as young as 8 months. Children are typically entitled to special protections under the law, including the right to have their asylum claims adjudicated by a judge.

Under this new policy, the administration is not deporting children — a proceeding based on years of established law that requires a formal hearing in immigration court.

It is instead expelling them — without a judge's ruling and after only a cursory government screening and no access to social workers or lawyers, sometimes not even their family, while in U.S. custody. The children are not even granted the primary registration number by which the Department of Homeland Security tracks all immigrants in its care, making it “virtually impossible" to find them, Efrén C. Olivares, a lawyer with the Texas Civil Rights Project, wrote in a court declaration arguing that the practice is illegal.

Little is known about how the process works, but published government figures suggest almost all children arriving at the border are being rapidly returned.

Between April and June, Customs and Border Protection officials encountered 3,379 unaccompanied minors at or between ports of entry. Of those, just 162 were sent to federal shelters for immigrant children run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the Health and Human Services agency tasked with their care. CBP would not say whether the remaining minors had been expelled or explain what had happened to them.

The precise number of children who are detained or to what situations they are returned is difficult to ascertain.

“We are only reaching a tiny fraction of these kids," said Lisa Frydman, vice president of international programs at Kids in Need of Defense, an advocacy group for migrant children with partners across Central America. “The rest are just gone."

Lawyers have fielded frantic calls from family members whose children suddenly went missing after crossing the U.S. border. Of the thousands of unaccompanied minors expelled under the health order, advocacy organizations said that they have only found about three dozen after months of searching across the United States, Mexico and Central America.

The Guatemalan teenager is one of them. She told child protection workers in Guatemala that she was sent to an American hotel with her baby for days and allowed only a brief call with her father in the United States. Then she and her infant were flown to Guatemala, where her case so alarmed international refugee groups that they referred her for protection in another country, determining that she was in peril. Advocates would not provide her age or other personal details to protect her.

The Associated Press first reported last month that the administration has detained at least 169 children in three Hampton Inn & Suites hotels in El Paso and McAllen, Texas, as well as Phoenix, before expelling them. New government numbers show that practice grew to more than 240 children over the past three months. Children reported being held for weeks in hotel rooms by an unlicensed government contractor, with little ability to reach anyone outside.

Advocates said the administration's expulsion policy is far more concerning than simply the practice of lengthy hotel detention, which they argue violates a long-standing court settlement protecting migrant children. Most kids who now reach U.S. soil are quickly flown back to their home countries — often to danger, forcing the intervention of international child welfare agencies to protect them from harm. Some children told advocates that they were sent to Mexico, even if they were not from there, in the middle of the night.

The U.S. government has largely declined to comment or release statistics, citing litigation that the American Civil Liberties Union and other advocacy organizations have brought against the expulsion program.

In June, a desperate father in Houston found Linda Corchado, an immigration attorney in El Paso. His 16-year-old son was detained somewhere in an American hotel, although where or by whom he did not know. He said the government was about to fly the boy back to Honduras, where he feared his son might be executed by gang members who threatened him after he saw them kill another man.

Corchado alerted the ACLU, and the boy became the first plaintiff in what lawyers hoped would be a test case as they argued that the government was illegally using an obscure provision of the federal Public Health and Welfare Code, written in 1893, to justify expelling all migrants, even children, at the border.

The boy's case spurred an emergency court hearing in June in Washington, D.C., before U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, who ruled that the ACLU was “likely to succeed" in its arguments that the government did not have the authority to expel the boy under the health declaration, issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Within days, Justice Department attorneys paused the boy's expulsion and agreed to allow him to request asylum through the immigration courts — the legal process usually required for migrant children coming here alone.

Attorneys found more children facing expulsion.

The relative of another 16-year-old Honduran boy told an advocate at the U.S. port of entry in El Paso that the teenager had disappeared in U.S. custody after they crossed the border together. Corchado called CBP and requested the protection screening allowed for the boy under the expulsion process, but federal agents said that they were moving him to a hotel to fly him back.

Once migrants are transferred to a hotel under the care of a government contractor, it is as if they vanish into a “legal abyss" where it is unclear which federal agency retains custody, Corchado said.

“You can't advocate for them," she said.

She said a supervisor with Immigration and Customs Enforcement told her that after migrants are moved there, “it's kind of off our radar."

Under the threat of litigation by the ACLU, the administration agreed to halt the boy's removal and transfer him to a federal shelter while he fought for asylum, his lawyers said.

Coordinating with advocates across the country, ACLU attorneys have located at least 18 children as of late July who were being expelled, court filings show. In each case, the government agreed to halt proceedings against them — a win for the child, but a concession that blocked lawyers from obtaining a judge's ruling on the policy as a whole.

“We assumed the government would want to have a test case in court to decide the lawfulness of this highly controversial and unprecedented practice of using public health laws to effect shadow deportations of children," said Lee Gelernt, an ACLU attorney fighting the program in court. “The government is getting away with a complete end run around all of the protections for children that Congress has painstakingly enacted."

Alexa Vance, a Justice Department spokesperson, declined to comment. So did April Grant, a spokesperson for ICE, citing the pending lawsuits.

Grant also refused to release statistics on children expelled by the agency, including those it detained in hotels, or provide the repatriation agreements that the U.S. holds with at least eight countries — including Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras — that would shed light on how those countries have agreed to accept expelled children and under which circumstances.

Matthew Dyman, a spokesman for CBP, similarly said the ongoing litigation meant he couldn't answer most questions about the policy. Alexei Woltornist, a DHS spokesman, did not respond to emails.

“Nobody Can Find Them"

Advocates said the secrecy reminds them of their search two years ago for thousands of immigrant children whom the Trump administration separatedfrom their parents at the border.

Then, government agents sent children to federal shelters under ORR, often without tracking numbers linking them to their parents in ICE detention centers. It took a federal court order and months of taxpayer-funded efforts before many could be reunited with their parents. A few never were because their parents had been deported and so they were released instead to acquaintances or other relatives in the U.S.

What's different now is that children are not entering the U.S. system for migrant children at all.

“Nobody can find them," said Jennifer Podkul, vice president for policy at KIND, the advocacy group.

The majority are quickly flown back to Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, the three main origins of unaccompanied children to the U.S.

Once in Central America, they don't have access to protections offered before the pandemic. Strict lockdowns have made it hard for watchdogs such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to track unaccompanied children after they are sent back to government repatriation centers.

Government representatives in those three Central American nations said that they could not differentiate between children who had been returned under the health order and those who had been deported under usual proceedings. But what they could report alarmed advocates.

Since the start of the pandemic through early July, at least 476 unaccompanied children have been sent back to Honduras, about half flown from the United States and the rest largely returned from Mexico, the Honduran federal agency overseeing children reported.

Guatemala reported about 380 such children returned from the United States in roughly that same period, according to a government spokesperson. El Salvador said more than 70 unaccompanied minors had been returned, and Mexico's government reported some 1,050 of its own children were returned between April and June, the latest data available.

The total for unaccompanied children governments said had been returned to those four countries — about 1,700 — is far less than the last official figure the U.S. government released. In early June, it said it had expelled at least 2,175 “single minors" under the health declaration. Then, citing litigation, the administration stopped providing that data.

“The number of kids who have been received doesn't match up with the number of kids who have been expelled," said Frydman of KIND.

She and other advocates suspect children from other countries are informally expelled to Mexico. Many in the last few months have reported that U.S. authorities returned them there — sometimes alone in the middle of the night and without being processed by Mexican immigration officials.

KIND found at least three unaccompanied minors from Central America in Mexico.

Two were siblings who said they arrived on their own at the port of entry in El Paso. CBP officers told them “the border is closed," the children later told attorneys, who declined to reveal the siblings' ages or other details for their safety.

Federal officials sent the siblings to Ciudad Juarez, where they were homeless until they went to a shelter, which contacted Mexico's child welfare agency.

Dyman, the CBP spokesperson, did not respond to questions about the siblings. But he said non-Mexican children can be expelled there only if they are with adult relatives. They are not supposed to be sent there alone.

“When minors are encountered without adult family members, CBP works closely with their home countries to transfer them to the custody of government officials and reunite them with their families," Dyman wrote in an email.

He said agents may exempt migrants from expulsion under certain circumstances, such as when they cannot be returned to their countries or if officers suspect they were victims of human trafficking. But he declined to elaborate on how CBP officials make those exceptions and conduct screenings, saying that information is “law enforcement sensitive."

Statistics from Mexico's National Migration Institute show that more than 200 children from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras have been expelled to Mexico under the health declaration as of June. That number includes unaccompanied children and those with adults. An official at Mexico's Secretary of Interior wrote that it does not have a formal agreement with the U.S. on how to return unaccompanied children from other countries, so it does not keep cumulative statistics.

“Shadow Operation"

Usually children coming to the U.S. alone from nations other than Mexico must be flown home — an operation delayed by logistics during a global pandemic. By law, they cannot be held for more than 72 hours in temporary CBP processing facilities before they are sent to shelters run by ORR.

That agency is currently detaining about 850 children, although it has 14,000 taxpayer-funded beds available. Before the administration's health order, ORR in late March was holding about 3,600 unaccompanied minors.

Instead of placing children in these federally regulated and state-licensed shelters, where they would have access to counsel and social workers, the U.S. moved hundreds of minors to a clandestine network of hotels — under the custody of a contractor not licensed to care for children.

The administration provided that data to attorneys litigating a court-ordered settlement that sets specific rules on how the government is allowed to hold migrant children. That 1997 consent decree, known as the Flores Settlement, requires migrant children in detention have certain rights, including that they be released quickly and held in licensed child care facilities.

In April, May and June, the government confined at least 240 children awaiting expulsion — including more than a dozen younger than 6 — in hotel rooms, according to legal filings submitted to the court overseeing compliance with the Flores Settlement.

In April, ICE, via its contractor MVM Inc., held at least 29 unaccompanied migrant children for as long as 10 days in the three Hampton Inn & Suites hotels in Texas and Arizona before expelling them.

In May, the contractor detained 80 children for days in those three hotels. In June, 120 were held there before being expelled, according to the government reports.

A 5-year-old was kept in a hotel room for 19 days in June before she was expelled.

An 8-month-old was held in a Hampton Inn for 12 days that month before being turned back with a 9-year-old sibling.

As of June 30, according to the administration's most recent reports submitted under the Flores Settlement, a 2-month-old had been detained in a Hampton hotel for four days while awaiting expulsion along with 19 other children.

Neha Desai, an attorney with the National Center for Youth Law, an organization that litigates to ensure the government abides by that consent decree, called the prolonged detention of migrant children in hotels a “blatant breach" of that settlement.

“This is a shadow operation," she said.

The U.S. has always briefly held a small number of children in hotel rooms after an immigration judge ordered them removed if there was a delay with their deportation flights.

But such widespread detention for up to three weeks involving children whose protection claims have never been adjudicated “flies in the face of the law," said Andrew Lorenzen-Strait, a former senior ICE official who left the agency last year. He said Congress and the courts have repeatedly held that children should not be kept in hotel rooms for more than one night — and even then, only in limited circumstances.

“The government is playing cowboy with regards to children's safety," he said.

Bob Carey, who headed ORR under President Barack Obama, called the practice “horrific … you have vulnerable children in the care of a private contractor with little, if any, transparency or adherence to state law, federal guidelines, legislation and a court settlement."

Not much is known about MVM, the private security contractor from Virginia that detains the children in hotel rooms. A spokesperson wrote in an email that its multimillion-dollar agreement with ICE to transport unaccompanied minors prevents it from disclosing information. It referred questions to ICE, which declined to comment and refused to release the contract.

In 2018, Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting found that MVM had held children for longer than a day in vacant office buildings in Phoenix. An ICE spokesperson said the agency did not permit the company to detain children for more than 24 hours in those offices, which she said were intended as “waiting areas" for same-day transport between CBP and ORR shelters. An MVM spokesperson termed it a “regrettable exception" to the company's policy of finding a hotel when there are delays in transporting children.

Details about the company's current contract came to light in a July court filing from Andrea Sheridan Ordin, a former U.S. attorney appointed to monitor the Flores Settlement in 2018. The federal judge overseeing that consent decree determined that was necessary because the government was not complying with it.

Ordin recommended ICE cease detaining unaccompanied minors in hotels, citing a “lack of formal oversight." She wrote MVM's “transportation specialists" are required to have only an associate's degree or high school diploma and one year of relevant work experience. They separated migrant children in hotel rooms by age and gender and allowed “little to no access to recreation." Children must be “within the line of sight" of contractors at all times.

Ordin said detention for weeks in hotel rooms can have a “harmful" impact on children, adding that MVM did not appear to have consistent requirements “regarding the special needs of young children, including hygiene, nutrition, or emotional well-being."

