#nuevo thieresienstadt

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In which the Financial Times asks the wrong question

Prosecuting Donald Trump: the question that will roil Biden’s first year Kadhim Shubber in Washington December 14 2020

When Joe Biden is sworn in as president on January 20, his in-tray will include a pandemic that continues to kill thousands of Americans each day and an economic crisis that has left millions out of work. Both those challenges rank among the most significant faced by any incoming US president. But Mr Biden will be forced to tackle a third issue that may define his presidency as much as the health and livelihoods of the American people: the fate of his predecessor.

Donald Trump will leave the White House with potential personal criminal liability unlike any commander-in-chief since Richard Nixon, who was saved by a controversial and sweeping pardon gifted by his successor Gerald Ford after he resigned in disgrace. Mr Trump, who will depart after attempting to subvert his loss in a free and fair election, is unlikely to receive any similar such clemency from Mr Biden. 

 Since first exploding on to the political scene in 2015, Mr Trump has tested and twisted the US political system to breaking point, serving as a one-man crash course on the US constitution, legal and ethical norms, and the effectiveness or lack thereof of the guardrails on the president’s power. Now his departure from office will force Washington to confront yet another question rarely asked in US history: should a former president be prosecuted? [...]

The question isn’t “should [he] be prosecuted”. Of course he should. He’s committed documented and verifiable crimes too numerous to recount here. (But let’s just mention that whole “ripping children from their parents and putting them in concentration camps” thing he authorized against children at our southern border, shall we? Let’s shall.)

The question isn’t “should he”, the question is “will he be prosecuted for his many many many crimes?” And sadly, the answer, at the federal level at least, is: No, of course not.

Biden views himself as a “uniter” -- at least, he tries to do so. (One wonders how long this illusion will last.) And a “uniter” doesn’t go after failed people when they know it will just make the existing divisions in the country so much worse.

Second, it is undeniable that, even when they deserve it (and he truly does), prosecuting your predecessors is a terrible terrible look for a nominal democracy. (Very nominal, these days, but you take my point.)

Third, it would be truly astonishing if he doesn’t pardon himself and a raft of relatives and other associates on the way out the door. A CNN article notes that the scramble for pardons has gotten truly insane already, with a month left in this administration. There’s also speculation afoot that the reason that Barr resigned when he did -- which, like many other things that have happened in this administration, was truly unprecedented -- was because he knew some craziness was headed to the Department of Justice in this last month (there’s a section at DOJ that’s responsible for vetting clemency requests and making recommendations) and he wanted absolutely nothing to do with that, since it would trash what little remains of his reputation. So it’s very likely that he may try to do something to pardon himself, which is again (say it with me!) unprecedented in US history ... but which Biden may well feel is the best way out of an admittedly tenuous situation.

What is more likely to happen is that there will be, at the very least, investigations by the House into everything they can investigate. It’s also worth noting that once a person has been pardoned, they lose their fifth amendment right against self incrimination for any conduct for which they have been pardoned -- if the House summons you to testify about such conduct, and you refuse, that’s a fresh brand new offense for which you can be held responsible.

So. Should he be prosecuted? Yes. Oh, yes.

Will he be prosecuted? Well, will he?

... Guess.

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As threatened, the Candidate Dictator signs executive order regarding family separation of refugees

Trump reverses course, signs order ending family separations on southern border by John Wagner, Nick Miroff and Mike DeBonis (washingtonpost.com) June 20 at 4:27 PM

President Trump abruptly reversed course Wednesday, signing an executive order ending family separations at the U.S.-Mexico border after a public uproar over the impact of his administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy.

The plan would keep families together in federal custody while awaiting prosecution for illegal border crossings, potentially violating a 1997 court settlement limiting the duration of child detentions.

“So we're going to have strong, very strong borders, but we’re going to keep the families together,” Trump said as he signed the order in the Oval Office. “I didn't like the sight or the feeling of families being separated.” [...] Trump’s said the order does not alter the “zero tolerance” policy itself that the administration put in place in April. Under that policy, the administration has sought to prosecute as many border-crossing offenses as possible, including those involving families with children. Because the Justice Department can’t prosecute children along with their parents, the result of the zero-tolerance policy has been a sharp rise in the number of children detained separately.

