Immigration: issues and policy

Windthin · September 19, 2020, 6:01pm

Trump’s blatant racism was on display in Minnesota, where he claimed to crowds that Biden would turn the state into a “refugee camp” and bragged about deporting Somali nationals in one of the states with the largest Somali-born populations.

Trump at Minnesota rally: Biden will turn state into a ‘refugee camp’

“I’m your wall between the American dream and chaos,” the president said.

President Donald Trump said his Democratic rival Joe Biden would “turn Minnesota into a refugee camp” and bragged about deporting Somali nationals, sharpening his play for the battleground state during a Friday rally.

“I’m your wall between the American dream and chaos,” Trump said.

Speaking in Bemidji, Minn., Trump repeated claims that Biden would dramatically increase the number of refugees in the country. He lauded the deportation of a number of Somali nationals, speaking in a state with one of the largest ethnic Somali populations in the country.

“These hardened criminals are back in their country where they can do all the complaining they want,” Trump said. “And your families are safer for it.”

The Trump administration has made stonewalling admissions for refugees a cornerstone of its immigration policy.

Seeking to draw a contrast with Biden, Trump said the Democratic nominee would open the doors for refugees from “jihadist regions” like Yemen and Somalia. He also derided Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who came to the United States as a child refugee from Somalia, calling her an “extremist.”

Trump last year called for Omar and a number of other high-profile progressive congresswomen to “go back” to “the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” Supporters also chanted “send her back” during a Trump rally last year — a line that has become a rallying cry among his base.

“Omar, how the hell did she win the election,” Trump said Friday.

Trump also directly echoed his law-and-order message in the town a couple of hours to the north of Minneapolis, which was a nexus of protests early this summer after George Floyd was killed by a white police officer. Trump has since derided the protests as violent uprisings, urging federal forces to restore order.

“They’re still trying to get rid of your police force in Minneapolis?” Trump said to a jeering crowd. “See they never learn.”

Trump has rebranded his rallies as “peaceful protests”, mocking municipalities that have allowed protesters to gather in spite of social distancing requirements and crowd-size limits due to the coronavirus pandemic. During his Friday talk, attendees were closely packed together, many not wearing masks.

Conspicuously absent from his address was any mention of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whose death was announced during his rally. Trump bragged during the speech that he didn’t look at the teleprompter when speaking at rallies, and no aides interrupted him on stage.

Just before boarding Air Force One after his rally, Trump said: “She just died? I didn’t know that. She led an amazing life, what else can you say?”

Recent polling has shown Biden pulling ahead in Minnesota, but Trump said Friday that what he’s read about the area made him confident he was in good standing.

“There’s no way that I’m nine points down,” Trump said. “This is not the crowd of somebody’s who’s going to finish second in this state to sleepy Joe.”

Trump’s appearance comes on the heels of Biden’s own trip to the battleground state. The former vice president toured a training center in a suburb of Duluth and uncorked a speech aimed at union members and blue-collar workers in the state.

“Like a lot of you, I spent a lot of my life with guys like Donald Trump looking down on me; looking down on people who make a living with their hands, people who take care of our kids [or] clean our streets,” Biden said. “These are the guys who always thought they were better than me, better than us, because they had a lot of money.”

Biden also picked up on the “Scranton vs. Park Avenue” theme his campaign has raised in recent days, including at a televised town hall Thursday near the former vice president’s birthplace in Pennsylvania. Biden again tore into comments Trump made earlier this week to journalist George Stephanopoulos that “stocks are owned by everybody” as part of a defense of his stewardship of the economy during the pandemic.

“What the hell’s he talking about?” Biden said. “People I grew up with in Scranton, Claymont, [Del.], they don’t have money in stocks. Every penny we made was to pay the bills and take care of the families, put clothes on the back and a roof overhead.”

Shortly before taking the lectern at his Bemidji rally, Trump mocked Biden’s “Scranton vs. Park Avenue” line, repeating his common attack as Biden an internationalist who will bend to China’s will.

“Joe Biden says this is a race between Scranton and Park Avenue,” Trump tweeted. “This is a race between Scranton and China. Joe Biden betrayed Scranton, and America, to China and foreign countries. I will always put America First!”