Ordin wrote that what was initially a “stop-gap measure" for the government to fly back children outside of normal proceedings has transformed under its expulsion policies into an “integral component of the immigration detention system" for children.

The administration argued she had overreached her authority. Children expelled under the health order, it contended, were not subject to protections under the Flores Settlement because they had never formally entered “immigration" custody.

Lawyers representing children under that settlement requested a judge's ruling, writing that the government has a “penchant for unilaterally disregarding" the consent decree.

A Sense of Deja Vu

Thirty-five years ago, a 15-year-old Salvadoran girl fleeing a civil war in her homeland was also imprisoned in an American hotel under the care of unlicensed private security guards. Jenny Flores' case forced the most significant overhaul yet of how U.S. authorities can detain migrant children. In fact, the 1997 federal settlement is named for her.

Carlos Holguín, who began litigating that case in 1985, said there is now a sense of “deja vu … but the degree of lawlessness is even beyond what was going on then."

Since taking office, the Trump administration has tried to end the Flores Settlement, arguing that it and a 2008 trafficking law work as “loopholes" encouraging families to send children here alone. The government has attempted to undo the settlement through regulations and requested Congress curtail the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, which requires certain safeguards for children arriving alone at the border.

So far, both efforts have failed.

The administration tried separating parents and children at the border, but a federal judge largely ruled against the practice in 2018, allowing it only in narrow circumstances such as if the adult poses a danger.

U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee, who is in charge of the Flores Settlement, has determined the administration must quickly release children locked up with their parents in immigrant detention centers, most recently citing the risk of coronavirus spreading.

“The family residential centers are on fire and there is no more time for half measures," she wrote in a June 26 order.

The government is now arguing it can force detained parents to choose between freeing their children or staying indefinitely imprisoned with them.

But none of the administration's attempts to undo either the settlement or the law have been as effective as the expulsion order, which is “eviscerating every single protection mechanism outlined by Congress and the courts with one sweeping gesture," said Podkul of KIND.

Late last month, the ACLU sued to allow its lawyers access to children detained in the McAllen Hampton Inn after a video went viral showing a Texas Civil Rights Project lawyer forcibly pushed away.

“The children are in imminent danger of unlawful removal," the attorneys wrote.

Facing a public relations scandal, Hilton quickly announced that all three hotels had canceled reservations with MVM.

“We expect all Hilton properties to reject business that would use a hotel in this way," a Hilton spokesperson said.

Government attorneys agreed to pause the expulsion of the migrants who they said remained in the McAllen hotel on the date of the lawsuit — once again, ACLU attorneys said, mooting litigation on the broader policy. A separate suit involving a 13-year-old Salvadoran girl who was expelled this summer is still pending in a Washington, D.C., federal court.

By the time the administration stopped the removal of the migrants detained at the Hampton Inn, most who had been held there had already been expelled or transferred elsewhere — some, advocates said, just before the ACLU filed its lawsuit. Only 17 family members, including one unaccompanied child, remained in that hotel.

What happened to the rest? No one would say.

Article Source

[bountyofbeads]

New Rule Would Let U.S. Hold Migrant Families Indefinitely https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/21/us/politics/flores-migrant-family-detention.html

Migrant Families Would Face Indefinite Detention Under New Trump Rule

By Michael D. Shear and Zolan Kanno-Youngs | Published Aug. 21, 2019 Updated 10:55 a.m. ET | New York Times | Posted August 21, 2019 11:20 AM ET |

Leer en español

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration unveiled a regulation on Wednesday that would allow it to detain indefinitely migrant families who cross the border illegally, replacing a decades-old court agreement that imposed a limit on how long the government could hold migrant children in custody and specified the level of care they must receive.

The White House has for more than a year pressed the Department of Homeland Security to replace the agreement, known as the Flores settlement, a shift that the administration says is crucial to halt immigration across the southwestern border.

The new regulation , which requires approval from a federal judge before it can go into effect and was expected to be immediately challenged in court, would establish standards for conditions in detention centers and specifically abolish a 20-day limit on detaining families in immigration jails, a cap that has prompted President Trump to repeatedly complain about the “catch and release” of families from Central America and elsewhere into the United States.

“This rule allows the federal government to enforce immigration laws as passed by Congress,” Kevin K. McAleenan, the acting secretary of homeland security, said in a statement. He called it a “critical rule” that would allow the government to detain families and maintain the “integrity of the immigration system.”

The administration proposed the rule last fall, allowing the public to comment on the potential regulation. It is scheduled to be published this week in the Federal Register and would take effect 60 days later, though administration officials concede that the expected court challenge will probably delay it.

Under the new rule, the administration would be free to send families who are caught crossing the border illegally to a family residential center to be held for as long as it takes for their immigration cases to be decided. Officials said families cases could be resolved within three months, though many could drag on much longer.

Trump administration officials — who briefed reporters on Tuesday night on the condition of anonymity to discuss the plans — said that many of the families would be detained until they were either released after being awarded asylum or they were deported to their home countries. Some families might be awarded parole to leave the facilities while the courts decide their fate.

The 20-day limit has been in place since 2015, a legal outgrowth of a 1997 court-ordered consent decree after a federal class-action lawsuit alleged physical and emotional harm done to immigrant children held for extended periods of time in the detention facilities.

Previous administrations tried to change the rules for detaining children in efforts to reduce surges of migrants crossing the border. Mr. Trump’s homeland security officials have repeatedly said that limiting the detentions of entire migrant families has driven the surge of Central American families who crossed the border this year.

The officials said on Tuesday that enacting the new regulation would send a powerful message that bringing children to the United States was not “a passport” to being released from detention.

They predicted that the rule would cause a significant decrease in the number of families trying to cross into the United States illegally, reducing the need for more family residential centers.

Withdrawing from the consent decree has also been a personal objective for Stephen Miller, the architect of Mr. Trump’s immigration policy. Delays in finishing the new regulation had prompted Mr. Miller to lash out at senior homeland security officials, who were ousted from the department.

The New York Times reported in April that Mr. Miller berated the former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Ronald D. Vitiello, for not finishing the new rule. Mr. Vitiello later had his nomination withdrawn by Mr. Trump, who said he was not tough enough for the job.

The Flores settlement has also been at the root of partisan debates on immigration. Democrats have said the rules, are imperative to ensuring the well-being of detained children, especially after reports of children being kept in overcrowded cells and sometimes going without showers, toothpaste or hot meals.

Mr. McAleenan told the House Homeland Security Committee in May that the Flores settlement had incentivized migration to the United States, saying that “if an adult arrives with a child, they have a likelihood of staying in the United States.”

Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the chairman of the committee, reminded Mr. McAleenan of the original purpose of the court-ordered regulations.

“It was about prolonged detention of children had proven to be harmful to their health,” Mr. Thompson said. “I think the court looked at it from that perspective rather than a punitive decision on the department.”

The Trump administration’s regulation, which is several hundred pages long, eliminates a requirement that federal detention centers for immigrant families be licensed by states, most of which had no such licenses.

Instead, under the regulation, the three centers built to house hundreds of immigrant families — in Dilley and Karnes City, Tex., and Leesport, Pa. — would have to meet standards set only by ICE, which runs them.

The administration officials insisted Tuesday that the facilities were, and would continue to be, maintained at high standards for the immigrants who were detained there. They said the facilities provided health care, education and “top notch” food.

But critics of the administration have long argued that the facilities were unsuitable for children to be held for long periods of time. And the recent examples of horrible conditions at overcrowded Border Patrol detention centers have underscored their concerns about the residential centers.

“We don’t disagree with detaining children when it’s necessary — namely, if they’re a flight risk or they’re a danger to themselves or others, we agree,” said Peter Schey, a lawyer who filed the original case and has continued to defend the settlement terms in court since. “It’s the unnecessary detention of child that this settlement sought to end. So these regulations really reflect a flagrant disregard on the part of President Trump and his administration for the safety and the well-being of children in the care of the federal government.”

Last summer, the Trump administration began separating children from their parents as a way to get around the Flores agreement. The children were sent to the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services while the adults were imprisoned while awaiting trial on their violation of immigration laws.

A fierce political backlash forced Mr. Trump to publicly abandon the separation policy, though immigration advocates said some families continued to be separated after that announcement.

Administration officials said Tuesday that the effort to allow families to be detained indefinitely was an attempt to avoid having to either separate families or release them while they waited for their cases to be heard.

Even before the final rule was announced on Wednesday, immigration advocates said it amounted to a cruel effort to imprison families — some with infants or young children — many of whom are fleeing violence and corruption in their home countries.

Under the terms of the 1997 consent decree, the regulation must be approved by the judge in the original case, Judge Dolly M. Gee of United States District Court for the Central District of California. The government will have seven days to file a brief in her court seeking her approval of the regulation.

If she refuses, the administration is expected to appeal her decision in a case that could drag on for months or even years, legal experts said.

Caitlin Dickerson contributed reporting from New York.

The Flores Agreement Protected Migrant Children for Decades. New Regulations Aim to End It.

By Miriam Jordan | Published Aug. 20, 2019 Updated 9:52 a.m. ET | New York Times | Posted August 21, 2019 |

LOS ANGELES — Nearly 35 years ago, long before the current mass influx of Central American families making their way to America’s southern border, a different and more brutal migrant crisis was unfolding.

In El Salvador, government death squads were stalking suspected insurgents. Farmers, human rights activists and even priests were being caught in the crossfire. The widening civil war would leave more than 75,000 people dead, and send tens of thousands of people fleeing to the United States.

One of them was Alma Yanira Cruz, a 12-year-old girl who made her way north to join her mother in Los Angeles after her grandfather and uncle were killed.

What happened to her after she arrived in 1985 violated nearly every principle of today’s standards for protecting migrant children — an ordeal that even now, she said recently, is “too painful to remember, to discuss.”

And yet it had become shockingly routine.

A barricade of razor wire surrounded an old motel in Pasadena, Calif., north of Los Angeles, where migrants were locked in overcrowded rooms, children and adults jammed in together. For weeks, the girl remained there — offered no schooling, no recreation, no doctors, no visits with relatives.

“Alma suffered too much. She felt unsafe. She was mixed with all kinds of people and was afraid,” said her mother, Anna Aldana, who had come to the United States in 1979 and was working as a housekeeper in Los Angeles. “She told me they didn’t give her enough food. She told me she fell out of a high bunk bed.”

The Department of Homeland Security on Wednesday unveiled a sweeping new set of regulations for detaining migrant children, replacing more than two decades of protections that were put into place as a result of what happened to Alma and her fellow detainees in 1985. The new standards, set to be published later this week, would allow the government to detain children and families indefinitely, revise the minimum standards of care and, if they stand up in court, end the 22-year-old consent decree, known as the Flores agreement, that has protected the nation’s youngest and most vulnerable new arrivals.

A class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of Ms. Cruz, one of the other young Salvadorean girls being held in Pasadena; Jenny Lisette Flores, 15; and two other adolescent girls paved the way for one of the most important changes in immigration policy in half a century. When it was finally settled in 1997, the litigation transformed the way migrant children all across the southwest border were treated after arriving in the United States.

No longer could they be held indefinitely in hard-core detention facilities: They had to be released quickly to a family member or guardian or, if that was not possible, transferred speedily to a licensed care facility that did not operate like a jail. A subsequent interpretation of the agreement limited the time most migrant children could spend in detention, generally to no more than 20 days.

The Obama administration, which battled a new surge in migrant families arriving on the border in 2014, tried and failed to get out from under the strict limits. The Trump administration railed against the “legal loopholes” in the consent decree and tried mightily to upend it. The Flores agreement, the administration argued, helped create the current chaos at the border by providing an incentive for migrant parents to bring their children with them — the equivalent, under the current legal framework, of a get-out-of-jail-free card.

Administration officials said that the new regulations maintain the underlying purpose of the Flores agreement, and all children will be “treated with dignity, respect, and special concern for their particular vulnerability as minors.”

But those who spearheaded the long-running litigation disagree.

“These regulations issued under orders from the White House show President Trump’s decision to politicize the detention of migrant children as part of his re-election campaign and his callous indifference to their safety and well-being,” said Peter Schey, who along with his co-counsel, Carlos Holguin, filed the original lawsuit.

When the Trump administration last year tried to get around the Flores agreement by separating children from their parents in order to detain the parents alone, the policy created such an uproar that it was soon rescinded, at least officially. Then, administration lawyers went to court to try to win permission to keep children with their parents in detention-type facilities for longer than 20 days.

