WTF Community

Immigration: issues and policy

The hardest journey #IconsInJourney

2 Likes

Stephen Miller is engineering this caveat for already legal immigrants, and what is proposed needs no outside approval aside from what the president wants to do. Harsh parameters put on legal immigrants.

Now the Trump administration wants to limit citizenship for legal immigrants

The most significant change to legal immigration in decades could affect millions of would-be citizens, say lawyers and advocates.

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is expected to issue a proposal in coming weeks that would make it harder for legal immigrants to become citizens or get green cards if they have ever used a range of popular public welfare programs, including Obamacare, four sources with knowledge of the plan told NBC News.

The move, which would not need congressional approval, is part of White House senior adviser Stephen Miller’s plan to limit the number of migrants who obtain legal status in the U.S. each year.

Details of the rulemaking proposal are still being finalized, but based on a recent draft seen last week and described to NBC News, immigrants living legally in the U.S. who have ever used or whose household members have ever used Obamacare, children’s health insurance, food stamps and other benefits could be hindered from obtaining legal status in the U.S.

Immigration lawyers and advocates and public health researchers say it would be the biggest change to the legal immigration system in decades and estimate that more than 20 million immigrants could be affected. They say it would fall particularly hard on immigrants working jobs that don’t pay enough to support their families.

1 Like

Silver linings

Miles 4 Migrants has already received 5.8 million donated airline miles following Wilensky’s tweet, the outlet reported.

1 Like

Dang that’s cold

I asked the current Administration official whether the outcry over family separation had caught the government by surprise. It had, the official said. “The expectation was that the kids would go to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, that the parents would get deported, and that no one would care.” Yet, when it became clear that the public did, the Administration chose not to change course.

2 Likes

Wait, what?! This is outrageous!

"When they turn 18, it’s basically, ‘Happy birthday,’ and then they slap on handcuffs and take them off to adult detention centers," says Lisa Lehner, an attorney with the nonprofit Americans for Immigrant Justice who is representing Orellana.

Since April, at least 14 children at the Homestead center have been handcuffed on their 18th birthdays and taken to a jail cell in Broward, Lehner says. And at least one of those kids had been separated from his father under the Trump administration’s since-abandoned policy to rip apart families that crossed the border together.

https://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/ice-handcuffs-immigrants-on-18th-birthday-at-homestead-childrens-center-sends-them-to-jail-10651093

2 Likes

A 18 month old child has died, contracting viral pneumonitis from an ICE facility after being separated from her mother for seeking asylum.

Six weeks after being released from the facility, relocated to New Jersey, and shuffled between three hospitals, Mariee was finally unhooked from a ventilator and died at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. The cause of death, ultimately, was viral pneumonitis, according to hospital records.

Mariee did not die in ICE confinement. One month into VICE News’ investigation, false rumors about her death spread on social media, sparking outcry from immigration advocates who have long been concerned about conditions for children at Dilley. She died of a viral infection that can kill children anywhere, though doctors say that conditions at institutions like Dilley allow viruses to spread more easily and make it hard to recover.

Read more here :point_down:

2 Likes

CNN confirms the story

https://www-m.cnn.com/2018/08/28/us/texas-ice-child-death/index.html?r=http%3A%2F%2Fthehill.com%2Fhomenews%2Fnews%2F403932-toddler-dies-after-ice-custody-lawyer-alleges-substandard-care

2 Likes

Hillary comes out swinging with a series of texts on immigration today.

@HillaryClinton

There’s a lot going on right now—understatement of the year.

  1. The separation of families and the failure of the administration to reunite them has been eclipsed in the news in recent days, but these tragic circumstances persist.

Here are some of the latest developments:
2. First, it’s been nearly five weeks since the deadline for the administration to reunite families they separated at the border, but 528 children are still waiting to see their parents again.

3.The administration is deporting people back to slavery:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ice-is-sending-mauritanians-back-to-modern-day-slavery/2018/08/27/1b411afe-a712-11e8-97ce-cc9042272f07_story.html?utm_term=.c9d4ac8fa824

  1. Child welfare officials in Texas are investigating the death of a young girl who died after alleged inadequate treatment while she was being held with her mother in a detention facility:
    Law firm alleges neglectful medical care after child dies weeks after ICE custody - CNN

  2. This heartbreaking video from the ACLU shows the consequences of separation:

https://twitter.com/ACLU/status/1033084026893070338

  1. These are just a few of countless stories that we should never read about events happening within our borders.

  2. We have to be better than this. Make sure your representatives continue to hear from you that families belong together, and give what you can to the efforts to reunite these children with their families.