Trump tells supporters Biden will flood Minnesota with “an influx of refugees”

President Trump on Friday night warned his crowd in Bemidji, Minnesota, that former Vice President Joe Biden would flood the state with refugees from the world’s most dangerous countries. Mr. Trump made the remarks in a state that has a large population of Somali refugees.

“One of the most vital issues in this election is the subject of refugees. You know it, perhaps better than almost anybody,” Mr. Trump said before questioning how Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar won her reelection in August.

“How the hell did she win the election? How did she win? It’s unbelievable,” he said. “Every family in Minnesota needs to know about Sleepy Joe Biden’s extreme plan to flood your state with an influx of refugees from Somalia, from other places all over the planet.”

Mr. Trump narrowly lost Minnesota in 2016 and polling shows him trailing Biden. The president was in neighboring Wisconsin on Thursday night where he trumpeted his administration’s work on the coronavirus and criticized Biden and his running mate, Senator Kamala Harris.

The president announced billions in aid to Puerto Rico right before the election, claimed 100 million doses of coronavirus vaccines would be available by the end of the year and said he thinks he knows better than his own experts much of the time.

“We’ve done more for Puerto Rico than anybody,” Mr. Trump said of an island he once called “one of the most corrupt places on earth.” Mr. Trump for years rejected the idea of additional aid for Puerto Rico.

Asked why he’s pushing for the aid package now, so close to the election instead of a year ago, the president replied, “because what we’re doing is we’ve been working on it for a long time.”

Many Puerto Ricans live in Florida, where polls show Mr. Trump is toe-to-toe with Biden.

dragonfly9 · September 19, 2020, 6:54pm

yes…T got royally critiqued by Morning Joe (which he watches) and they said T had alienated and acted poorly with Puerto Rico (correct) and low and behold same day a big financial package goes to PR. Just our impulsive, vote-grubbing maniac President.

Windthin · September 19, 2020, 6:58pm

Oh yes. I was born in Puerto Rico, so I follow that. Reporters at his last press conference hit him hard on that, and pretty much nobody believes the timing is coincidence; it’s a blatant attempt to buy votes.

Windthin · September 19, 2020, 8:23pm

Pet_Proletariat · September 20, 2020, 4:46am

ICE Hysterectomy Doctor Wasn’t Even a Board-Certified OB-GYN

On Friday, a spokesperson for the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology told The Daily Beast that its records show Amin is not certified by the organization. A spokesperson for the American Board of Medical Specialties, the leading organization for physician board certification in the U.S., said Amin was not certified by any of the 24 ABMS member boards.

Azadeh Shahshahani, an attorney with one of the immigrant rights groups that filed the complaint, said it was “outrageous” that ICE would send detainees to a doctor who had not passed this quality control.

“It shows the lack of care that ICE feels for detained immigrants, for their wellbeing and healthcare,” said Shahshahani, the legal and advocacy director for Project South. “It’s really disturbing."

Windthin · September 22, 2020, 5:21pm

ICE Forced Sterilizations Claim Revives America’s Sick Eugenics Tradition

The procedures a detainee says are being performed now are of a piece with states’ not-so-long ago efforts to sterilize people of color as supposed “morons” and “sex delinquents.”

Not long after defenders of Donald Trump’s anti-immigration agenda pilloried U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for calling Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) prisons “concentration camps on our southern border,” an ICE detainee in Georgia is alleging cruel and horrific medical neglect, including forced sterilizations performed by a gynecologist dubbed “the uterus collector.”

“When I met all these women who had had surgeries, I thought this was like an experimental concentration camp,” the detainee is quoted as saying in a whistleblower complaint, noting that between October and December 2019, she met five different women at the prison who had been given non-consensual hysterectomies. “It was like they’re experimenting with our bodies.”

The Third Reich’s experiments in sterilization, conducted at the Auschwitz and Ravensbrück camps, and ultimately including more 400,000 children and adult victims, looms larger than any other in the world’s historical memory. But Germany’s eugenics sterilization project—a program of mass genocide—should be recognized as an example of applied learning rooted in lessons taken from the United States, the original world-renowned leader in compulsory sterilization.

“I have studied with interest the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock,” Hitler reportedly told a Nazi colleague. “I’m sure that occasionally mistakes do occur as a result. But the possibility of excess and error is still no proof of the incorrectness of these laws.”