On Tuesday, the Department of Homeland Security said 2,342 children have been separated from their parents since last month.

Trump’s executive order instructs DHS to keep families in custody “to the extent permitted by law and subject to the availability of appropriations,” language that points to the government’s deficit of detention space for parents with children. ICE operates two large family detention centers in Texas and a smaller facility in Pennsylvania, with a combined capacity for about 3,000 beds.As of June 9, the three facilities had nearly 2,600 of those beds occupied, according to the latest available ICE figures....

This Vox article offers more specific information about the order and its effects.

Because this order does not rescind the “zero tolerance” policy, and because Homeland Insecurity does not have enough space for all of the families in its few family detention centers, this means that we will soon see large-ish concentration camps for entire families in Texas and the Southwest. We will also see many more express deportations without hearings, because the government isn’t allowed to keep children in family detention centers for more than 20 days, thanks to the Flores settlement and subsequent laws and regulations. 

All this order really does is to pull the images of screaming distressed children and children in prison cages off the front pages and off the television screens. Which may nominally be better for these families in the very short term, but isn’t good for them or for us in the long term. The facilites will likely be horrifying, and the expedited hearings will violate due process. And once they’re out of sight, we’ll conveniently forget all about them. 

It’s what we do well, after all. 

It will also be interesting to see what effort, if any, the administration makes to reunify the families it has so very recently sundered. After all, it shouldn’t take THAT much effort, since it was all so recent.

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Counting down to counting up, or, "what a Census, what a show”

You know, if it weren’t for the fact that it is affecting how we pick our representatives, the mess over the Census would be prime popcorn fodder. It’s limped from stupid to stupider for the past few weeks, and shows no sign of getting any less stupid ... or, unfortunately, any less important.

Settle in, folks; this is going to be a LOOOOOONG ‘un.

Kicking things off, of course, we had the decision of our esteemed US Supreme Court, stating that the government could not add a question on citizenship to the 2020 census at the current time. Importantly, the five conservatives all agreed that the government had the technical authority to do so. However, Justice Roberts then swung over to join with the liberals to say that the government could not do so in this situation at this time because the law required them to give reasons for doing so (and dictated that they follow a specific process, which had been ignored) and the reasons they had given were “pretextual” -- that is, the government lied. The opinion of the Court -- that is, effectively of Roberts -- then stated that the government could, if they had time (which they allegedly did not, and more about that later) produce valid reasons -- essentially, the opinion of the Court was: lie better.

Meanwhile, as the case was coming out of the Supreme Court to its quarterfinal decision (... well, it’s certainly not final final, as we’ll see), things were happening in other courts. Appellants were presenting evidence to a lower court that members of the government had knowingly collaborated with a donor to produce a census that would discriminate against minorities and enhance whites’ representation. This provides both additional groundwork for the “you lied BADLY” part of the Court’s decision (although they didn’t really take that evidence much into account, since it was discovered late in their process), and makes it harder for the government to do as directed and “lie BETTER”.

The government then shrugged its collective shoulders, said, “Oh, well”, and went on to start printing the Census without the question. The government seemed to take its defeat in stride, because they knew full well that the damage had already been done. Thanks to publicity over the lawsuit, and over theoretically planned -- and almost certainly somewhat illegal -- Gestapo-style ICE raids to round up people who have overstayed their deportation orders, noncitizen residents will be, at best, reluctant to participate in the census, because they know full well that their participation will be used against them. It will, after all, tell the government exactly where they are. Given the conditions at the Nuevo Thieresienstadt concentration camps on the border, they’re justifiably afraid of what will happen when they fall into the government’s clutches.

OH WAIT: The government did not shrug its collective shoulders and take its defeat in stride. It did not, because The Dictator Candidate did not take this at all well, and reopened the case via tweet, as he is prone to doing, and taking the entire rest of the government by surprise, to say nothing of the governments own lawyers. (And more about THEM shortly.) The Tweeter-In-Chief also said that he might issue an executive order to direct the Census Bureau to add the question. (This is, of course, entirely illegal.) 