Judge Dolly Gee of Federal District Court in Los Angeles, who oversees the agreement, denied the government’s request, blaming more than 20 years of congressional inaction and “ill-considered executive action” for the “current stalemate.” Three months later, in September, the administration published the proposed new Flores regulations for comment in the Federal Register.

After the final rule is published later this week, the plaintiffs’ lawyers will have one week to file a brief with the court if they believe the regulations fail to implement the terms of the settlement. If not rejected by the court, the regulations would take effect 60 days after publication.

The two plaintiffs’ lawyers have returned to court dozens of times to force the administration to abide by the agreement’s provisions and made repeated visits to detention centers to inspect them or interview children. Most recently, the legal observers in the case reported on a border facility in Clint, Tex., where they said migrant children were being held in filthy conditions with inadequate food.

“If someone had told me in 1985 that our work to protect children would continue into 2019,” Mr. Holguin said, “there is no way I would have believed it.”

Mr. Holguin was a 30-year-old lawyer working with Mr. Schey at a public-interest law firm when the two lawyers first got drawn into the case. It started with a phone call from the actor Ed Asner, who had heard about Ms. Cruz’s case and wanted someone to intervene.

Mr. Holguin’s father, the son of a Mexican immigrant, had been a public school teacher in East Los Angeles who had supported the 1968 Latino student walkouts across the city protesting racism and substandard education for Mexican-Americans. After college, Mr. Holguin enrolled in the People’s College of Law, an unaccredited law school in Los Angeles, convinced that the quickest way to a more equitable society was through the courts.

Mr. Schey was the son of a German gentile mother and a communist Jewish father who had escaped on a boat to South Africa during World War II. The family immigrated to United States when Mr. Schey was a teenager.

By the 1980s, Los Angeles was ground zero in the immigrant-rights movement. “The key national organizations were based in Los Angeles. The most vocal immigrant defenders worked in L.A.,” Mr. Schey said. The two lawyers were working together out of a 1920s-era Craftsman house with bad plumbing and a warped roof when the call about the girls being held in Pasadena came in.

Los Angeles was absorbing thousands of war refugees. “Back then, it was guerrillas, not gangs making people leave,” said Ms. Aldana, sitting recently in her modest one-bedroom apartment in a middle-class Los Angeles neighborhood adorned with photographs of her teenage grandchildren — the twins her daughter would go on to have.

Guerrillas who rampaged through her neighborhood in El Salvador had forced her children to procure and prepare food for them, she recalled. “I had to get them out of there.” After her son, Luis Alberto, crossed the border undetected, she decided Alma should come.

But Alma was apprehended by border agents at San Ysidro, and transferred to the detention facility in Pasadena. Ms. Aldana feared she would be deported if she came forward to claim her daughter, and the authorities would not allow anyone else to take her. So the girl languished in custody.

“I wept and wept. I felt helpless,” recalled Ms. Aldana.

At about the same time, Jenny Lisette Flores, whose mother was also undocumented and living in Los Angeles, had arrived at the border and been sent to the Pasadena motel. Her mother, too, was afraid to pick up her daughter because of her immigration status.

“Children were being indefinitely detained. The government was using them as bait to arrest their parents,” said Mr. Holguin.

With an army of law students and volunteer lawyers, the pair began visiting facilities and documenting what they witnessed.

The most serious thing they found was that immigration agents were doing body cavity searches on migrant children, said John Hagar, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Southern California, a co-counsel in the case. “They would look up a boy’s anus and a girl’s vagina,” he said.

The lawsuit filed on July 11, 1985, argued that the government needed to meet basic child-welfare standards, with education, recreation and medical examinations. It also said the authorities should release children to competent and available adults, rather than indefinitely detaining them until a parent or legal guardian could come forward.

On the day that the suit was filed, Ms. Aldana appeared at a news conference alongside Mr. Schey and the actor, Mr. Asner. To hide her identity, she tied a bandanna around her face, leaving only her forehead and eyes exposed.

“I was on TV, and I said that I had brought my daughter because I didn’t want her kidnapped by guerrillas,” Ms. Aldana said.

A few weeks later, a judge ordered the girls released to people appointed by their mothers who were American citizens. Ms. Cruz was handed over to a family friend who represented her in the lawsuit; Ms. Flores was released to an uncle.

The lawyers sought a nationwide injunction to apply the same principles to all children in federal custody. The parties began discussing a settlement and reached the now-famous consent decree in 1997.

“At the time, we didn’t realize it would be seminal,” said Doris Meissner, the immigration chief in the Clinton administration who signed off on the settlement. She said she had advised addressing the problems head-on. “If there are real issues surrounding the detention of minors, and the government is being held accountable for poor conditions, why are we litigating in favor of what we are doing wrong? Why don’t we settle the lawsuit?”

Complying with the standards in the settlement, she said, was “the right thing to do for kids.”

Little did the plaintiffs’ lawyers know that holding the government to the consent decree would become their life’s work.

“By and large, there was substantial compliance,” recalled Mr. Schey.

Then, in 2014, Central American families and unaccompanied children began pushing across the border in ever-larger numbers, fleeing horrific gang violence, domestic abuse and entrenched poverty. Most of them were seeking asylum. As the numbers climbed, the Obama administration responded by erecting large detention centers for families.

Mr. Holguin and Mr. Schey sprang into action in early 2015, filing a motion in federal court to enforce the Flores agreement. Judge Gee ruled that the settlement applied even to a child apprehended with a parent — meaning that the de facto 20-day limit on detentions applied not just to children, but to parents who were detained with their children.

The numbers of children in detention began rising again late last year, and Mr. Holguin and Mr. Schey enlisted dozens of lawyers and health professionals to inspect facilities like the one in Clint where they were being kept.

What they found was a constant pattern: One facility would be fixed. Then there would be problems at a different one.

“It’s like we are playing Whac-a-Mole. Done with that, then another violation comes up,” Mr. Holguin said.

Today, both Ms. Cruz and Ms. Flores live in Southern California, with children of their own. Though Ms. Cruz spoke briefly to The New York Times, neither wanted to be interviewed. Mr. Schey, who called the women “the Rosa Parks of the civil rights movement for immigrant children,” said he had not seen them in years.

“I’d love to see them,” he said, “to tell them that their willingness to be lead plaintiffs has provided protections for more than a million immigrant children.”

Michael Shear contributed reporting from Washington and Jack Healy from Denver. Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.

[newstfionline]

Headlines

Hacker gained access to 100 million Capital One credit card applications and accounts (CNN) In one of the biggest-ever data breaches, a hacker gained access to more than 100 million Capital One customers’ accounts and credit card applications earlier this year. Paige Thompson is accused of breaking into a Capital One server and gaining access to 140,000 Social Security numbers, 1 million Canadian Social Insurance numbers and 80,000 bank account numbers, in addition to an undisclosed number of people’s names, addresses, credit scores, credit limits, balances, and other information.

On Costliest U.S. Warship Ever, Navy Can’t Get Munitions on Deck (Bloomberg) Only two of 11 elevators needed to lift munitions to the deck of the U.S. Navy’s new $13 billion aircraft carrier have been installed, according to a Navy veteran who serves on a key House committee. “I don’t see an end in sight right now” to getting all the elevators working on the USS Gerald R. Ford, the costliest warship ever, Democratic Representative Elaine Luria of Virginia said in an interview. The shakedown phase has been extended to October and the vessel won’t have all the elevators installed--much less functioning--by then, according to Luria, a 20-year Navy surface warfare officer whose served on two aircraft carriers and as shore maintenance coordinator for a third. “Essentially, the ship can’t deploy,” Luria said. “It can’t carry ammunition.”

Senate fails to overturn Saudi arms sale veto (BBC) The US Senate has failed in its latest bid to block the controversial sale of $8.1bn (£6.5bn) worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia. It fell short of the two-thirds majority needed to overturn President Donald Trump’s veto, used to override resolutions passed by both chambers of Congress preventing the sale. Critics fear the weapons may be used on civilians in the Yemen conflict. Mr Trump argued that blocking the sale would weaken US global competitiveness.

Over 900 Children Separated at U.S. Border Since Policy Halted: ACLU (Reuters) The American Civil Liberties Union on Tuesday asked a federal judge to stop the Trump administration’s ongoing separation of families at the U.S.-Mexico border, saying the government had taken more than 900 children from their parents since the policy officially ended last year.

It’s official: UK broke temperature record during heat wave (AP) Britain has officially had its hottest day on record. Weather agency the Met Office says the temperature reached 38.7 C (101.7 F) at Cambridge University Botanic Garden in eastern England during last week’s heat wave. The previous U.K. record was 38.5 C (101.3 F), set in August 2003. Temperature records fell across Europe last week as a suffocating heat wave swept up from the Sahara.

Greek Lawmakers Vote to Ease Some Taxes From Bailout Era (AP) Lawmakers in Greece have approved measures to ease bailout-era taxes nearly a year after the country ended its final rescue program, but most of the taxes imposed during the crisis will remain in effect.

Blast in Pakistani city Quetta kills five: police (Reuters) Five people including two policemen were killed and 27 injured in a blast near a police station in southwestern Pakistani city of Quetta on Tuesday evening, a week after a similar blast that killed two people, police said.

Sri Lanka Gives Free Visa to Boost Tourism After Bomb Blasts (AP) Sri Lanka says it will give one-month free visa on arrival to visitors from nearly 50 countries in its latest effort to revive the island nation’s lucrative tourism industry that was badly hit by the Easter bomb attacks.

Iran to Reduce Nuclear Deal Commitments More Unless Europe Protects It: Zarif (Reuters) Iran is set to further cut its commitments to its international nuclear deal unless its European partners move to protect it from U.S. sanctions by ensuring it can sell oil and receive income, its foreign minister told state television on Wednesday.

Bangladesh Grapples With Country’s Worst Dengue Outbreak (AP) Bangladesh is facing its worst-ever dengue fever outbreak as hospitals are flooded with patients, putting a severe strain on the country’s poor emergency services.

A drug-resistant strain of malaria is making the disease ‘almost untreatable’ in southeast Asia (Washington Post) Two recent studies have found that the presence of drug-resistant strains of malaria is on the rise in southeast Asia. The research has provoked alarm among scientists who are leading the fight against one of the world’s most stubborn health problems. The disease is “getting close to being untreatable,” said Arjen Dondorp a lead author of one the studies and the head of malaria research at the Mahidol-Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit in Thailand.

Top diplomats gather in Bangkok for key Asia-Pacific talks (AP) Top diplomats from the Asia-Pacific region started gathering Tuesday in the Thai capital to discuss issues of concern to the area, including security on the Korean peninsula and China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea. The meetings in Bangkok are hosted by the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations, chaired this year by Thailand. Thai officials say there will be 27 meetings in all through Saturday, and 31 countries and alliances will participate.

North Korea Tests More Missiles Despite Efforts at Diplomatic Solutions (Reuters) North Korea fired two short-range ballistic missiles early on Wednesday, the South Korean military said, only days after it launched two similar missiles intended to pressure South Korea and the United States to stop upcoming military drills.

White House Eyeing Chinese Forces Gathered on Hong Kong Border (Bloomberg) The White House is monitoring what a senior administration official called a congregation of Chinese forces on Hong Kong’s border. Weeks of unrest in the Chinese territory have begun to overwhelm Hong Kong’s police, who have found themselves in violent clashes with protesters. China warned Monday that the civil disorder had gone “far beyond” peaceful protest after police deployed tear gas over the weekend. The nature of the Chinese buildup wasn’t clear; the official said that units of the Chinese military or armed police had gathered at the border with Hong Kong. The official briefed reporters on condition he not be identified.

China celebrates ‘very happy lives’ in Xinjiang, after detaining 1 million Uighurs (Washington Post) The Chinese government Tuesday declared its campaign of control and repression in the majority-Muslim region of Xinjiang to be a resounding success, claiming that almost all those detained in internment camps had been released and were now “living very happy lives.” Signaling the start of a new phase in Xinjiang, officials quoted reams of figures to support their claims that life in Xinjiang had improved remarkably under 70 years of Communist rule and that the government’s “deradicalization” campaign had been effective. The government’s portrayal of the situation in Xinjiang differs sharply from firsthand accounts of life there.

China to Halt Individual Taiwan Tourism Permits for 47 Mainland Cities (Reuters) China will stop issuing individual travel permits for Taiwan to people in 47 mainland cities from Aug. 1, its culture and tourism ministry said on Wednesday, citing the state of ties with the self-ruled island, but gave no details.

Israel Approves New Homes for Settlers, Palestinians in West Bank (Reuters) Israel has approved the construction of 6,000 new homes for Jewish settlers and 700 new homes for Palestinians in an area of the occupied West Bank where it has full control, an Israeli official said on Wednesday.