America’s sterilization laws, accepted by the Supreme Court, variously targeted Black, Native, Latina, and Puerto Rican women for over a century as more than 60,000 people were forcibly sterilized under legislation originally and broadly dedicated to the eradication of “feeblemindedness,” but which ultimately served as a means to racial extermination.

The world’s first compulsory sterilization legislation, passed in 1907, was enacted in Indiana, followed in 1909 by the "Asexualization Act” in California. Those two laws heavily informed The Third Reich’s 1933 “Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases.”

California would ultimately perform one-third of all U.S. mandatory sterilizations, more than any other state. Latina women, mostly those of Mexican descent, were sterilized at 59 percent higher rates than non-Latinas. Researchers Nicole L. Novak and Natalie Lira reviewed medical records that showed “doctors who performed sterilizations would label Latinas as “sex delinquents” whose “sterilizations were described as necessary to protect the state from increased crime, poverty and racial degeneracy.”

The program was officially terminated under the law in 1979, but unwanted sterilizations would continued to be performed in California, with an estimated 1,400 incarcerated women subjected to unwanted and illegal hysterectomies between 1997 and 2013 by “doctors under contract with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.” The eugenicist reasoning for these human rights violations remained the same as ever, based in social control and the “breeding out” of defective traits. Survivors of the program “maintain that prison medical staff coerced the women, targeting those deemed likely to return to prison in the future.”

Between 1929 and 1973, North Carolina forcibly sterilized nearly 7,600 people, a majority of them Black women. (From 1950 to 1966, the sterilization rate for Black women was more than three times that of white women, and over 12 times that of white men.) The state has the dubious distinction of maintaining the only eugenics program where social workers were allowed to file petitions—with a 95 percent approval rate—recommending their clients for hysterectomies. Nonconsensual sterilization of Black women was so common in North Carolina and across the South that it was called a “Mississippi appendectomy,” because, as one historian states, doctors “would tell women they needed to get their appendix out, but then sterilize them.”

Justifications for forced sterilizations in North Carolina records cited in recent record reviews include a 21-year-old mother of six who showed “no effort to curb her sexual desires and is very promiscuous with numerous suitors”; a 32-year-old childless woman described as “oversexed”; a 1947 note that reads, “she wears men’s clothing all [the] time.” The youngest person targeted by the state’s program was a mere 9 years old. Rutgers historian Johanna Schoen writes that “more than one-third of those sterilized were not even of legal age to buy a drink or vote, let alone give consent to their sterilization.”

North Carolina is often cited for its reproductive abuses of Black women because, along with Virginia, it recognized and paid survivors of its forced sterilization program under the 2015 Eugenics Compensation Act. But these violations of Black women’s health and bodily autonomy took place across the South. Civil rights icon Fannie Lou Hamer was forcibly sterilized in Mississippi’s Sunflower County hospital after checking-in for minor surgery to remove a uterine tumor in 1961.

“In the North Sunflower County Hospital, I would say about six out of the 10 Negro women that go to the hospital are sterilized with the tubes tied,” Hamer testified in 1965.

Black women weren’t the only targets of these programs. Though the numbers aren’t fully clear because of poor record keeping, a 2010 study found that “as many as 25 to 50 percent of Native American women in America were sterilized between 1970 and 1976.” Many of those women were coerced into procedures by medical staff working for the Indian Health Service. Between the passage of its forced sterilization law in 1937 and the '70s, roughly one-third of all women of child bearing age in Puerto Rico were forcibly sterilized under a program instituted by federal and local Puerto Rican officials.

These programs heaped systemic violence upon Black and other nonwhite women, demonstrating the U.S.’s consistent violation of reproductive rights in service of racist ends. The ICE project–a literal crime against humanity according to the International Criminal Court at The Hague–is America reapplying itself to an undertaking of aspirational whiteness. It is a continuance of efforts to eradicate perceived assaults on and threats to white supremacy by an administration, led nominally by Donald Trump along with white nationalist Stephen Miller, that has made its intentions clear.

“If you are sterilizing someone,” says University of Southern California Historian William Deverell, "you are saying, if not to them directly, ‘Your possible progeny are unassimilable, and we choose not to deal with that.’”

Windthin · October 7, 2020, 1:20am

‘We Need to Take Away Children,’ No Matter How Young, Justice Dept. Officials Said

Top department officials were “a driving force” behind President Trump’s child separation policy, a draft investigation report said.