Government lawyers were forced to go back to the circuit court and Appeals court and say, basically, “we have no freakin’ idea what the hell he’s talking about, but apparently the case is back open, and please don’t think we lied to you -- we just didn’t know he would do that!” They are forced to ask the courts not think they lied because they are in fact being accused of lying on an entirely separate count, that of the final print date for the Census itself. (To be sure: the government’s lawyers are also being accused of lying about the racially discriminatory intent of the citizenship question, and sanctions are also being requested for that. Being a lawyer for the government on this case truly sucks -- and not in the happy fun way -- and more about THAT below.) (Also, accidentally typed “accursed with lying” in that last link, and feel that it much better fits how the lawyers for the government must feel about this whole mess.)

The case was expedited to the Supreme Court in the first place because the government claimed -- with a theoretical basis in historical fact, even! -- that they would need to start printing the census no later than the first week of July; they are, after all, needing to print something like 100 million of the suckers. The Supreme Court took up the case from the district court without the final disposition from the appeals court in part because of this timeliness claim. However, now that the Dictator Candidate has tweeted out that he is willing to delay the census to add the question to suppress minority response rates, that deadline is proven to be, once again (say it with me!) A Lie. The courts, no matter what level, do not take kindly to being lied to directly, never mind repeatedly.The lawyers are thus in the position of having to argue that they didn’t know that they were being lied to by the administration, which ... well, OK, point. Not sure that it’s a point that the courts will care about at all, having been lied to repeatedly, but we shall see. (Also, suspect it doesn’t go over well with the Justice Department for their own lawyers to say, “We didn’t know the government was lying to us.”)

AND THEN (because of course there is an “AND THEN”) the Dictator Candidate bluntly said the following:  [...]  “Number one, you need it for Congress — you need it for Congress for districting,” he said Friday. “You need it for appropriations — where are the funds going? How many people are there? Are they citizens? Are they not citizens? You need it for many reasons.” The problem with this statement is that (a) it’s illegal for the government to use national origin and ethnicity in that way (OF COURSE IT’S ILLEGAL, EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS CASE IS ILLEGAL!) and (b) the government’s lawyers have explicitly said to the courts that no, this isn’t about redistricting, not at all. They’ve explicitly said that it wasn’t one of the rationales that Ross of the Commerce Department (over the Census Bureau) used to justify adding the question. (Yes, of course this is being used by the plaintiffs as another reason the government and its lawyers should be sanctioned. They’ve really got quite the bounty of lies to work with.)

The lawyers, it would appear, have now Officially Had ENOUGH. Per the (editorially dreadful but sometimes tolerable news reporting) New York Times, the government’s lawyers on this case are being replaced en masse. This is not normally done -- or tolerated by the courts, which usually have to grant permission for this sort of swap -- on a case like this at this late stage. The government, in its public statements, doesn’t seem to be offering any justification, simply thanking the lawyers for their service. However, it is strikingly unusual for the entire Federal Programs branch of the Justice Department to be taken off an active case, and strongly indicates that every lawyer in that branch simply refused to keep lying to the courts. (Given that they’re facing at least three separate requests for sanctions against them, it’s not at all surprising, if you think about it.)

So now, after all that, the question is set up for another somewhat brisk trip through the court system. (In theory. In practice, having apparently been lied to about the need for speed, the courts are very likely to effectively say, “Screw you, government; we’ll decide this on our own schedule and in our own time.) Eventually, it will land on the Supreme Court’s doorstep again -- which is to say, it will more or less land in Chief Justice John Roberts’ august lap. 

That return trip sets Roberts up for a truly grinding decision to make: “So ... white supremacy good, OK? But government lying to the court and getting away with it: Bad. Very bad. Vote for the government’s lie, good for white supremacy, but bad for the Court as an institution. So, accept the lie and go for white supremacy? Reject the lie and slow what’s become a surprisingly swift march to formally reinshrining the white Christianist male as the one true power in all the land? Accept, reject? Accept, reject? AAAAIGH!” 