Suspected Boko Haram fighters kill 65 in attack on funeral in Nigeria (Washington Post) Villagers were walking home from a funeral in northeast Nigeria this weekend when gunmen on motorbikes surrounded them in a graveyard and opened fire. The attack bearing the hallmarks of terrorist group Boko Haram left at least 65 people dead, authorities said Monday, as residents urged the military to ramp up protection in a region gripped by extremist violence.

South Africa says unemployment at highest level in a decade (AP) South Africa says unemployment has reached its highest level in a decade at 29%. It is the latest grim report for Africa’s most developed economy, which in May announced that growth had dropped by the most in a decade during the first quarter. President Cyril Ramaphosa’s administration is under public pressure to turn around the economy and clean up corruption. That dissatisfaction led to the worst election showing in 25 years for Ramaphosa’s ruling African National Congress in May.

[fernreads]

Every morning for the past year, Emilsa and her two American-born daughters wake up on a mattress in a storage room inside a migrant shelter in Ciudad Juárez. For breakfast, they usually eat eggs and potatoes or whatever food people donate to the shelter.

After eating, the 39-year-old from Guatemala will read to her daughters and teach her 8-year-old addition and subtraction and her 11-year-old multiplication and division. For the rest of the day, the girls play with other children while Emilsa socializes with the hundreds of other migrants in the crowded shelter. On Saturdays, she attends Bible studies and a religious sermon at the shelter.

Since the family arrived at the shelter in May 2021, they have been waiting for the Biden administration to lift Title 42 so they can migrate together to the U.S.

Immigration officials have used the public health order nearly 1.8 million times since March 2020 to expel migrants from entering the country, including asylum-seekers.

The Trump administration invoked Title 42 at the start of the pandemic to close the northern and southern borders to slow the spread of the coronavirus. But now some lawmakers want to keep it in place as a tool for immigration control.

“I just want someone to help me get out of here so my daughters can attend school and make something of themselves,” Emilsa said last week as her daughters ran toward her with a box of chocolates and flowers, a Mother’s Day gift.

While her daughters, who are U.S. citizens, can cross the border anytime, Title 42 has blocked Emilsa from requesting asylum in the U.S. She said she fled the Mexican state of Michoacán after local drug cartel members began demanding extortion payments from her while she worked at a water purification plant.

Emilsa, who asked to be identified only by her middle name because she fears that cartel members could find her, is one of hundreds of thousands of migrants living in limbo in Mexican border towns who had anxiously been waiting for May 23 — the day the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced it would lift the health order, allowing migrants to once again cross the border and request asylum.

But a federal judge in Louisiana could soon halt the CDC’s move and keep Title 42 in place indefinitely.

After Arizona and more than 20 other Republican-controlled states filed a lawsuit last month in federal court asking District Judge Robert R. Summerhays to block the Biden administration from lifting Title 42, the Trump appointee indicated in court documents that he plans to rule in favor of the states. That would likely spark a monthslong legal battle if the Biden administration appeals the ruling to a higher court.

In court documents, Department of Justice lawyers representing the administration have said Title 42 was meant to be a temporary health order.

Democrats and immigrant rights advocates argue that Title 42 should be lifted because it is inhumane and forces asylum-seekers to live in Mexican border towns where they make easy targets for criminals looking to exploit them. They also say Title 42 violates migrants’ right to seek asylum.

“Every day this policy continues, we deny displaced human beings — the majority of them Black, Indigenous, and brown — the right to seek asylum by summarily kicking them out of the U.S. and putting them in harm’s way,” said Karla Marisol Vargas, a senior attorney at the Texas Civil Rights Project. “An immediate end to Title 42 is necessary to restore access to asylum and fulfill the administration’s promises to welcome all people with dignity, no exceptions.”

The states argued that lifting Title 42 could create chaos at the U.S.-Mexico border by attracting even more migrants and force the states to spend taxpayer money providing services like health care to migrants. Texas, which had filed a separate lawsuit, joined the Arizona-led lawsuit earlier this month.

“The removal of Title 42 will surely exacerbate Biden’s border crisis. Law enforcement officials have been spread thin arresting violent, illegal aliens who have been incentivized to cross our border by Biden’s reckless policies,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a statement last month.

It’s unclear when the judge will issue a ruling but it’s expected before May 23.

Meanwhile, in Juárez, Emilsa waits with her daughters because they don’t want to be separated.

“For right now, I don’t have anything planned,” she said. “I’m just waiting for a miracle from God.”

Grissel Ramírez, director of the Esperanza Para Todos shelter where Emilsa and her daughters are staying, said the shelter is well beyond its capacity of 180 people. Currently it’s hosting 240 people from countries like Haiti, El Salvador, Honduras and other parts of Mexico.

“There are people who arrive at night, and the city can be dangerous at times,” she said. “I don’t kick them out, even if it makes things complicated for us here.”

“I felt like my whole world had ended”

Emilsa said she has sought refuge in the U.S. twice.

The first time was 21 years ago, when she left Guatemala for Minnesota, where her brother was living, because her ex-boyfriend beat her and threatened to kill her with a knife. She said she walked through the Chihuahuan desert into Texas as an undocumented immigrant.

In Minnesota, she found work at a Mexican restaurant as a cook. After two years, she met a Mexican man who she began dating before they moved in together and had two daughters.

But as the years went by, the couple disagreed on the direction of their relationship and her boyfriend would hit her during arguments, she said. They split up and he moved back to his home state of Michoacán and found a job cutting and hauling lumber.

Six months after he moved back to Mexico, a tree rolled off a trailer and fell on his chest, damaging his heart and lungs, Emilsa said. A doctor told him that if they couldn’t find a donor for a heart transplant, he would die.

He called Emilsa and told her he wanted to see his daughters one last time. Emilsa knew if she went to Mexico, she couldn’t come back to the U.S. because she was undocumented. But she also didn’t want her daughters to miss seeing their father one last time, she said.

She quit her job, packed some clothes for her and the children, and a friend drove her to El Paso, where an immigration officer asked her if she was sure she wanted to cross because she wouldn’t be able to come back, she said. After she crossed a pedestrian bridge into Juárez, her father-in-law picked her up and drove her to Michoacán — a hot spot for drug cartel violence — to rejoin her boyfriend.

“I forgot about all the blows he’d given me and all the problems we had,” she said. “I just wanted him to be happy with the girls in his last moments.”

In Mexico, Emilsa and her boyfriend got married, mainly so she could get Mexican citizenship and legally work. She said they gave up on the process to get Mexican citizenship because Mexican government officials told her she didn’t qualify.

Three years later, in April 2018, Emilsa’s husband died in his bed after his heart stopped.

“I had already felt guilty,” she said. “But at that moment, I felt like my whole world had ended.”

She decided to stay in Michoacán, where she lived with her husband’s family and worked at a water purification plant while her girls attended school. Emilsa said they felt safe at first.

One day after work in 2019, Emilsa said she was walking home through a forested area when she was approached by a group of men who asked if her boss pays the monthly quota. Emilsa said she knew who they were — members of Los Correa drug cartel, which controlled illegal logging and grew marijuana in Michoacán’s eastern forests. She said she pleaded ignorance and the men let her pass.

Weeks later, the same group of men again approached her and said they knew she and her daughters were not Mexican and if they wanted to continue living in the area, Emilsa would have to pay $50 a month — half of her monthly salary.

“If you don’t want to pay to live here, then your daughters are going to pay,” Emilsa said one of the men told her. “If you don’t pay, we’re going to kidnap them — we know they’re American.”

She said she paid them a few times but knew she couldn’t continue for long because she had no money left for her daughters’ school materials.

When Emilsa heard that a local family planned to travel to Juárez so they could cross the border and ask for asylum, she decided to escape. One of her brothers-in-law gave Emilsa $250 to make the bus trip to the U.S.-Mexico border with the other family.

Turned away at the border

When she arrived at the shelter, Emilsa began to call immigrant rights advocacy groups in El Paso, hoping advocates could provide her with legal assistance so she could cross the bridge legally. But after three months, she said she never got a call back.

She said she feared that if she tried without a lawyer, immigration officers would separate her from her daughters. But by August, she was running out of patience and decided to try anyway.

She explained to immigration officers why she fled Guatemala and Mexico and how her daughters are U.S. citizens. The agents said they couldn’t do anything for Emilsa and her daughters because of the pandemic, she said.

Discouraged, they returned to the shelter.

There’s not much for them to do in Juárez, she said. She doesn’t work because she doesn’t have a permit. She worries her daughters have fallen behind in school because she can do only so much and the shelter doesn’t offer classes for children.

In the year she’s been there, she’s made friends with other migrants. Some of them have managed to enter the U.S. because they have medical conditions that fall under an exemption for Title 42. She said others, tired of waiting, decided to enter the U.S. illegally or settle elsewhere in Mexico, and now she and her daughters have been at the shelter longer than anyone else.

She said they feel safe for now but they depend on donated food, clothing and hygiene products.

So they wait, hoping Title 42 will be lifted so she can make an asylum claim, or that an advocacy group can help her find a way to legally cross with her daughters.

“Maybe if it was just me, I wouldn’t be worried about being stuck here,” she said. “But what does worry me the most is that my girls aren’t going to school and learning.”

[techcrunchappcom]

New Post has been published on https://techcrunchapp.com/trump-cabinet-officials-voted-in-2018-white-house-meeting-toseparate-migrant-children-say-officials-nbc-news/

Trump Cabinet officials voted in 2018 White House meeting to separate migrant children, say officials - NBC News

WASHINGTON — In early May 2018, after weeks of phone calls and private meetings, 11 of the president’s most senior advisers were called to the White House Situation Room, where they were asked, by a show-of-hands vote, to decide the fate of thousands of migrant parents and their children, according to two officials who were there.

President Donald Trump’s senior adviser Stephen Miller led the meeting, and, according to the two officials, he was angry at what he saw as defiance by Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen.

It had been nearly a month since Jeff Sessions, then the attorney general, had launched the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy, announcing that every immigrant who crossed the U.S. border illegally would be prosecuted, including parents with small children. But so far, U.S. border agents had not begun separating parents from their children to put the plan into action, and Miller, the architect of the administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants, was furious about the delay.

Those invited included Sessions, Nielsen, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and newly installed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, according to documents obtained by NBC News.

Nielsen told those at the meeting that there were simply not enough resources at DHS, nor at the other agencies that would be involved, to be able to separate parents, prosecute them for crossing the border and return them to their children in a timely manner, according to the two officials who were present. Without a swift process, the children would enter into the custody of Health and Human Services, which was already operating at near capacity.

Two officials involved in the planning of “zero tolerance” said the Justice Department acknowledged on multiple occasions that U.S. attorneys would not be able to prosecute all parents expeditiously, so sending children to HHS was the most likely outcome.

As Nielsen had said repeatedly to other officials in the weeks leading up to the meeting, according to two former officials, the process could get messy and children could get lost in an already clogged system.

Miller saw the separation of families not as an unfortunate byproduct but as a tool to deter more immigration. According to three former officials, he had devised plans that would have separated even more children. Miller, with the support of Sessions, advocated for separating all immigrant families, even those going through civil court proceedings, the former officials said.

While zero tolerance ultimately separated nearly 3,000 children from their parents, what Miller proposed would have separated 25,000 more, including those who legally presented themselves at ports of entry seeking asylum, according to Customs and Border Protection data from May and June 2018.

The Morning Rundown

Get a head start on the morning’s top stories.

That plan never came to fruition, in large part because DHS officials had argued it would grind the immigration process to a halt. But after Sessions’ announcement that all families entering illegally would be prosecuted, the onus had fallen on DHS to act.

At the meeting, Miller accused anyone opposing zero tolerance of being a lawbreaker and un-American, according to the two officials present.

“If we don’t enforce this, it is the end of our country as we know it,” Miller said, according to the two officials. It was not unusual for Miller to make claims like that, but this time he was adamant that the policy move forward, regardless of arguments about resources and logistics.

No one in the meeting made the case that separating families would be inhumane or immoral, the officials said. Any moral argument about immigration “fell on deaf ears” inside the White House, one of the officials said.

“Miller was tired of hearing about logistical problems,” one of the officials said. “It was just ‘Let’s move forward and staff will figure this out.'”

Frustrated, Miller accused Nielsen of stalling and demanded a show of hands. Who was in favor of moving forward? he asked.

A sea of hands went up. Nielsen kept hers down. It was clear she had been outvoted, according to the officials.

In the days immediately following the meeting, Nielsen had a conversation with Kevin McAleenan, then the Customs and Border Patrol commissioner, in her office at the Ronald Reagan Building and then signed a memo instructing DHS personnel to prosecute all migrants crossing the border illegally, including parents arriving with their children.