Jeff Sessions and Rod Rosenstein were driving forces behind this.

The five U.S. attorneys along the border with Mexico, including three appointed by President Trump, recoiled in May 2018 against an order to prosecute all illegal immigrants even if it meant separating children from their parents. They told top Justice Department officials they were “deeply concerned” about the children’s welfare.

But the attorney general at the time, Jeff Sessions, made it clear what Mr. Trump wanted on a conference call later that afternoon, according to a two-year inquiry by the Justice Department’s inspector general into Mr. Trump’s “zero tolerance” family separation policy.

“We need to take away children,” Mr. Sessions told the prosecutors, according to participants’ notes. One added in shorthand: “If care about kids, don’t bring them in. Won’t give amnesty to people with kids.”

Rod J. Rosenstein, then the deputy attorney general, went even further in a second call about a week later, telling the five prosecutors that it did not matter how young the children were. He said that government lawyers should not have refused to prosecute two cases simply because the children were barely more than infants.

“Those two cases should not have been declined,” John Bash, the departing U.S. attorney in western Texas, wrote to his staff immediately after the call. Mr. Rosenstein “instructed that, per the A.G.’s policy, we should NOT be categorically declining immigration prosecutions of adults in family units because of the age of a child.”

The Justice Department’s top officials were “a driving force” behind the policy that spurred the separation of thousands of families, many of them fleeing violence in Central America and seeking asylum in the United States, before Mr. Trump abandoned it amid global outrage, according to a draft report of the results of the investigation by Michael E. Horowitz, the department’s inspector general.

The separation of migrant children from their parents, sometimes for months, was at the heart of the Trump administration’s assault on immigration. But the fierce backlash when the administration struggled to reunite the children turned it into one of the biggest policy debacles of the president’s term.

Though Mr. Sessions sought to distance himself from the policy, allowing Mr. Trump and Homeland Security Department officials to largely be blamed, he and other top law enforcement officials understood that “zero tolerance” meant that migrant families would be separated and wanted that to happen because they believed it would deter future illegal immigration, Mr. Horowitz wrote.

“The department’s single-minded focus on increasing prosecutions came at the expense of careful and effective implementation of the policy, especially with regard to prosecution of family-unit adults and the resulting child separations,” the draft report said.

The draft report, citing more than 45 interviews with key officials, emails and other documents, provides the most complete look at the discussions inside the Justice Department as the family separation policy was developed, pushed and ultimately carried out with little concern for children.

This article is based on a review of the 86-page draft report and interviews with three government officials who read it in recent months and described its conclusions and many of the details in it. The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they had not been authorized to discuss it publicly, cautioned that the final report could change.

Before publishing the findings of its investigations, the inspector general’s office typically provides draft copies to Justice Department leaders and others mentioned in the reports to ensure that they are accurate.

Mr. Horowitz had been preparing to release his report since late summer, according to a person familiar with the investigation, though the process allowing for responses from current and former department officials whose conduct is under scrutiny is likely to delay its release until after the presidential election.

Mr. Sessions refused to be interviewed, the report noted. Mr. Rosenstein, who is now a lawyer in private practice, defended himself in his interview with investigators in response to questioning about his role, according to two of the officials. Mr. Rosenstein’s former office submitted a 64-page response to the report.

“If any United States attorney ever charged a defendant they did not personally believe warranted prosecution, they violated their oath of office,” Mr. Rosenstein said in a statement. “I never ordered anyone to prosecute a case.”

Gene Hamilton, a top lawyer and ally of Stephen Miller, the architect of the president’s assault on immigration, argued in a 32-page response that Justice Department officials merely took direction from the president. Mr. Hamilton cited an April 3, 2018, meeting with Mr. Sessions; the homeland security secretary at the time, Kirstjen Nielsen; and others in which the president “ranted” and was on “a tirade,” demanding as many prosecutions as possible.

Mr. Hamilton declined to comment for this article, as did Mr. Horowitz’s office. Mr. Sessions did not respond to requests for comment. Alexa Vance, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department, disputed the draft report and said the Homeland Security Department referred cases for prosecution.

“The draft report relied on for this article contains numerous factual errors and inaccuracies,” she said. “While D.O.J. is responsible for the prosecutions of defendants, it had no role in tracking or providing custodial care to the children of defendants. Finally, both the timing and misleading content of this leak raise troubling questions about the motivations of those responsible for it.”