At that point he may hope that his fellow justices decide to just accept whatever the appeals courts do, decline to take the case, and spare them the agony of making the decision. Since the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, at this point, appears surprisingly likely to read the government for filth -- as they should -- and the lower district court appears strongly likely to upbraid the government in terms that would make “read for filth” an entirely inadequate description, it seems unlikely that his fellow conservative judges will allow those threats to immediate enshrined white supremacy to stand. (It only takes the votes of four justices to accept a case -- even if the entire liberal bloc and Roberts want to turf the case, the others can effectively overrule that.) If they accept the case, this means that the government will be required to stand before the Supreme Court and lie to it again. (Seriously, they’ll actually be required to support the lies they have already told to effectively represent the government as its advocates. If I were a lawyer, I think I’d bail on that, as well. They’re caught in a fairly nasty and appallingly high-profile two-way trap.)

Seriously, if this were a television soap opera plot, it would be rejected by viewers as ridiculously unrealistic. And yet, here we are.

(Today’s title taken from the musical “Evita”, which winds up being appallingly appropriate for entirely different non-census-related reasons.)

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ICE vs detainees. Again.

Would that one could be surprised that ICE appears to be trying to organize things so that more detainees get ill and die.

Detainees in New Mexico say ICE violating hygiene, distancing rules By Jens Gould jgould@sfnewmexican.com Mar 29, 2020

Detainees in a federal facility near Grants say more than 20 people are being held in one room with no social distancing, little access to hygiene products and scant information about the new coronavirus, even as the global health crisis continues to spread.

In an interview with The New Mexican, Yulian Llerena, a Cuban man being held in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody at the Cibola County Correctional Center, said he and 23 other detainees are being held in one room. They are unable to stay more than 6 feet away from either each other and are coming into physical contact, he said.

“We’re all together,” Llerena said. “That’s why we’re afraid.”

Llerena said the detainees in his group aren’t being given hygiene products such as antibacterial gel, their rooms aren’t being cleaned with disinfectant, and guards at the facility are not telling them to take health precautions to avoid potentially contracting or spreading COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.

“There’s no hygiene here. They’re not taking the precautions here,” Llerena said. “They’re not bringing us any chemicals for cleaning, they’re not bringing toilet paper, nothing hygienic.” [...]

ICE, of course, says that this is not true, that they’re following all the rules exactly.

Anyone believes that an organization that abuses children is following any rules whatsoever? ... Anyone? ... Anyone at all? ... Yeah, that’s what I thought.

Given what’s happening elsewhere in the federal prison system, where COVID-19 seems to be exploding, it would frankly be astonishing if they were following the recommendations for the detainee prisons -- and make no mistake, these certainly are prisons. And given what we know of ICE, it would be beyond astonishing if they were even trying ... and it seems, they’re not trying to protect the prisoners at all.

Of course, the other issue there is that ICE prison staff move in and out of the prisons, while the detainee prisoners themselves do not. And it is, admittedly, beyond difficult to run a prison with anything like social distancing. So the staff are no doubt catching the disease, and bringing it out of the prison back into the community, because that’s what happens with airborne diseases when you don’t take the right precautions.

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Apparently, children need sleep. Who knew?

Panel rules soap, sleep essential to migrant kids’ safety By AMY TAXIN, apnews.com August 15, 2019

Immigrant children detained by the U.S. government should get edible food, clean water, soap and toothpaste under a longstanding agreement over detention conditions, a federal appeals panel ruled Thursday in dismissing a Trump administration bid to limit what must be provided.

A three-judge panel for the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco tossed out the U.S. government’s challenge to a lower court’s findings that authorities had failed to provide safe and sanitary conditions for the children in line with a 1997 settlement agreement.

The government argued that authorities weren’t required to provide specific accommodations, such as soap, under the settlement’s requirement that facilities be “safe and sanitary” and asked the panel to weigh in. The appellate judges disagreed.

“Assuring that children eat enough edible food, drink clean water, are housed in hygienic facilities with sanitary bathrooms, have soap and toothpaste, and are not sleep-deprived are without doubt essential to the children’s safety,” the panel wrote.

The ruling followed a June hearing where a U.S. government lawyer said the agreement was vague and might not require that a toothbrush and soap be provided to children during brief stays in custody. Requiring these items, the government said, would be a change in the agreement.

Leecia Welch, senior director of legal advocacy and child welfare at the National Center for Youth Law, said the panel’s ruling wasn’t surprising. “It should shock the conscience of all Americans to know that our government argued children do not need these bare essentials,” she said.....