Nielsen did so despite her stated reservations in the Situation Room and her having been warned in a legal memo by DHS General Counsel John Mitnick — which was also sent to her chief of staff at the time, Chad Wolf, who is now the acting secretary of DHS — that the decision would result in separation of families. Of the practice, Mitnick wrote, “a court could conclude that the separations are violative of the INA, Administrative Procedure Act, or the Fifth Amendment Due Process clause.”

Less than two months later, Trump signed an executive order halting family separations and a federal judge in California ordered family reunifications on the grounds that the separated families’ due process rights were violated.

At the time, no plan was in place to track the children who had been separated or to create a system to reunite thousands of separated families, according to the two former officials.

According to an invitation list obtained by NBC News, those expected to be in attendance at the meeting included: Sessions, Nielsen, Miller, Pompeo, Azar, Undersecretary of Defense John Rood, then-White House chief of staff John Kelly, White House deputy chief of staff Chris Liddell, then-White House counsel Don McGahn and Marc Short, who was then director of legislative affairs and is now chief of staff to Vice President Mike Pence.

Asked about the show-of-hands vote, Judd Deere, a White House spokesman, said, “This is absolutely not true and did not happen.”

In response to a request for a comment about the meeting and the show of hands, HHS spokesman Michael Caputo said, “This never happened.”

The State Department and DHS referred NBC News to the White House. Sessions, Nielsen, Kelly and Bolton did not respond to requests for comment. McGahn and Rood could not be reached for comment.

Before Trump ended zero tolerance by executive order on June 20, 2018, over 2,800 children had been separated from their parents. When a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to begin reuniting the families it had separated, it became clear that there was no method to track both parent and child as they moved through the system. As a result, some took months to reunite, and, in hundreds of cases, parents were deported from the U.S. without their children.

On May 4, Gary Tomasulo, who was then the senior director for border and transportation security on the National Security Council, sent an email to the deputies and lower-level staffers tasked with carrying out immigration policy, telling them that their bosses had agreed to the new zero tolerance prosecution and separation policy and that they needed to develop plans to support it.

At the time, some of the subordinates to the Cabinet secretaries who were responsible for carrying out zero tolerance had raised moral objections, according to a source familiar with the discussions.

In the email, obtained by NBC News, Tomasulo told the deputies and other subordinates that their bosses “acknowledged that there are no easy solutions, but remained committed to collectively do everything possible to develop innovative solutions that leverage the full resources, capabilities, and authorities of the U.S. government.”

He went on to say, “I ask that if you are unable to participate in these meetings, the message of commitment and resolve expressed by our principals is communicated and internalized by those that represent your departments and agencies.”

[bountyofbeads]

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/ice-agents-are-losing-patience-with-trumps-chaotic-immigration-policy

ICE agents are losing patience with Trump's chaotic immigration policy, NYer reports.

"I don't even know what we’re doing now," one officer said. "A lot of us see the photos of the kids at the border, and we’re wondering, 'What the hell is going on?'"

ICE Agents Are Losing Patience with Trump’s Chaotic Immigration Policy

By Jonathan Blitzer | Published June 24, 2019 | The New Yorker | Posted June 25, 2019 |

Monday, when President Trump tweeted that his Administration would stage nationwide immigration raids the following week, with the goal of deporting “millions of illegal aliens,” agents at Immigration and Customs Enforcement were suddenly forced to scramble. The agency was not ready to carry out such a large operation. Preparations that would typically take field officers six to eight weeks were compressed into a few days, and, because of Trump’s tweet, the officers would be entering communities that now knew they were coming. “It was a dumb-shit political move that will only hurt the agents,” John Amaya, a former deputy chief of staff at ice, told me. On Saturday, hours before the operation was supposed to start in ten major cities across the country, the President changed course, delaying it for another two weeks.

On Sunday, I spoke to an ice officer about the week’s events. “Almost nobody was looking forward to this operation,” the officer said. “It was a boondoggle, a nightmare.” Even on the eve of the operation, many of the most important details remained unresolved. “This was a family op. So where are we going to put the families? There’s no room to detain them, so are we going to put them in hotels?” the officer said. On Friday, an answer came down from iceleadership: the families would be placed in hotels while ice figured out what to do with them. That, in turn, raised other questions. “So the families are in hotels, but who’s going to watch them?” the officer continued. “What happens if the person we arrest has a U.S.-citizen child? What do we do with the children? Do we need to get booster seats for the vans? Should we get the kids toys to play with?” Trump’s tweet broadcasting the operation had also created a safety issue for the officers involved. “No police agency goes out and says, ‘Tomorrow, between four and eight, we’re going to be in these neighborhoods,’ ” the officer said.

The idea for the operation took hold in the White House last September, two months after a federal judge had ordered the government to stop separating parents and children at the border. At the time, the number of families seeking asylum was rising steadily, and Administration officials were determined to toughen enforcement. A D.H.S. official told me that, in the months before the operation was proposed, “a major focus” of department meetings “was concern about the fact that people on the non-detained docket”—asylum seekers released into the U.S. with a future court date—“are almost never deported.” By January, a tentative plan had materialized. The Department of Justice developed a “rocket docket” to prioritize the cases of asylum seekers who’d just arrived in the country and missed a court date—in their absence, the government could swiftly secure deportation orders against them. D.H.S. then created a “target list” of roughly twenty-five hundred immigrant family members across the country for deportation; eventually, the Administration aimed to arrest ten thousand people using these methods.

From the start, however, the plan faced resistance. The Secretary of D.H.S.,  Kirstjen Nielsen, argued that the arrests would be complicated to carry out, in part, because American children would be involved. (Many were born in the U.S. to parents on the “target list.”) Resources were already limited, and an operation on this scale would divert attention from the border, where a humanitarian crisis was worsening by the day. The acting head of ice, Ron Vitiello, a tough-minded former Border Patrol officer, shared Nielsen’s concerns. According to the Washington Post, these reservations weren’t “ethical” so much as logistical: executing such a vast operation would be extremely difficult, with multiple moving pieces, and the optics could be devastating. Four months later, Trump effectively fired them. Vitiello’s replacement at ice, an official named Mark Morgan—who’s already been fired once by Trump and regained the President’s support after making a series of appearances on Fox News—subsequently announced that ice would proceed with the operation.

Late last week, factions within the Administration clashed over what to do. The acting secretary of D.H.S., Kevin McAleenan, urged caution, claiming that the operation was a distraction and a waste of manpower. Among other things, a $4.5 billion funding bill to supply further humanitarian aid at the border has been held up because Democrats worried that the Administration would use the money for enforcement operations. McAleenan had been meeting with members of both parties on the Hill, and there appeared to be signs of progress, before the President announced the ice crackdown. According to an Administration official, McAleenan argued that the operation would also threaten a string of recent gains made by the President. The Trump Administration had just secured a deal with the Mexican government to increase enforcement at the Guatemalan border, and it expanded a massive new program called Remain in Mexico, which has forced some ten thousand asylum seekers to wait indefinitely in northern Mexico. “Momentum was moving in the right direction,” the official said.

On the other side of the argument were Stephen Miller, at the White House, and Mark Morgan, at ice. In the days before and after Trump’s Twitter announcement, Morgan spoke regularly with the President, who was circumventing McAleenan, Morgan’s boss. In meetings with staff, Morgan boasted that he had a direct line to the President, according to the ice officer, who told me it was highly unusual for there to be such direct contact between the agency head and the White House. “It should be going to the Secretary, which I find hilarious, actually, because Morgan was already fired once by this Administration,” the officer said.

Over the weekend, the President agreed to halt the operation. But it’s far from certain whether McAleenan actually got the upper hand. Officials in the White House authorized ice to issue a press release insinuating that someone had leaked important details about the operation and therefore compromised it. “Any leak telegraphing sensitive law-enforcement operations is egregious and puts our officers’ safety in danger,” an ice spokesperson said late Saturday afternoon. This was a puzzling statement given that it was Trump who first publicized the information about the operation. But the White House’s line followed a different script: some members of the Administration, as well as the former head of ice, Thomas Homan, were publicly accusing McAleenan of sharing information with reporters in an attempt to undermine the operation.

For Homan, his involvement in the Administration’s internal fight marked an unexpected return to the main stage. Last year, he resigned as acting head of ice after the Senate refused to confirm him to the post. Earlier this month, Trump announced, on Fox News, that Homan would be returning to the Administration as the President’s new border tsar, but Homan, who hadn’t been informed of the decision, has remained noncommittal. Still, according to the Administration official, Homan and the President talk by phone regularly. Over the weekend, Homan, who has since become an on-air contributor to Fox News, appeared on television to attack McAleenan personally. “You’ve got the acting Secretary of Homeland Security resisting what ice is trying to do,” he said.

[morganbelarus]

U.S. Wants 2 Years To Find Thousands Of Migrant Children Separated From Parents

The Trump administration seeks up to two years to track tens of thousands of additional immigrant children who may have been separated from their parents under President Donald Trump’s controversial “zero-tolerance” policy.

It will take at least a year to review a total of about 47,000 cases of children taken into government custody between July 1, 2017, and June 25, 2018, before the practice of splitting families was halted, according to a Justice Department court filing on Friday in San Diego.

“Defendants estimate that identifying all possible children” separated from their parents among that population “would take at least 12 months, and possibly up to 24 months,” according to the filing. Records would be assessed using data analysis, statistics and a manual review of whatever records exist.

The children have already been released from government custody, the vast majority to parents or close relatives. But the Customs and Border Protection agency didn’t start tracing separated families as a searchable data set before April of last year, according to the filing, so records are spotty.

Government officials propose releasing any information as it’s obtained to the American Civil Liberties Union, which launched a class action suit against the government last year addressing the family separations. 

The organization blasted the government’s timeline.

“The government was able to quickly gather resources to tear these children away from their families and now they need to gather the resources to fix the damage,” ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt said in a statement. “The government needs to make this a priority.”

Following a federal judge’s earlier order, the government managed to reunite close to 2,700 children separated from their parents under the zero-tolerance policy that prosecuted everyone entering the U.S. illegally from Mexico. 

Last month, U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw in California issued a 14-page ruling expanding the class definition in the suit and affecting thousands of other children following revelations that the government had been separating families since July 2017 — long before the zero-tolerance policy was announced.

From that summer to the following summer, a total “population of approximately 47,000 children [were] discharged by the Office of Refugee Resettlement,” according to the Justice Department filing. Officials are now attempting to determine which children were separated from their parents.

It’s estimated that close to 90 percent of the children have been released to parents or close relatives. The others went with distant relatives, family friends and others, according to ABC News.

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Original Article : HERE ; This post was curated & posted using : RealSpecific

U.S. Wants 2 Years To Find Thousands Of Migrant Children Separated From Parents was originally posted by MetNews

[tmmsradio-blog]

Trump removes Secret Service director as purge of DHS leadership widens | Clown Dictator Needs @GOP to wake the F@CK UP!

Angry at the ongoing immigration surge, the presiden took aim at the Department of Homeland Security. By Nick Miroff , Toluse Olorunnipa , Josh Dawsey and Carol D. Leonnig April 8 at 7:42 PM

A Secret Service agent stands guard as President Trump departs from the White House on Friday. He continued to dismantle the Department of Homeland Security’s leadership over the weekend and on Monday. (Oliver Contreras/For The Washington Post) President Trump continued to dismantle the leadership of the nation’s top domestic security agency Monday, as the White House announced the imminent removal of U.S. Secret Service Director Randolph D. “Tex” Alles, the latest in a series of head-spinning departures from the Department of Homeland Security. A day after Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was forced to step aside following a White House meeting with Trump, senior DHS officials remained in a fog about the fate of their agency’s leaders, expecting more firings as part of a widening purge. “They are decapitating the entire department,” said one DHS official, noting that the White House had given no cause for Alles’s removal. Why Kirstjen Nielsen’s loyalty to Trump wasn’t enough Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was a loyal soldier for President Trump and often repeated his falsehoods, but it wasn’t enough to save her job. (Video: JM Rieger/Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post) The instability extends to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, whose director, William “Brock” Long, left DHS in February after supervising emergency and recovery efforts for several massive natural disasters. L. Francis Cissna, the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and DHS General Counsel John Mitnick could be the next to go, DHS officials said Monday, speaking on the condition of anonymity to talk candidly of their frustrations with the White House.