The draft report also documented other revelations that had not previously been known:

Government prosecutors reacted with alarm at the separation of children from their parents during a secret 2017 pilot program along the Mexican border in Texas. “We have now heard of us taking breastfeeding defendant moms away from their infants,” one government prosecutor wrote to his superiors. “I did not believe this until I looked at the duty log.”

Border Patrol officers missed serious felony cases because they were stretched too thin by the zero-tolerance policy requiring them to detain and prosecute all of the misdemeanor illegal entry cases. One Texas prosecutor warned top Justice Department officials in 2018 that “sex offenders were released” as a result.

Senior Justice Department officials viewed the welfare of the children as the responsibility of other agencies and their duty as tracking the parents. “I just don’t see that as a D.O.J. equity,” Mr. Rosenstein told the inspector general.

The failure to inform the U.S. Marshals Service before announcing the zero-tolerance policy led to serious overcrowding and budget overruns. The marshals were forced to cut back on serving warrants in other cases, saying that “when you take away manpower, you can’t make a safe arrest.”

For two years, Ms. Nielsen has taken the brunt of the public criticism for separating migrant families because of her decision to refer adults crossing the border illegally with children for prosecution. A day after the president’s retreat, Mr. Sessions distanced his department from the decision, telling CBN News that “we never really intended” to separate children.

That was false, according to the draft report. It made clear that from the policy’s earliest days in a five-month test along the border in Texas, Justice Department officials understood — and encouraged — the separation of children as an expected part of the desire to prosecute all illegal border crossers.

“It is the hope that this separation will act as a deterrent to parents bringing their children into the harsh circumstances that are present when trying to enter the United States illegally,” a Border Patrol official wrote on Oct. 28, 2017, to the U.S. attorney in New Mexico, according to the draft report.

After the pilot program in Texas ended, the report asserted, Mr. Sessions, Mr. Hamilton and Mr. Rosenstein pushed aggressively to expand the practice across the entire southwestern border, with help from prosecutors.

In a briefing two days after Christmas in 2017, top Justice Department officials asked Mr. Bash for statistics from the pilot program, conducted by his predecessor, that could be used to develop “nationwide prosecution guidelines.” Mr. Bash, a former White House adviser, did not receive a follow-up request for the information. Thinking that the idea had been abandoned, he did not provide it.

By April 2018, Mr. Sessions nevertheless moved to enact the zero-tolerance policy across the entire border with Mexico. Mr. Rosenstein told the inspector general that Mr. Sessions “understood what the consequences were.”

“The A.G.’s goal,” he said, “was to create a more effective deterrent so that everybody would believe that they had a risk of being prosecuted.”

But the Justice Department still needed to persuade Ms. Nielsen to refer all families for prosecution, which she had been resisting. The draft report says a pressure campaign culminated in a May 3 meeting in which Mr. Sessions insisted that Customs and Border Protection begin referring all of those cases to prosecutors.

A note from Mr. Hamilton to Mr. Sessions before the meeting indicated: “You should lead this discussion.”

“We must vigorously enforce our criminal immigration laws to ensure that there are consequences for illegal actions and to deter future illegal immigration,” Mr. Sessions planned to say, according to the draft report. “That means that an illegal alien should not get a free pass just because he or she crosses the border illegally with a child.”

When the group voted by a show of hands to proceed, Ms. Nielsen was the only one who kept her hand down, according to two people familiar with the vote, which was reported earlier by NBC News. The next day, Ms. Nielsen backed down, signing a memo referring all adults for prosecution and clearing the way for the children to be separated.

The decision roiled the prosecutors along the border. In Arizona, Elizabeth Strange, the acting U.S. attorney, led a minor rebellion, temporarily declining six cases, citing concern about the children. That prompted a rebuke from top Justice Department officials, who demanded to know “why would they be declining these cases?”

Justice Department officials have repeatedly claimed that they thought the adults would be prosecuted and reunited with their children within hours of being separated. But the inspector general found a memo informing top officials that sentences for adults ranged from three to 14 days, making it all but certain that children would be sent to the custody of officials at the Health and Human Services Department for long periods of time.

“We found no evidence, before or after receipt of the memorandum, that D.O.J. leaders sought to expedite the process for completing sentencing in order to facilitate reunification of separated families,” the inspector general wrote.