“Shock the conscience” ... well, maybe.

Shock anyone who has been paying even the least attention to how this government tries to treat anyone who isn’t white and preferably male and preferably very very rich? 

Not so much, no.

I would expect this to be appealed to the Supreme Court, because that’s what this government does. In more normal times, I would expect the court to dismiss this without comment. And even now, should they accept the case, I would hope that this Court would not aid and abet the government in committing child abuse. Unfortunately, there’s no certainty there. 

(There’s also the issue that this case could have a “penumbra” effect with regard to what is allowed in prisons and jails. I should think that if the Court sides with the government and says that they are allowed to abuse vulnerable children in this way, they will be hard pressed not to agree when the federal government and the states argue that they should be allowed to abuse adults in these ways as well. [They already do, but at the moment, it’s techically considered unconstitutional. Technically.])

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Meanwhile, regarding the Nuevo Thieresienstadts on our southern border ...

While Congress engages in an absolutely stupid and ridiculous internecine spat about whether or not the concentration camps the government is running should properly be called concentration camps, the government is trying to define “safe and sanitary” conditions in those concentration camps as ... well, see for yourself.

Feds Tell 9th Circuit: Detained Kids ‘Safe and Sanitary’ Without Soap (courthousenews.com) June 18, 2019 HELEN CHRISTOPHI

SAN FRANCISCO (CN) – The Trump administration argued in front of a Ninth Circuit panel Tuesday that the government is not required to give soap or toothbrushes to children apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border and can have them sleep on concrete floors in frigid, overcrowded cells, despite a settlement agreement that requires detainees be kept in “safe and sanitary” facilities.

All three judges appeared incredulous during the hearing in San Francisco, in which the Trump administration challenged previous legal findings that it is violating a landmark class action settlement by mistreating undocumented immigrant children at U.S. detention facilities.“You’re really going to stand up and tell us that being able to sleep isn’t a question of safe and sanitary conditions?'” U.S. Circuit Judge Marsha Berzon asked the Justice Department’s Sarah Fabian Tuesday.

U.S. Circuit Judge William Fletcher also questioned the government’s interpretation of the settlement agreement. “Are you arguing seriously that you do not read the agreement as requiring you to do anything other than what I just described: cold all night long, lights on all night long, sleeping on concrete and you’ve got an aluminum foil blanket?” Fletcher asked Fabian. “I find that inconceivable that the government would say that that is safe and sanitary.”

Given that the government has -- at other times and about many other things -- asserted, alleged and stated many many MANY counter-factual things (you know, LIES), that they would say that manifestly disease-causing and unsafe conditions are somehow “safe and sanitary” is, unfortunately, not at all inconceivable.

Even less inconceivable: the government will lose, and lose, and lose this case in court, and will serenely ignore that fact. (Well ... not “serenely”. The Dictator Candidate hasn’t done anything “serenely” in his entire life, one suspects.) They will continue to abuse and mistreat these children, because who is in a position to stop them?

Even allowing the much more conservative bent of our current Supreme Court, assuming that the government loses in the Ninth Circuit -- as they should -- I would think the Supreme Court would simply refuse to take this case once it gets that far. If they do grant certiorari for this case and agree to hear it ... well. It would likely mean that at least four justices agree that the government should be legally allowed to mistreat children. Then it’s likely that the courts will be granting formal assent to the existence of concentration camps and the deliberate mistreatment of the most vulnerable prisoners they contain.

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The July 2, 2018 cover of TIME

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Kidnapped migrant children allege physical abuse, govt more or less plans to just keep ‘em all

Because apparently, there’s just no way for this not to keep getting worse.

Various types of outright physical abuse have been alleged, as was pretty much inevitable.

Abuses alleged in the first article are separate from the current situation, since they include statements from teens who have been there for “months or years”. That said, we simply don’t know if children from the current situation have been sent to this place. And it is, unfortunately, what is highly likely to happen to many the children caught up in the current frenzy, there or elsewhere.