Then-director of the Secret Service Randolph “Tex” Alles, seen in Feb. 2018. (David Goldman/AP) Since the department’s creation in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, successive presidents have viewed stability at DHS as a top priority for national security, counterterrorism efforts and, more broadly, the country’s collective peace of mind. With nearly two dozen agencies and sub-agencies, DHS is responsible for safeguarding the country’s immigration system, cyber-networks, land borders and coasts, as well as responding to disasters and protecting the country’s public officials. Trump is furious about the department’s inability to reduce unauthorized migration to the United States, with one of his signature campaign issues devolving into a glaring failure. Several administration officials said Monday that Trump appears to be taking out his frustrations on the entire DHS leadership, convinced he needs a full sweep. Further exacerbating Trump’s struggles with immigration policy Monday was a California federal judge’s ruling to block the experimental “Remain in Mexico” program that has sent hundreds of Central American asylum seekers back across the border to wait outside U.S. territory while their asylum claims are processed. DHS officials viewed the policy as one of Nielsen’s most significant initiatives — they were hoping to expand its use broadly across the southern border — and its halt leaves the department without one of the tools it was counting on to deter more Central American migrants from making the journey. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said the border crisis created by the largest migration surge in a decade was being compounded by the removal of so many Homeland Security leaders in rapid succession. “In addition to congressional dysfunction, I am concerned with a growing leadership void within the department tasked with addressing some of the most significant problems facing the nation,” Johnson wrote on Twitter on Monday. ‘Tougher’ direction No president before Trump has pushed the country’s security agencies into such a state of churning confusion, current and former DHS officials said Monday.

Ronald Vitiello was President Trump’s nominee to be director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but he was one of several leaders Trump has targeted for removal from agency leadership in recent days. (Win McNamee/Getty Images) Last week, Trump abruptly rescinded his nomination of Ronald Vitiello to be director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, saying he wanted to go in a “tougher” direction. Both Alles and Vitiello reported to Nielsen. Nielsen is scheduled to end her tenure Wednesday, when Kevin McAleenan, the current commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, takes over as acting DHS chief. His moveleaves a vacancy at the top of CBP, the country’s largest law enforcement agency. Trump senior adviser Stephen Miller has been among the leading voices urging the president to clean house at DHS, encouraging Trump to take wider aim at the entire department, not just the agencies responsible for immigration policy and border enforcement, White House aides said Monday. “Immigration was the president’s signature issue, and for a variety of reasons, things are spinning out of control,” said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a group with proposals to reduce immigration that have been influential in the Trump White House. Krikorian said the 2020 election “isn’t that far away, and he needs to be able to show some progress” in managing the border crisis. By threatening to cut off aid to Central America and close the border with Mexico, Trump is “throwing anything against the wall to see what sticks.” Trump named Marine Corps Gen. John Kelly to the DHS secretary role after his 2016 win, in part to reassure the country that a former reality television star would surround himself with military leaders and security experts. Two years later, the president increasingly believes the whole leadership structure that Kelly installed is ineffective, current and former administration officials said. One former DHS official said that when former secretary of state Rex Tillerson left the State Department, many of the political appointees departed. But when Kelly left DHS, most of the political appointees stayed. “They needed a big shake-up,” the former official said. After Trump found out last week that more than 103,000 migrants arrived at the Mexican border in March — the highest total in more than a decade — he was livid, according to a White House official. The president was additionally frustrated that Nielsen and others would not close the border and change the rules to immediately stop migrants from coming to the United States to request asylum. ‘Cleaning house’ DHS officials are now looking for a way to satisfy the president’s demand for “tough” measures, including a plan called “binary choice” that would give migrant parents the option of remaining detained as a family or agreeing to a separation so that their children would not remain in immigration custody.  Continue: Trump removes Secret Service director as purge of DHS leadership widens Read the full article

[omgstupendousbouquetbasement]

AP Report: Trump Considers Adding 'Immigration Czar'

As he threatens to shut down the southern border, President Donald Trump is considering bringing on a "border'' or "immigration czar'' to coordinate immigration policies across various federal agencies, according to four people familiar with the discussions. Trump is weighing at least two potential candidates for the post: Former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach and former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli — two far-right conservatives with strong views on immigration, according to the people, who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the conversations publicly. The planning comes as Trump is threatening anew to close the U.S.-Mexico border as soon as this week if Mexico does not completely halt illegal immigration into the U.S. And it serves as the latest sign that the president plans to continue to hammer his hardline immigration rhetoric and policies as he moves past the special counsel's Russia investigation and works to rally his base heading into his 2020 re-election campaign. Aides hope the potential appointment, which they caution is still in the planning stages, would be the administration's new "face'' of the immigration issue and would placate both the president and his supporters, showing he is serious about the issue and taking action. White House press aides, Kobach and Cuccinelli did not immediately respond Monday to requests for comment. Kobach previously served as vice chair of the president's short-lived election fraud commission, which was disbanded after finding little evidence of widespread fraud. Trump has often complained, both publicly and privately, about how he has not been able to do more to stop the tide of illegal immigration, which he has likened to an "invasion'' and labeled a national security crisis. Arrests along the southern border have skyrocketed in recent months and border agents are now on track to make 100,000 arrests or denials of entry there this month. More than half are families with children. Trump in December forced a government shutdown to try to pressure Congress to provide more money for his long-promised border wall and eventually signed an emergency declaration to circumvent them. He also moved Saturday to cut direct aid to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, where citizens are fleeing north and overwhelming U.S. resources at the southern border. That focus on immigration has touched on numerous government agencies, including the departments of Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, State, Defense and Justice. But not all of those departments are always on the same page. One of the most glaring examples came last summer, when former Attorney General Jeff Sessions instituted a "zero tolerance'' policy at the border without consulting others that caused a spike in the number of migrant children separated from their families. The separated children were placed in HHS custody, but there was no tracking system in place to link parents with their children until a federal judge ordered one, causing widespread fear and concern about whether families would ever see each other again. Homeland Security also has to coordinate with the Pentagon on space to detain migrants as well as on wall funding. It has yet to be decided whether the czar position, if Trump goes through with the plan, would be housed within Homeland Security or within the White House, which would not require Senate confirmation. A person positioned within the White House could coordinate immigration policy across various agencies, working closely with aides who are deeply involved in immigration policy, including Stephen Miller, Jared Kushner, national security adviser John Bolton and Kirstjen Nielsen, the Homeland Security secretary. Appointing a person who is based within Homeland Security could be trickier because the department's agency heads are all Senate-confirmed positions and, in the case of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection, are longtime immigration officials with decades of experience dealing with the border. While immigration officials would welcome an adviser focused specifically on policy across the varying agencies, the names being floated are likely to spark backlash and criticism. Kobach, an immigration hardliner, ran a failed bid for governor promising to drive immigrants living in the U.S. illegally out of the country and has recently been working for a nonprofit corporation, WeBuildtheWall Inc., which has been raising private money to build Trump's wall. Cuccinelli, meanwhile, has advocated for denying citizenship to American-born children of parents living in the U.S. illegally, limiting in-state tuition at public universities only to those who are citizens or legal residents, and allowing workers to file lawsuits when an employer knowingly hires someone living in the country illegally for taking a job from a "law abiding competitor.'' Thomas Homan, the former acting ICE director, has also been mentioned as a potential pick, according to one of the people familiar with the talks. from Blogger https://ift.tt/2TNOeJ8 via IFTTT

[plusorminuscongress]

New story in Politics from Time: Lawyers on the Border Still Dealing With Fallout From Family Separations

When the Trump Administration started separating families at the U.S. border, Jodi Goodwin all but stopped working as a private attorney in Texas to do pro bono work for people who had been affected. Even though the Administration ended the policy over two months ago, her work isn’t finished.

In June, U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw ordered the Trump Administration to reunite the more than 2,000 families separated under a policy aimed at deterring illegal immigration. According to a federal filing last week, 565 children remain separated from their parents, some of whom have already been deported.

Goodwin has personally reunited 32 moms and dads with a total of 34 children, but at least a dozen of her clients remain in federal detention, separated from their children for various reasons: some have not passed the “credible fear” interview about conditions in their home countries, while others have not yet been granted bond. One case has been blocked because her client is the child’s aunt and legal guardian, but not her biological parent.

“I still spend half of the day doing separated parents stuff and follow up,” Goodwin told TIME.

While the political conversation has moved on from the now-defunct family separation policy, the real-world effects continue to be felt, and lawyers remain on the front lines of the fight, especially in border towns like McAllen, Texas. It’s a similar dynamic as other Trump policy changes, such as the travel ban, which were announced unexpectedly, leading to an intense scramble among private lawyers followed by months of follow-up work.

The family separation policy began in May when Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a new “zero tolerance” policy of referring border crossings for federal criminal prosecution, which led to children being separated as their parents are sent to jail.

Border lawyers scrambled quickly. At a federal courthouse in McAllen, public defenders and attorneys with the Texas Civil Rights Project began working together to track how many adults had been separated from their children. At a South Texas detention facility, Goodwin helped other pro bono attorneys who provide legal assistance to detainees do triage. During her first trip to the Port Isabel Detention Facility, where many of the parents were being held, she says, every person she spoke to told her about another 70.

“After about three days of going out there, I felt like I was in a MASH unit dropped in Vietnam somewhere trying to take care of the most mortally wounded person at a time,” she said.

The period during and immediately after zero was chaotic not just for the migrants, but also for the private attorneys, public defenders, and advocates that are helping to shepherd them through the U.S. immigration system. And while an executive order signed by Trump in June effectively halted the separation of biological parents from their children, and a federal judge ordered families be reunited later that month, attorneys in South Texas say their focus has yet to shift from the ongoing crisis.

“The government talking points were that they had reunified those families that were eligible and that was that,” says Laura Peña, a visiting attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project. “That’s not the case.”

Lawyers from the Texas Civil Rights Project are still appearing in the McAllen federal courthouse daily to track prosecutions. According to Peña, the number of prosecutions they are witnessing daily is “staggering” — morning and afternoon dockets of between 50 and 100 people. Attorneys have continued to ask those who have been prosecuted whether or not they were also separated from their children. In one case, after the executive order was signed, a Guatemalan father was separated from his 2-year-old daughter. The father, Mario Perez Domingo, primarily spoke Mam, an indigenous language, and border officials did not believe the birth certificate he presented was real.

“But for our screening of those criminal prosecution hearings, he probably would have been deported without his kid,” she says. “Now they’re together reunited and released in Atlanta.”

Beyond separations, those who have been released and reunited still require assistance navigating the complexities of U.S. immigration system— from court appearances to ICE check-ins—and adjusting to life in the U.S. Last week, attorney Carlos M. Garcia sent a $50 Target gift-card to a client whose 6-year-old son needed supplies for the first day of school. Goodwin says because her clients have few people they can trust, they’ve been sending her WhatsApp messages at all hours of the day.

From concerns about traumatized children: “Abogada, mija esta critando la noche.” To questions about who in their new world they can trust: “Abogada, do you know who this person is? Can I trust them?”

“I’m, like, the mother hen,” Goodwin says, laughing. “And I’ve got all my chickadees running around the country.”

By Maya Rhodan / McAllen, Texas on August 20, 2018 at 02:14PM

[latinovoice]

RRG FACT CHECKS OF Dr. JUAN ADRADE CRITICISM OF GOYA CEO

Reggie Gonzal

12 hrs

NOT SURE WHAT TPS AND DED stand FOR AT THE MOMENT. FACT CHECK ON JUAN ANDRADE’S PROMOTION OF COYA BOYCOTr.