Over all, Mr. Horowitz concluded in the draft, Mr. Sessions and other senior department officials “were aware that full implementation of the zero-tolerance policy would result in criminal referrals by D.H.S. of adults who enter the country illegally with children and that the prosecution of these family-unit adults would result in children being separated from families.”

dragonfly9 · October 7, 2020, 1:21am

Horrible

The five U.S. attorneys along the border with Mexico, including three appointed by President Trump, recoiled in May 2018 against an order to prosecute all illegal immigrants even if it meant separating children from their parents. They told top Justice Department officials they were “deeply concerned” about the children’s welfare.

But the attorney general at the time, Jeff Sessions, made it clear what Mr. Trump wanted on a conference call later that afternoon, according to a two-year inquiry by the Justice Department’s inspector general into Mr. Trump’s “zero tolerance” family separation policy.

“We need to take away children,” Mr. Sessions told the prosecutors, according to participants’ notes. One added in shorthand: “If care about kids, don’t bring them in. Won’t give amnesty to people with kids.”

Rod J. Rosenstein, then the deputy attorney general, went even further in a second call about a week later, telling the five prosecutors that it did not matter how young the children were. He said that government lawyers should not have refused to prosecute two cases simply because the children were barely more than infants.

“Those two cases should not have been declined,” John Bash, the departing U.S. attorney in western Texas, wrote to his staff immediately after the call. Mr. Rosenstein “instructed that, per the A.G.’s policy, we should NOT be categorically declining immigration prosecutions of adults in family units because of the age of a child.”

The Justice Department’s top officials were “a driving force” behind the policy that spurred the separation of thousands of families, many of them fleeing violence in Central America and seeking asylum in the United States, before Mr. Trump abandoned it amid global outrage, according to a draft report of the results of the investigation by Michael E. Horowitz, the department’s inspector general.

Windthin · October 7, 2020, 11:53pm

Breastfeeding Immigrant Moms Were Separated From Babies Under Trump Admin

Windthin · October 10, 2020, 11:16pm

Family separation and the Trump administration’s immigration legacy

Officials said in 2017 that separated migrants under 12 couldn’t find parents again on their own

The memo, written by federal prosecutors in Texas, was never sent to Washington. The Trump administration launched its family separation policy in mid-2018.

New report on Trump’s child separation policy makes it clear: Cruelty was always the point

Trump’s Child Separation Policy Intended to ‘Inflict Hardship’

Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin calls new information around the Trump administration’s child separation policy more proof that the Justice Department is “disgraced and broken.”

Defense of Trump’s family separation policy is built on lies

Federal prosecutors did a dry run of family separations in Texas and found that children younger than 12 shouldn’t be taken away from their parents

Windthin · October 13, 2020, 2:44pm

ICE is Using Torture Against Cameroonian Immigrants to Coerce Deportation, According to New Complaint Filed by Immigrant Rights Groups

dragonfly9 · October 21, 2020, 4:09am

Beyond shameful…

Lawyers say they can’t find the parents of 545 migrant children separated by Trump administration

Lawyers appointed by a federal judge to identify migrant families who were separated by the Trump administration say that they have yet to track down the parents of 545 children and that about two-thirds of those parents were deported to Central America without their children, according to a filing Tuesday from the American Civil Liberties Union.

The Trump administration instituted a “zero tolerance” policy in 2018 that separated migrant children and parents at the southern U.S. border. The administration later confirmed that it had actually begun separating families in 2017 along some parts of the border under a pilot program. The ACLU and other pro-bono law firms were tasked with finding the members of families separated during the pilot program.

Unlike the 2,800 families separated under zero tolerance in 2018, most of whom remained in custody when the policy was ended by executive order, many of the more than 1,000 parents separated from their children under the pilot program had already been deported before a federal judge in California ordered that they be found.

Windthin · October 22, 2020, 6:40pm

US Ice officers ‘used torture to make Africans sign own deportation orders’

Cameroonians say officers choked, beat and threatened to kill them, as lawyers tell of pre-election removal drive

US immigration officers allegedly tortured Cameroonian asylum seekers to force them to sign their own deportation orders, in what lawyers and activists describe as a brutal scramble to fly African migrants out of the country in the run-up to the elections.