ActBlue

https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton/status/1034532792506507264

3 Likes

This one is galling…

PHARR, Tex. — On paper, he’s a devoted U.S. citizen.

His official American birth certificate shows he was delivered by a midwife in Brownsville, at the southern tip of Texas. He spent his life wearing American uniforms: three years as a private in the Army, then as a cadet in the Border Patrol and now as a state prison guard.

But when Juan, 40, applied to renew his U.S. passport this year, the government’s response floored him. In a letter, the State Department said it didn’t believe he was an American citizen.

As he would later learn, Juan is one of a growing number of people whose official birth records show they were born in the United States but who are now being denied passports — their citizenship suddenly thrown into question. The Trump administration is accusing hundreds, and possibly thousands, of Hispanics along the border of using fraudulent birth certificates since they were babies, and it is undertaking a widespread crackdown.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/us-is-denying-passports-to-americans-along-the-border-throwing-their-citizenship-into-question/2018/08/29/1d630e84-a0da-11e8-a3dd-2a1991f075d5_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.3c27ba0b18ac

3 Likes

WTF…wow!

https://www.sacbee.com/news/business/article217567300.html

2 Likes

Immigrants are turning down government help to buy infant formula and healthy food for their young children because they’re afraid the Trump administration could bar them from getting a green card if they take federal aid.

Local health providers say they’ve received panicked phone calls from both documented and undocumented immigrant families demanding to be dropped from the rolls of WIC, a federal nutrition program aimed at pregnant women and children, after news reports that the White House is potentially planning to deny legal status to immigrants who’ve used public benefits. Agencies in at least 18 states say they’ve seen drops of up to 20 percent in enrollment, and they attribute the change largely to fears about the immigration policy.

3 Likes

I am one of those people who, for genuine medical reasons, has really shitty impulse control when it comes to buying food, and I always walk out of a store with so much more than I need. I need to find out if there’s a way to contribute that stuff locally specifically to immigrants in this position.

4 Likes

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration announced a new rule Thursday that would allow immigrant children with their parents to be held in detention indefinitely, upending a ban on indefinite detention that has been in place for 20 years.

The rule, proposed by the departments of Homeland Security and Health and Human Services, goes into effect in 60 days and will allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to keep children with their mothers in detention facilities while their cases for asylum play out in court.

A DHS official said the average length of stay for adults with pending court cases is currently 39 days. However, court backlogs can drag out the time an immigrant must wait in detention for a court hearing.

Until now, children have been released with their parents after 20 days. Earlier this year, the Trump administration sought to get around that rule by separating parents from their children and holding parents in detention while children were placed in the care of HHS.

1 Like

As Months Pass in Chicago Shelters, Immigrant Children Contemplate Escape, Even Suicide

Internal documents reveal despair and tedium in one of the nation’s largest shelter networks for unaccompanied minors.

“It’s traumatic to have this indefinite detention,” said Emily Ruehs-Navarro, an assistant professor of sociology at Elmhurst College near Chicago who has studied shelters for unaccompanied immigrant children. “It’s a vicious cycle where the longer kids stay, the more trauma is compounded on their situation.”

Children — many of whom are reeling from the trauma of rape, violence or other abuse in their home countries or during their treks to the United States — languish as caseworkers try to find sponsors and persuade them to undergo background checks. Those without relatives or family friends in the U.S. remain in custody even longer, sometimes rejected by long-term foster care programs already filled to capacity.

A child’s 18th birthday is a dreaded milestone marked by the arrival of federal immigration agents at shelter doors, sometimes just after midnight. Current and former staff said they have overheard older children talk about running away as their birthday approached. Some have been successful.

We need more foster parents!

1 Like

Australia has had this policy of locking up refugees for a number of years now. Indeed they send them off-shore to Manus Island in Papua New Guinea and to Nauru (an independent Pacific Island State). Here these people who were all initially asylum seekers, and now UNHCR assessed as refugees are left to rot in camps.
The point I wish to make is that the down stream effects of what Trump administrations stance on indefinite detention can already be seen in Manus and Nauru.

3 Likes

The numbers are even more stark than that: President Barack Obama raised the ceiling for refugee admissions in his final two years in office from 85,000 in fiscal year 2016 to 110,000 in fiscal year 2017 amid the Syrian crisis, which was still a pittance in a world in which the United Nations refugee agency estimates that there are nearly 20 million refugees. The Trump administration set a new cap for refugee resettlement for fiscal year 2018 at 45,000 but, less than 30 days from the end of the fiscal year, has resettled only around 20,000, according to figures from the Refugee Processing Center.