Young immigrants detained in Virginia center allege abuse (usatoday.com) Michael Biesecker, Jake Pearson and Garance Burke, Associated Press   Published 8:39 a.m. ET June 21, 2018

WASHINGTON (AP) — Immigrant children as young as 14 housed at a juvenile detention center in Virginia say they were beaten while handcuffed and locked up for long periods in solitary confinement, left nude and shivering in concrete cells.

The abuse claims against the Shenandoah Valley Juvenile Center near Staunton, Virginia, are detailed in federal court filings that include a half-dozen sworn statements from Latino teens jailed there for months or years. Multiple detainees say the guards stripped them of their clothes and strapped them to chairs with bags placed over their heads.

"Whenever they used to restrain me and put me in the chair, they would handcuff me," said a Honduran immigrant who was sent to the facility when he was 15 years old. "Strapped me down all the way, from your feet all the way to your chest, you couldn't really move. ... They have total control over you. They also put a bag over your head. It has little holes; you can see through it. But you feel suffocated with the bag on."

[...] Many of the children were sent there after U.S. immigration authorities accused them of belonging to violent gangs, including MS-13. President Donald Trump has repeatedly cited gang activity as justification for his crackdown on illegal immigration. [...] But a top manager at the Shenandoah center said during a recent congressional hearing that the children did not appear to be gang members and were suffering from mental health issues resulting from trauma that happened in their home countries — problems the detention facility is ill-equipped to treat...

[...] Most children held in the Shenandoah facility who were the focus of the abuse lawsuit were caught crossing the border illegally alone. They were not the children who have been separated from their families under the Trump administration's recent policy and are now in the government's care. But the facility there operates under the same program run by the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement. It was not immediately clear whether any separated children have been sent to Shenandoah Valley since the Trump administration in April announced its "zero tolerance" policy toward immigrant families, after the lawsuit was filed...

The Shenandoah Valley facility is, of course, a subcontracted private prison. (Literally a prison; there’s another part of it that contains convicted American juveniles.) The article notes that, even allowing for it being such a facility, it doesn’t receive enough money from the government to properly treat, house and feed the migrant children. Not that it’s actually interested in properly treating, housing and feeding them, of course. (The amount of money for food it receives is rather startlingly low.) In theory, the subcontractor is supposed to make up the difference between what they receive and what they should be spending themselves. In practice....

The children are accused by the government of being gang members (why they get sent to an outright prison facility), but even the staff of the facility abusing the children doesn’t think that they are. They’re just previously traumatized teens ... who get to be RE-traumatized because staff at the facility are abusing them. And we may or may not be sending children whom we know already are not gang members to the facility; we don’t know because the government won’t say.

... Well, all-righty, then!

Immigrant children forcibly injected with drugs, lawsuit claims By Matt Smith and Aura Bogado / June 20, 2018

President Donald Trump’s zero tolerance policy is creating a zombie army of children forcibly injected with medications that make them dizzy, listless, obese and even incapacitated, according to legal filings that show immigrant children in U.S. custody subdued with powerful psychiatric drugs.

Children held at Shiloh Treatment Center, a government contractor south of Houston that houses immigrant minors, described being held down and injected, according to the federal court filings. The lawsuit alleges that children were told they would not be released or see their parents unless they took medication and that they only were receiving vitamins. Parents and the children themselves told attorneys the drugs rendered them unable to walk, afraid of people and wanting to sleep constantly, according to affidavits filed April 23 in U.S. District Court in California. 

[...] A child described trying to open a window and being hurled against a door by a Shiloh supervisor, who then choked her until she fainted.“The supervisor told me I was going to get a medication injection to calm me down,” the girl said. “Two staff grabbed me, and the doctor gave me the injection despite my objection and left me there on the bed.”

[...]  One child was prescribed 10 different shots and pills, including the antipsychotic drugs Latuda, Geodon and Olanzapine, the Parkinson’s medication Benztropine, the seizure medications Clonazepam and Divalproex, the nerve pain medication and antidepressant Duloxetine, and the cognition enhancer Guanfacine....

Jesus fucking christ.

And then there’s this gem:

Trump Retreats on Separating Families, but Thousands Will Remain Apart (nytimes.com)

President Trump caved to enormous political pressure on Wednesday and signed an executive order meant to end the separation of families at the border by detaining parents and children together for an indefinite period. [...] But Justice Department officials said it was not clear whether the practice of separating families could resume after 20 days if a federal judge refuses to give the government the authority it wants to hold families together for a longer period.