Many of the Cameroonian migrants in a Mississippi detention centre refused to sign, fearing death at the hands of Cameroonian government forces responsible for widespread civilian killings, and because they had asylum hearings pending.

According to multiple accounts, detainees were threatened, choked, beaten, pepper-sprayed and threatened with more violence to make them sign. Several were put in handcuffs by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officers, and their fingerprints were taken forcibly in place of a signature on documents called stipulated orders of removal, by which the asylum seekers waive their rights to further immigration hearings and accept deportation.

Parents of 545 children still not found three years after Trump separation policy

Read more

Lawyers and human rights advocates said there had been a significant acceleration of deportations in recent weeks, a trend they see as linked to the looming elections and the possibility that Ice could soon be under new management.

“The abuse we are witnessing, especially right now against black immigrants, isn’t new, but it is escalating,” said Christina Fialho, executive director of an advocacy group, Freedom for Immigrants (FFI). “In late September, early October of this year, we began to receive calls on our hotline from Cameroonian and Congolese immigrants detained in Ice prisons across the country. And they were being subjected to threats of deportation, often accompanied by physical abuse.”

“The reality is that Ice operates in the shadows. They thrive in secrecy,” Fialho added. “We know that the US government is deporting key witnesses in an effort to silence survivors and absolve Ice of legal liability.”

A plane carrying 60 Cameroonian and 28 Congolese asylum seekers was quietly flown out of Fort Worth Alliance airport in Texas on 13 October to deliver them to their home countries. The charter plane did not release a flight plan, but it was tracked by immigration rights group Witness at the Border, which said it stopped in Senegal, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo and then Kenya before flying back to Texas.

The Cameroonian deportees were from the country’s English-speaking minority, which has been the target of widespread abuses, including extrajudicial killings, by government security forces seeking to crush a separatist movement. The Trump administration cut the country’s trade privileges at the beginning of this year because of the persistent abuses.

Most of the deportees on the flight had testified that they had suffered detention without charge and torture at the hands of the Cameroonian military, and had relatives who had been killed. They were detained for questioning on arrival in Douala, but some were freed after their families paid bribes, and have since gone into hiding.

As for the others, the lawyer Evaristus Nkongchu said: “We have no knowledge of what happened to those that were deported. We know they arrived, but we haven’t heard what happened after they arrived at the airport.”

The Cameroonian embassy in Washington did not reply to several requests for comment.

Detainees and their lawyers have been told there will be another deportation flight in the coming days, possibly as early as Friday.

‘I kept telling him, “I can’t breathe”’

Cameroonians are routinely denied asylum or parole in the US immigration court system, which is run by the justice department.

Victims, family members, lawyers and human rights activists have described a range of coercive measures used by Ice on Cameroonian detainees at the Adams county correctional centre in Mississippi to make them sign their own deportation orders.

A complaint filed by FFI and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) cites eight cases of forced signatures or fingerprints on stipulated orders of removal.

One of those involved, identified by the initials BJ, said that on 27 September, Ice officers “pepper-sprayed me in the eyes and [one officer] strangled me almost to the point of death. I kept telling him, ‘I can’t breathe.’ I almost died.”

“As a result of the physical violence, they were able to forcibly obtain my fingerprint on the document,” BJ said.

Another detainee, known as DF, said that he was ordered to sign his deportation order by an Ice agent on 28 September.

“I refused to sign. He pressed my neck into the floor. I said, ‘Please, I can’t breathe.’ I lost my blood circulation. Then they took me inside with my hands at my back where there were no cameras,” DF said. According to his account, he was then taken to a punitive wing of the Adams county centre, known as Zulu, and subjected to further assault.

“They put me on my knees where they were torturing me and they said they were going to kill me. They took my arm and twisted it. They were putting their feet on my neck. While in Zulu, they did get my fingerprint on my deportation document and took my picture,” he said. DF was one of the detainees on the 13 October flight to Douala. It is unclear what has happened to him since.

A third detainee, CA, said he was forced to the ground, sat on, handcuffed and pepper-sprayed. “I was crying, ‘I can’t breathe,’ because they were forcefully on top of me pressing their body weight on top of me. My eyes were so hot … I was dragged across the ground,” he said. “The officers told me to open my eyes. I couldn’t. My legs and hands were handcuffed. They forcefully opened my palm. Some of my fingers were broken. They forced my fingerprint on to the paper.”