JA: “We’re all truly blessed, at the same time, to have a leader like President Trump who is a builder.” I’ve known many vendidos during my career, and heard about many more, pero tu te tragaste la olla carajo! What the hell were you thinking? RRG: NO ONE KNOWS WHAT COYA CEO WAS THINKING BUT WE DO KNOW WHAT HE SAID. JA: Trump, a builder?  He may build hotels, but he destroys lives.   RRG:  DID TRUMP DESTROY LIVES?  YES, SOME WERE KNOWN TERRORIST AND WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE BY THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT. JA: Are you not aware of the human crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border? RRG: THERE IS A HUMAN CRISIS AT THE U.S.-MEXICAN BORDER AND IT HAS BEEN THERE WAY BEFORE THE TRUMP PRESIDENCY.  CONGRESS HAS FAILED TO INITIATE A COMPREHENSIVE IMMIGRATION BILL AND TRUMPS BORDER WALL IS NOT THE ANSWER TO A BROKEN IMMIGRATION POLICY. JA: Are you not aware of the thousands of Latino families Trump has separated and destroyed? RRG:  THERE IS NO EVIDENCE THAT TRUMP HAS SEPARATED AND DESTROYED THOUSANDS OF LATINO FAMILIES.  OCTOBER 1-MAY 31, 2018, 252,187 INDIVIDUALS have APPREHENDED CROSSING THE SOUTHER BORDER, AND OF THESE 32,372 (13 PERCENTAGE) WERE IDENTIFIED AS UNACCOMPANIED ALIEN CHILDREN. 59,113 INDIVIDUAL WERE IDED AS BEING PART OF A FAMILY UNIT (23 PERCENTAGE). JA: Are you not aware of the thousands of innocent children, including infants and toddlers, who were put in cages after being taken away from their parents? RRG: DURING THE OBAMA TERM IN 2014, CHILDREN FROM THE BORDER WERE PLACED IN STEEL CAGES.  1500 “LOST” IMMIGRANT CHILDREN CAME INTO THE US ALONE. JA:  Are you not aware that now those children may possibly have to live the rest of their lives never seeing their parents again?   RRG: THERE IS NO EVIDENCE SHOWING WERE THESE CHILDREN ARE DEPORTED AND IN 2018 THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION HAD HALTED THE SEPARATION POLICY. The Trump administration has scaled back a key element of its zero-tolerance immigration policy amid a global uproar over the separation of more than 2,300 migrant families, halting the practice of turning over parents to prosecutors for charges of illegally entering the country. JA:  Are you not aware of the thousands of asylum seekers whose applications are being rejected by his judges, effectively condemning them to torture and death when they return home? RRG:  THERE IS NO EVIDENCE THAT TRUMP JUDGES ARE CONSPIRING TO REJECT ASYLUM SEEKERS APPLICATIONS.  NO EVIDENCE THAT REJECTED ASYLUM SEEKERS ARE BEING TORTURED AND PUT TO DEATH. Under the new rules, migrants who pass through another country on their way to the U.S. will be ineligible for asylum. Most of the immigrants arriving at the border this year pass (2019) through Mexico — including Central Americans, Africans, Cubans, and Haitians. That makes it all but impossible for them to get asylum. The rule also applies to children who have crossed the border alone.

JA:  Are you not aware of the 2.5 million DACA recipients, TPS and DED beneficiaries he is trying to deport?

RRG: THE SUPREME COURT RECENTLY DECIDED THE DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.) CASE AND HAS TEMPORARILY HALTED ANY DEPORTATION OF DACA RECIPIENTS.   THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION HAS VOWED TO REVIEW THE DECISION AND MAKE CHANGES TO THE CURRENT LANGUAGE TO COMPLY WITH THE SUPREME COURT DECISION. NOT SURE WHAT TPS AND DED STANDS FOR AT THE MOMENT. JA: Are you not aware of the 20 million people, of whom 11 million are Latinos, who could lose their healthcare insurance, in the middle of a pandemic, if the Supreme Court rules in Trump’s favor? RRG:   OBAMACARE DID NOT COVER THE UNDOCUMENTED AND THE HEALTH CARE INSURANCE COVERAGE WAS UNAFORDABLE FOR MANY WORKING PEOPLE.   JA:  Are you not aware of the hundreds of thousands of Latinos infected by the coronavirus because of his mismanagement?

RRG:  THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC IS A WORLDWIDE INFECTION THAT KILLED MILLIONS AND HERE IN THE USA MILLIONS ARE VICTIMS OF THIS VIRUS THAT WAS IGNORED, DENIED, AND ACTED UPON WITH ILL CONCEIVED PLANS BY THE FEDERAL, STATE AND LOCAL GOVERNMENTS. JA: Are you not aware of the tens of thousands of Latinos killed by the virus because of his indifference?

RRG: THERE IS NO EVIDENCE THAT TRUMP’S ALLEGED INDIFFERENCE KILLED THOUSANDS OF LATINOS.   JA: Are you not aware that Trump is a white supremacist who managed to uniteenough bigots, racists, and anti-immigrant xenophobes to elect him President? RRG: IT WAS NOT THE PEOPLE WHO ELECTED TRUMP BUT THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE SYSTEM THAT GAVE HIM THE NECESSARY VOTES FOR HIM TO BECOME THE 45TH PRESIDENT OF THE USA.   On 9 November 2016, the day after Donald Trump was elected the 45th president of the United States, a petition appeared on Change.org urging the United States Electoral College to reject the way states voted during the general election, placing into office not the person who received the majority of electoral votes (Donald Trump) but rather the person who received the most popular votes nationwide (Hillary Clinton, as of this count):

JA:  Are you not aware that your so-called builder abused the powers of his office enough to get himself impeached? RRG:  PRESIDENT TRUMP WAS IMPEACHED BY A DEMOCRATIC HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES MAJORITY AND FOUND NOT QUILTY BY REPUBLICAN SENATE MAJORITY. JA:  you believe Trump’s a builder, eres un menso! RRG:  THERE IS NO EVIDENCE THAT COYA PRESIDENT IS A MENSO.  HE IS A MILLIONAIRE AND CONTROLS A BILLIONAIRE DOLLAR ENTERPRISE. JA: Only people who value profit more than human life would feel blessed to have Trump as their President. RRG:  THERE ARE MILLIONS OF PEOPLE WHO FEEL BLESSED TO HAVE TRUMP AS THEIR PRESIDENT AND THEY ARE NOT PROFIT SEEKERS. JA:  But your millions of consumers, predominantly Latinos, people who value life more than money, do not feel similarly blessed to have Trump as President. Al contrario, es undemonio! RRG:  THERE IS NO EVIDENCE TO SHOW HOW MANY COYA CONSUMERS FEEL SIMILARLY OR DIFFERENTLY BLESSED TO HAVE TRUMP AS PRESIDENT.

JA: You can call the backlash you have brought on yourself“suppression of speech” if you want, but you’ve earned a national rebuke and boycott of your products. RRG: THE BACKLASH IS BY SOME INDIVIDUAL LEADERS WHO REPRESENT NATIONAL LATINO ORGANIZATIONS WHO ARE ADVOCATING THE COYA PRODUCTS BOYCOTT.  FORMER CHICAGO CONGRESSMAN-GUTIERREZ VOWED TO NO LONGER PURCHASE COYA PRODUCTS BUT FAILED TO THROW OUT THE COYA PRODUCTS IN HIS PANTRY. JA: You weren’t wrong to accept Trump’s invitation, but what you said was wrong. RRG: THERE IS NO EVIDENCE THAT SHOWS THAT COYA PRESIDENT WAS WRONG.   IT WAS A BELIEF. JA: Words have power … and consequences. You had every right to say what you did, but what you said was just plain wrong. RRG:  THERE IS TRUTH THAT WORDS HAVE POWER AND CONSEQUENCES.  EVERYONE HAS A RIGHT TO SAY WHAT THEY BELIEVE.  IT IS ONE'S RIGHT TO DISAGREE WITH ANOTHER’S BELIEF. JA: Your remarks hurt millions of Latinos who have suffered greatly because of Trump’s policies and treatment. RRG: THERE IS NO EVIDENCE THAT MILLIONS OF LATINOS HAVE SUFFERED GREATLY BECAUSE OF TRUMP’S POLICIES AND TREATMENT.  THERE IS EVIDENCE THAT THOUSANDS OF LATINOS WERE EMPLOYED DURING HIS TERM AND BEFORE THE COVID-19 CRISIS. JA: They are the very Latinos who have made you rich, and you will pay for what you said. RRG: THERE IS NO EVIDENCE THAT THE MILLIONS OF LATINOS WHO SUFFERED GREATLY UNDER TRUMP’S POLICIES ARE THE SAME WHO MADE COYA CEO RICH.  IT IS NOT KNOWN IF COYA CEO WILL PAY FOR WHAT HE SAID.  ONLY TIME WILL TELL IF A BOYCOTT IS SUCCESSFUL AND COYA’S PROFITS, SHARES, AND SALES ARE AFFECTED BY A BOYCOTT. JA: In November, Trump will pay for what he has said and done. BOYCOTT GOYA! RRG: IT IS NOT TRUE THAT November 03, 2020 TRUMP WILL PAY FOR WHAT HE HAS SAID AND DONE BECAUSE IT’S AN ELECTION DAY NOT A PAYMENT DUE DAY!

Dr. Juan Andrade, Jr. President United States Hispanic Leadership Institute, Inc.

[socialjusticeartshare]

Biden's effort to reunite Trump-era separated families is trickiest immigration challenge

AUSTIN, Texas –President Joe Biden unveiled a slew of immigration policy reversals and sweeping legislative proposals in his first week in office that were widely applauded by immigration advocates.

But his efforts to undo one of the more controversial policies of former President Donald Trump's administration – family separations at the border – might be the thorniest, advocates and attorneys said.

On his website, Biden called Trump’s policy of separating children – some who were infants – from parents and other relatives who crossed into the U.S. without permission a “moral failing” and promised to immediately end the prosecution of parents for minor immigration violations that led to the separations. 

Biden has also vowed to form a task force to help reunite the more than 600 parents who remain separated from their children and whose whereabouts are unknown. Executive orders specific to that policy are expected next week.

Jodi Goodwin, an immigration attorney in Harlingen, Texas, who has worked to help reunite more than 450 families, said she has been encouraged by what she has seen from the Biden administration.

But it may take time to fully stop border agents from separating families, she said.

“As with all new policies, it takes a while to get the message down to the troops on the grounds,” Goodwin said.

The Trump administration approved family separations in April 2018 as part of its “zero tolerance” policy to criminally prosecute all undocumented border crossers. Though family separations occurred under previous administrations, they became widespread practice under the policy.

TV images of children locked in federal detention facility cages sparked outrage, and Trump rescinded the order in June 2018. Family separations continued for children who were determined to be in the custody of a harmful adult.

Groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union sued the government, and a federal judge ordered all the families to be reunited. But 2½ years after the policy was banned, more than 600 families remain separated and the parents' whereabouts unknown, according to court filings. Of those, more than 300 were deported and have been difficult to locate. All told, about 5,500 families were separated during the Trump administration, though most of them have been reunited.

Biden officials should allow the deported parents back into the U.S. to reunite with their children and focus less on helping agencies find the missing parents, said Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU's Immigrants' Rights Project, which filed the federal lawsuit to stop the family separation policy and force the Trump administration to reunite families. That litigation is ongoing.

The new government should also consider offering a pathway to citizenship to the thousands of families who endured the trauma of being separated, he said.

“Given what the 5,500 families have been through, they deserve to be reunited and given safe refuge in the United States,” Gelernt said. “We owe that to these families.”

Gelernt said he also hopes the Biden administration investigates how the Trump administration policy emerged in the first place. A Department of Justice Office of Inspector General report released this month detailed how top-ranking Trump officials, including then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, knew of the policy's potential detriment but implemented it anyway. 

A deep look into the genesis of the policy may also unearth new data on separated families that could help locate them, Gelernt said.

“This policy was so inhumane and such a stain on the United States that we simply can’t move on until we have a full accounting,” he said. “It will be a mistake if 20 years from now people studying our immigration history did not know exactly what happened.”

Jessica Vaughn, director of policy studies at the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies, a non-profit research institute that promotes stricter immigration control, said family separations as a widespread policy was a mistake and resulted in chaos at the border. But the government shouldn't be held accountable for actions that were instigated by parents who broke U.S. immigration law and put their own children at risk, she said. 

"These parents set off the chain of events through their choice to come here without permission to enter," Vaughn said. 

The task of finding parents who were separated then deported without their children has fallen mostly to advocacy groups, such as Justice in Motion, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit that has used its contacts in Mexico and Central America to find parents.

The efforts, which include enlisting local human rights attorneys to venture to remote villages and track down parents using scant information, were halted for months as the coronavirus pandemic roiled through the hemisphere and have only recently picked back up, said Jeremy McLean, policy and advocacy manager with Justice in Motion. 

The group has been able to find hundreds of separated parents and is in the process of looking for hundreds more, he said. Many of the families remain separated, even after the parents are found. The Biden administration should enlist groups such as his to help with reunification, McLean said. It should also create long-term-trauma studies and assistance for the families, he said. 

"You're talking about very young kids separated from the parents for years now," McLean said. "That’s an incredible amount of trauma."

Though Trump ceased family separations more than two years ago, the practice continues across the border, said Alysha Welsh, a Washington-based managing attorney with Human Rights First. Families have been regularly split up as they were placed into the Migrant Protection Protocols program, otherwise known as “Remain in Mexico,” a Trump-era policy that ferried immigrants to Mexican border towns to await their immigration hearings, she said. 

Also, migrant teens who turn 18 while in federal custody are often moved from family detention centers to an adult facility, further cleaving families, Welsh said.

“It’s encouraging that (the Biden administration) is taking the steps that they are,” Welsh said. “But there are other policies that result in family separations that still need to be addressed to make sure this isn’t still happening across the board.”