And a Health and Human Services official said that more than 2,300 children who have already been separated from their parents under the president’s “zero tolerance” policy will not be immediately reunited with their families while the adults remain in federal custody during their immigration proceedings.“There will not be a grandfathering of existing cases,” said Kenneth Wolfe, a spokesman for the Administration for Children and Families, a division of the Department of Health and Human Services. Mr. Wolfe said the decision about the children was made by the White House, but he added, “I can tell you definitively that is going to be policy.”

So it will be policy that we’re going to keep those children separated from their families indefinitely -- in foster homes and agencies scattered across the country and in facilities like Nuevo Thieresienstadt. Inflicting untold damage upon them. For the youngest children -- the three month old, six month old, eight month old children that have been reported on -- it’s very likely that, should they ever be reunited (which is extremely doubtful at this point), they will have been separated from their parents for far longer than they were with them in the first place.

The administration also declines to commit to keeping families unified while it builds facilities to accommodate the Candidate Dictator’s executive order, which likely means that the separations will continue for a bit. Just not quite so high profile as they have been. Which is quite unfortunate.

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... Well, of course they approve

Say what you will of the Candidate Dictator, but he has his finger firmly on the pulse (and hands around the throat) of his party core.

Majority oppose policy that causes family separation, but Republicans approve (cnn.com) By Grace Sparks Updated 4:39 PM ET, Mon June 18, 2018

Two-thirds of Americans disapprove of the Trump administration's practice of taking undocumented immigrant children from their families and putting them in government facilities on US borders, according to a CNN poll conducted by SSRS. Only 28% approve.

But among Republicans, there is majority support for the policy that has resulted in an uptick of children being separated from their families.[...] Sixty-two percent of the people who approve of the job Trump is doing as President also approve of the immigration policy and so do 51% of self-described conservatives....

Would that one could be even a little surprised. Or even shocked, or scandalized in the moment, if not more generally surprised at the possibility. But no. That’s not the burning trashfire of a country that we happen to be in this year.

Also: an “uptick”, CNN? An “uptick”? An “uptick” is a small but notable increase or slight upward trend in something that was already happening, not a major implementation of something that was barely happening at all, ever, before then.

In any event, majority approval in the party means that the Candidate Dictator won’t pull back on the policy, even if he is using it as a bargaining chip. (He isn’t. To be using something as a bargaining chip, even something as reprehensible as this, requires the other party to regard you as someone likely to follow through on the bargain negotiated, however bad. Anyone who thinks that man will keep to any bargain -- unless you’re a dictator he admires and strives to emulate, of course (or another dictator with particularly odoriferous kompromat on him, whichever) -- anyone who thinks that is beyond a fool, and dangerous to boot.

What I do wonder is: if this, of all possible things, is this week’s horrifying right-hand object to distract everyone from what the left is doing ... what godawful thing is the left hand doing?

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One good decent thing from all the horror - a quantum of decency

These parents hoped to raise $1,500 for separated migrant families. Then their Facebook fundraiser went viral. (washingtonpost.com, by Darlena Cunha and Avi Selk, 2018 June 19 at 3:50 PM )

It began with the smallest possible quantity of optimism, which turns out to be $1,500.

Charlotte and Dave Willner had seen the pictures of migrant children crying at the border. One in particular reminded them of their own 2-year-old daughter.

The San Francisco area couple had heard — as much of the United States had by now — that President Trump’s administration has begun jailing migrant parents caught crossing the border and sending their children to shelters. The president’s chief of staff has called the new “zero-tolerance” policy a deterrent against illegal immigration.

But the Willners had also learned that a lump of cash might thwart the government’s plans.

Just like arrested Americans, detained migrant parents can often post bond and simply walk out of jail.

They can then, presumably, collect their children from government custody and live in the United States until their court hearings, which are often months away.

Or they could, if they had the money. Bonds for detained migrants typically range from hundreds to many thousands of dollars — amounts that might as well be in the billions for families that arrive here with next to nothing, and have whatever they brought with them confiscated by Border Patrol.