Now Donald Trump is expected to either maintain that cap or lower it in the coming fiscal year, which begins October 1, and cut one or more agencies from the resettlement process altogether—all of which could lead to the collapse of a system built over many years to support the world’s most vulnerable people.

This is an unprecedented level of change,” said Kay Bellor, the vice president for programs at the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (LIRS), one of the largest of the nine agencies.

Detention of Migrant Children Is now at Highest Levels Ever. Largely due to changes in placement policy.

Population levels at federally contracted shelters for migrant children have quietly shot up more than fivefold since last summer, according to data obtained by The New York Times, reaching a total of 12,800 this month. There were 2,400 such children in custody in May 2017.

The huge increases, which have placed the federal shelter system near capacity, are due not to an influx of children entering the country, but a reduction in the number being released to live with families and other sponsors, the data collected by the Department of Health and Human Services suggests. Some of those who work in the migrant shelter network say the bottleneck is straining both the children and the system that cares for them.

Most of the children crossed the border alone, without their parents. Many are teenagers from Central America, and they are housed in a system of more than 100 shelters across the United States, with the highest concentration near the southwest border.

Shelter capacities have hovered close to 90 percent since at least May, compared to about 30 percent a year ago. Any new surge in border crossings, which could happen at any time, could quickly overwhelm the system, operators say.

“The closer they get to 100 percent, the less ability they will have to address anything unforeseen,” said Mark Greenberg, who oversaw the care of migrant children for the Health and Human Services Department under President Barack Obama. “Even if there’s not a sudden influx, they will be running out of capacity soon unless something changes.”

Read more below :point_down:

4 Likes

Rabbi Comess-Daniels comes down hard on former member Stephen Miller of his synagogue in Santa Monica, CA regarding the separation of children from their parents. Shame on you Stephen Miller, from those who know him.

But one religious leader took the holiday as an opportunity to send a message to a man who he said was a former congregant: presidential adviser Stephen Miller. In a fiery sermon that has now been covered by news outlets around the world, Rabbi Neil Comess-Daniels of Beth Shir Shalom, a synagogue in Santa Monica, Calif., where Miller grew up, denounced Miller for his role in the proposal that resulted in the family separation crisis at the border, questioning how his values diverged so sharply from the congregation’s.

“The actions that you now encourage President Trump to take make it obvious to me that you didn’t get my or our Jewish message,” Comess-Daniels said. “That notion is completely antithetical to everything I know about Judaism, Jewish law and Jewish values.”

What is troublesome to me is that some of my colleagues and others are concerned what I might have taught you when you were a member of our community,” Comess-Daniels said.
>
More than 2,600 children were separated from their families after they crossed the U.S.-Mexico border this year, the result of a change in federal practice to charge all undocumented immigrants crossing the border with crimes. As The Washington Post has previously reported, Miller, who is considered a hard-liner on immigration, was one of a small circle of Trump administration members who played a crucial role in making the proposal actionable. The separations were halted June 20 amid multiple lawsuits, but hundreds of children remain separated from their families in government-funded shelters.

“From the Jewish perspective, the parent-child relationship is sacrosanct,” he said. “Disrupting it is cruel. Mr. Miller, the policy you helped to conceive and put into practice is cruel.

His comments echoed those made by Miller’s uncle David S. Glosser, who in August penned a scathing op-ed that noted the family’s history of immigration to the United States — the family’s patriarch, Wolf-Leib Glosser, landed at Ellis Island after fleeing violence in Eastern Europe — and accused Miller of being a hypocrite."

3 Likes

We literally had a serial killer working as a border agent. :flushed:

A longtime U.S. Border Patrol agent is being called a “serial killer” after he was arrested and charged with the murder of four women in southern Texas on Saturday.

Juan David Ortiz, 35, was arrested on Saturday in Laredo, Texas, after he allegedly attempted to abduct a fifth woman, the Webb County Sheriff’s Office said. He has been charged with the murder of four women over the past two weeks, as well as unlawful restraint, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and evading arrest.

2 Likes

U.S. Loses Track of Another 1,500 Migrant Children, Investigators Find

In findings that lawmakers described as troubling, Senate investigators said the department could not determine with certainty the whereabouts of 1,488 out of 11,254 children the agency had placed with sponsors in 2018, based on follow-up calls from April 1 to June 30.

The inability to track the whereabouts of migrant children after they have been released to sponsors has raised concerns that they could end up with human traffickers or be used as laborers by people posing as relatives.

4 Likes