Goodwin, the Texas-based attorney, said the years she spent representing separated families were some of the toughest of her career. As cases mounted and despair from parents desperate to find their children grew, Goodwin felt the task weighing on her mentally and physically, she said. She began experiencing short-term-memory loss, a trait of secondary trauma, and considered switching legal fields. In the end, she was able to reunify all but one of her clients.

She’s hopeful Biden will rectify the practice. But the personal toll it's taken on herself, other attorneys and scores of separated families will be harder to reverse.

“Every single day it was waking up to some fresh hell,” Goodwin said. “I don’t ever in my life want to go through that again.” 

Follow Jervis on Twitter: @MrRJervis.

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We Said We Would See Him in Court and We Did

Several months into the Trump administration, my wife was doing The New York Times crossword puzzle and came across this clue: “Group that told President Trump, ‘We’ll see you in court.’” I’m not generally much use when it comes to the crossword, but on that one I could help. She didn’t really need the assistance of course, as the ACLU is my employer, and she, The New York Times crossword puzzle drafters, and much of the country already knew that it was the ACLU who told the president we’d see him in court.   

In fact, we told him that before he took office. Just days after he improbably won the presidential election, we took out ads in The New York Times and Los Angeles Times telling the president-elect that if he sought to implement some of the programs he had promised on the campaign trail — denying legal access to abortion, implementing restrictive immigration practices, undermining voting rights and more — we would sue. We kept our promise.

https://twitter.com/ACLU/statuses/1144797689030348801

As we mark three years since we put President-elect Trump on notice, we’ve filed over 100 lawsuits, and over 140 other legal actions — Freedom of Information Act requests, administrative complaints, and other legal mechanisms to halt illegal policies — against the president, his administration, or those inspired by his victory to cut back on civil rights and civil liberties. We’ve won many of them, and in the process, protected the rights of millions of people to be treated with dignity and respect for their basic constitutional rights.

IMMIGRANTS’ RIGHTS

In his first week in the Oval Office, President Trump issued an executive order banning immigrants from seven predominantly Muslim countries from entering the U.S. The ACLU quickly responded by filing and winning the first legal challenge to the Muslim ban that very weekend. A federal court held an emergency hearing on a Saturday night, and enjoined its implementation the day after he put the policy in place. When the first ban was declared unconstitutional by the courts, Trump was forced to issue a revised ban. When we and others successfully challenged that revised ban, he issued still a third version. That, too, was struck down by the lower courts, although the Supreme Court upheld it on a 5-4 vote along party lines. But that third ban, while still a Muslim ban, was narrower than the first two, and we continue to challenge its implementation in the courts. 

https://twitter.com/ACLU/statuses/825532347839836161

The lion’s share of our Trump-related work has focused on defending immigrants, because that is where the president has directed his most virulent, egregious and systematic attacks.

Trump has particularly targeted those seeking asylum, and we’ve countered him at every point. His goal is to deter asylum applicants — regardless of the validity of their claims to facing persecution at home. In what is surely the cruelest of his many anti-asylum initiatives, he separated children from their parents, in hopes that this would discourage other families from seeking refuge and safety here. We sued, obtained a ruling barring the practice, and continue to press the administration to reunite the thousands of families it so heartlessly separated. The ACLU has helped reunite more than two thousand families, but we keep discovering more who were separated, and we won’t rest until we’ve reunited them all.

https://twitter.com/ACLU/statuses/1000403709237583872

Trump has also locked up asylum applicants without hearings in which they could show that they pose no flight risk or danger, and therefore should be freed. In our view, the government cannot constitutionally detain people absent a demonstrated reason for doing so, and where an asylum seeker poses neither a flight risk nor a danger, she cannot constitutionally be deprived of her liberty. Here, too, the courts have blocked the administration’s practice thanks to litigation by us and our allies, requiring it to hold hearings and release those who pose no threat.

The Trump administration also sought to change the legal standard in order to make it more difficult to get asylum based on fears of gang violence or domestic abuse in one’s home country. Again, we sued. And again, a federal court blocked the administration from implementing that policy.  

Trump issued an executive order denying asylum to anyone who entered the country other than at an official port of entry — even though the asylum statute provides that asylum is available to all who face persecution at home, regardless of how or where they entered the U.S. The courts blocked that policy, too. He then sought to deny asylum to anyone who has traveled through another country to reach the U.S. and has not applied for and been denied asylum there. Again, the courts declared the policy illegal. The Supreme Court has temporarily stayed that injunction pending the government’s appeal, but our legal challenge continues.

https://twitter.com/ACLU/statuses/1146471278532071424

Trump also sought to deny legal protections to immigrants from countries that either would not take their citizens back, or where conditions were so bad that we had long afforded their nationals temporary protected status, which allowed them to live and work among us. When Trump sought to revoke their status en masse, the ACLU and our allies sued, and obtained injunctions barring the wholesale denial of legal status to over 400,000 people.   

Most recently, Trump sought to expand so-called “expedited removal,” a summary deportation process that short-circuits many of the essential procedural protections generally afforded to immigrants in deportation proceedings. These procedures have long been limited to persons apprehended within 100 miles of the border and within two weeks of illegal entry. Trump wants to expand exponentially the number of people who could be swiftly deported under this process, to include anyone who had entered illegally within the past two years, apprehended anywhere in the nation. Once again, we sued, and a federal judge blocked the initiative as illegal. 

Trump has attempted, virtually since the day he took office, to build a wall at the southern border. He repeatedly asked Congress for funding to build the wall, and repeatedly they refused. He went ahead and ordered the wall built anyway, declaring a fake national emergency and diverting funds appropriated for other purposes. We sued to stop the diversion of funds, and the lower courts ruled the spending illegal. The Supreme Court granted a temporary stay, but the challenge continues with an argument in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on November 12. 

We are not the only ones to see Trump in court. Other groups have successfully challenged his revocation of protection for the approximately 800,000 so-called Dreamers, young undocumented people brought here by their parents, to whom the Obama administration gave deferred action status, allowing them to live, work, and go to school here. And the courts have also blocked Trump’s efforts to expand the definition of persons deportable as “public charges” to encompass immigrants who even briefly fall on hard times and need virtually any sort of government assistance.

In short, judicial review has been critical to protecting the basic human rights of tens of thousands of immigrants throughout this country.  That that’s only the beginning.   

REPRODUCTIVE FREEDOM

As a candidate, Trump promised to overturn Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision protecting abortion access, and in response, seven states have enacted laws banning abortion. We’ve challenged five of the state bans and obtained injunctions against each of them; our ally, the Center for Reproductive Rights, has blocked the other two. The states are appealing, but we will continue to defend this fundamental right. 

https://twitter.com/ACLU/statuses/1189194439765438464

We also successfully blocked the Trump administration’s own ban on abortion. This prohibition was applied selectively to some of the most vulnerable women in this country: undocumented teens held in U.S. custody. When one such teen, detained in Texas, learned that she was pregnant and sought to exercise her constitutional right to an abortion, the Trump administration refused to let her out of its facility to go to the clinic for the procedure. We sued in federal court, and won. We now have a nationwide injunction against the practice. 

And most recently, a federal judge blocked President Trump’s so-called “conscience rule,” which would have allowed  doctors, nurses, and other health care providers nationwide to place their own views over the needs of their patience and refuse to provide health care to which they object on moral or religious grounds.  The court held that the rule was arbitrary and rested on demonstrably false assertions by the administration.

VOTING RIGHTS

The president tried to rig the census, by adding a question about citizenship that would have deterred tens of thousands of immigrants from filling out the census form. The Census Bureau itself objected to the plan, because they knew it would lead to undercounting of people in areas where immigrants live, often urban areas that the administration sees as likely to vote Democratic. The Constitution requires the census to count all people, not just citizens. The undercounting would have translated into fewer representatives in Congress for districts with large immigrant populations, and less federal support for all the people who live there, citizen and noncitizen alike. The initiative’s pre-textual rationale was initially drafted by a Republican gerrymandering specialist who advised in a confidential memo that it would advantage “Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites.” We sued and won. In June 2019, the Supreme Court affirmed our victory, finding that the administration’s justification for adding the question was pre-textual — or in plain English, a lie. Trump bristled at the defeat, and only after his entire legal team resigned over his direction to find a way to reinstitute the question did he admit defeat and abandon the effort. 

https://twitter.com/ACLU/statuses/1144257601364008960

ENEMY COMBATANTS

Trump vowed to expand the detention of enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay, although he has not yet dared do so. His administration did lock up a U.S. citizen as an “enemy combatant” in secret in Iraq, without access to a lawyer, without a hearing, and without any criminal charges. The ACLU sued and won. We first obtained an order requiring the administration to give him access to our attorneys. Then, we challenged the legal basis for detaining a U.S. citizen indefinitely without charges, and the government gave in and released him. The Trump administration has not held a U.S. citizen as an “enemy combatant” since. 

LGBTQ RIGHTS

Trump has also declared war on the LGBTQ community.  Here, too, we’ve challenged him every step of the way. He barred transgender people from serving in the military, despite the military’s finding that there was no basis for excluding them. We obtained an injunction against the ban, and forced Trump to water it down, allowing currently enlisted transgender soldiers to remain. But the revised ban still bars entry to new transgender enlistees. That, too, was blocked, but the lower court’s injunction was temporarily stayed by the Supreme Court pending the government’s appeals, which continue.

https://twitter.com/ACLU/statuses/1116794914795216899

The Trump administration also reversed the federal government’s position on whether LGBTQ individuals are protected by federal civil rights law from being fired or otherwise discriminated against because of who they are. We won victories in the federal appeals courts, which ruled that firing someone for being gay or transgender is a form of sex discrimination forbidden by federal law. In October, we argued before the Supreme Court on behalf of a gay man and a transgender woman who had been fired because of who they are. The Trump administration argued the other side.

https://twitter.com/ACLU/statuses/1176181332390621186

In many of these cases, the courts have served their intended purpose: Protecting the vulnerable from abuses directed at them by the president, upholding the rule of law, and stopping arbitrary and cruel treatment of hundreds of thousands of people. We are proud to have led the legal resistance, with full participation of many of our allies in the immigrants’ rights, reproductive rights, and civil rights communities.

OUTSIDE THE COURTS

But we have not limited our response to the courts. We are committed to defending liberty through all available means, and in a democracy, the political process must also be an essential part of that defense. In the wake of President Trump’s election, our membership soared from 400,000 to 1.8 million, and many of our supporters said they wanted not only to join and donate, but also to take action. The ACLU launched People Power, a nationwide mobilization platform that empowers ACLU volunteers to fight for liberty at the local level. Over half a million people have since taken action with us as People Power volunteers — visiting a legislator or town council, participating in a demonstration, or gathering signatures and getting out the vote for ballot initiatives furthering civil liberties, among others. They have encouraged local sheriffs and police chiefs to adopt immigrant-friendly law enforcement policies; advocated for the expansion of voting rights; gathered over 150,000 signatures for Amendment 4 in Florida, which paved the way to re-enfranchise over 1.4 million previously incarcerated people; and showed up at demonstrations at the border and in many cities to protest anti-immigrant policies. Today, People Power volunteers are pressing presidential candidates of all parties to endorse critical civil liberties initiatives, including reducing mass incarceration. Judge Learned Hand, one of the great federal judges of all time, once said that “liberty lies in the hearts of men and women.” We are deploying People Power to nurture that spirit and spread it through direct action. 

https://twitter.com/ACLU/statuses/1011734566514634755

We also engaged in the 2018 midterms in ways that were not possible before. We spent more than $5 million and devoted thousands of hours of volunteer and staff time to the fight in Florida for Amendment 4. We supported similar voter access reform measures in Nevada and Michigan, both of which passed. We supported a successful referendum to end non-unanimous jury verdicts in Louisiana, a Reconstruction era practice that was designed to nullify the votes of Black jurors. And we helped to defeat a transphobic ballot measure in Massachusetts. In key elections, we also did substantial voter education and outreach to ensure that citizens were aware of the civil rights and civil liberties stakes, reminding voters to “Vote like your rights depend on it.”  President Trump’s election posed immediate and wide-ranging threats to civil liberties. The threats have grown, not diminished, over time. But we have been there every step of the way, fighting to defend the civil rights and civil liberties of all. Most of these legal fights are ongoing, and we will almost certainly have to mount new legal challenges to other unlawful, unconstitutional, or un-American policies. For nearly 100 years, the ACLU has steadfastly fought battles large and small, to secure freedoms and advance equality, no matter who occupies the Oval Office. Great challenges may lie ahead, but rest assured that, with your help, we stand ready to fight for a more perfect union.

Published November 8, 2019 at 03:25AM via ACLU https://ift.tt/2WQrMSI