So the Willners created a Facebook fundraiser over the weekend to raise $1,500 — enough to free a single migrant parent with a relatively low bond. “It was the closest thing we could do to hugging that kid,” Dave Willner told the Mercury News.

Four days later, the Willners have raised more than $5 million and climbing — overflowing all previous optimism. [...] Private donors have matched at least $250,000 of the total, but the Willners said the average donation is just $40.The money has come from Americans disaffected with their government, immigrants who remember their own journeys, and sympathizers from Canada to Switzerland and beyond....

[...] [ the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES)] plans to use the money not only to bond parents out of immigration jails but also to provide lawyers to the parents and children as they fight in court to stay together and stay in the United States.“We’ve been occasionally crying around the office all day when we check the fundraising totals,” RAICES wrote on Facebook. “This is such a profound rejection of the cruel policies of this administration. Take heart.”

RAICES operates primarily in Texas, so its efforts will be concentrated on that border, but that’s also where Nuevo Thieresienstadt and most of the other concentration camps are. (We can only assume. The administration flatly refuses to tell the media or Congress where it’s hiding the girl children it’s kidnapped.) The government has ended the grant program that provided funding for its imprisoned refugee children to get legal representation, so RAICES and similar organizations have been operating purely out of pocket and the goodness of their hearts. This will go some distance to helping many of those children and families.

The administration is allegedly negotiating a ransom with Congress, but of course, there’s no guarantee that it will abide by the terms it negotiates. In fact, judging by past declarations on this topic, it’s fairly certain that once they have a deal -- if they get one -- they’ll decide that if Congress is getting anything, like the release of the hostages, they’ve lost the negotiation and will immediately say that Congress didn’t do what they promised and refuse to release the hostage children.

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The lasting problems that Nuevo Thieresienstadt will cause its victims, no matter where they wind up

The family separation crisis is a health crisis (vox.com) Health risks come with separating kids from their parents. By Dylan Scott Jun 18, 2018, 2:40pm EDT

There is no more important story in the country right now than the thousands of parents and children being separated from each other at the border as they attempt to enter the United States. [...]

Dr. Colleen Kraft, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, visited a shelter housing unaccompanied minors ages 12 and younger in April. She described walking into a toddler room where, instead of finding a group of rambunctious kids, she found quiet ones and, in the middle of the floor, a little girl crying uncontrollably.

I asked Kraft to explain the health risks that come with separating kids from their parents.

”Every bit of their health is predicated on a foundational relationship with a caring adult,” she said. Their parents, in other words.

When they are separated from their parents, kids’ stress hormones start working overtime. They are constantly on red alert. Over time, Kraft said, that “causes disruption in the way the neural synapses connect with each other, in their brain architecture.”

That can lead to developmental delay. Children develop speech slower, their motor skills don’t come along as quickly as they should, and they start to have difficulty creating proper attachments to other human beings.

The presence of a social worker isn’t enough to mitigate those effects, Kraft said, and the younger the child is and the longer they are in this kind of situation, the more difficult it is to reverse it. These experiences can have lifelong consequences too...

The article also details health effects on the mothers, particularly nursing mothers, who may develop abscesses and mastitis from being unable to nurse their infants. And, of course, should this endure any amount of time -- and it will -- their breasts will cease to produce milk for their infant. And then, assuming that they are reunified in the vaguely near future, about which there is considerable doubt, they will have to return to (in most cases) a desperately poor and difficult existence, in which the one thing they were able to count on -- that they could feed their infant as long as the mother got something to eat -- is no longer true. So it is rather likely to produce a staggering number of dead infants in various countries ... but they won’t be here, of course. Out of sight, out of mind.

And, in yet one more egregious example of child abuse perpetrated by the administration, information from the children able to talk that is meant to be used to help counsel them about whatever they experienced on their journey is now somehow being used against their parents. I honestly can’t imagine what they say that can be used that way, but imagine how disruptive it would be to realize that testimony from your child was being used against you. Even knowing that they may not have understood, that they had no choice, it might still make a relationship more difficult. Again, something that will likely not happen here, but elsewhere.

Basically, if you want a textbook of child abuse and how to outsource its consequences, the administration is writing it, here and now.