CA was taken off the 13 October flight, but still faces deportation.

A brief reprieve

Two Cameroonians were taken off the 13 October deportation flight at the last moment after the intervention of human rights advocates through the office for civil rights and civil liberties in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), but they have been told by Ice agents it will not save them from deportation.

Patrick, a detainee who has been told he is on the deportation list, said he has not been able to sleep knowing that Ice agents could come for him at any time, and that for him, deportation could well be a death sentence.

“I live in worry because I don’t know what awaits me. I don’t even know what the next day is going to look like, and will I be taken back home,” Patrick (a pseudonym) told the Guardian in a call from a detention centre. He did not want his name used because of the risk to his surviving family members.

His lawyer, Ruth Hargrove, said: “He actually has a very strong case for asylum, but the problem is he may die before he gets his hearing, because he was supposed to be on that plane that went out last week, and his Ice officer just guaranteed that he will be on the next flight.”

An Ice spokeswoman, Sarah Loicano, confirmed that a formal complaint over use of force against the Cameroonian detainees had been submitted to the DHS inspector general.

Loicano added: “That said, in general, sensationalist unsubstantiated allegations, particularly those made anonymously and without any fact-checkable specifics, is irresponsible, and should be treated with the greatest of scepticism.”

“Ice is firmly committed to the safety and welfare of all those in its custody. Ice provides safe, humane, and appropriate conditions of confinement for individuals detained in its custody,” she said.

For those who have already been deported, any reforms to Ice would be too late, and they are currently in no position to give evidence about their treatment in the US.

The Texas-based sister of one of the deportees who escaped into hiding after the 13 October flight to Douala, told the Guardian: “My brother ran away to America thinking that you will be safe here in another culture. But they sent him back and right now he has no life. He’s hiding in the bush. What can you do in the bush?”

dragonfly9 · October 24, 2020, 2:06am

The members of this displaced community requested refuge in the United States but were sent back into Mexico, and told to wait. They came there after unique tragedies: violent assaults, oppressive extortions, murdered loved ones. They are bound together by the one thing they share in common — having nowhere else to go.

“Sometimes I feel like I can’t hold on anymore,” said Jaqueline Salgado, who fled to the camp from Southern Mexico, sitting outside her tent on a bucket as her children played in the dirt. “But when I remember everything I’ve been through, and how it was worse, I come back to the conclusion that I have to wait.”

Ms. Salgado is one of about 600 people stranded in a place that many Americans might have thought would never exist. It is effectively a refugee camp on the doorstep of the United States, one of several that have sprung up along the border for the first time in the country’s history.

Windthin · October 28, 2020, 8:31pm

More proof that Stephen Miller is a paranoid whack-job.

An architect of Trump’s hard-line immigration policies claims that Biden is ‘a radical outlier.’

One of the key architects of President Trump’s hard-line immigration agenda, Stephen Miller, attacked Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Wednesday “as a radical outlier in the whole of human civilization” for his immigration policies.

Mr. Miller has been a driving force behind the Trump administration’s severely restrictive immigration policies, including one that led thousands of children to be separated from their parents at the southern border. (The parents of 545 migrant children still have not been found, according to court documents filed earlier this month in a case challenging the practice.)

In sometimes angry tones, Mr. Miller — who as top White House adviser on immigration is a federal employee but said he was speaking “in my personal capacity” — offered an apocalyptic vision of a Biden presidency in which he said terrorists would pour into the U.S. and America’s southern border would be overrun by migrants.

“Tens of millions will come from every single part of planet Earth,” Mr. Miller said. Noting that the Trump administration is maintaining a stringent cap on refugee admissions, he alleged that Mr. Biden would approve “a staggering increase on refugees from the most dangerous places in the world.”

The Trump administration had sharply reduced the level of refugees admitted to 15,000 per year, but Mr. Biden has said he would raise the level to 125,000, slightly above where it was by the end of the Obama administration.

Mr. Miller also claimed, without evidence, that Mr. Biden’s intention to reverse a sweeping Trump administration travel ban would allow potential terrorists to enter the U.S.

Four years ago Mr. Trump ran for the presidency vowing to crack down on immigration, promising to build a wall along the southern border and claiming that Mexico would pay for it. (It did not.)

Asked about evidence that immigration has played a relatively smaller role in Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign than it did in 2016 and 2018, Mr. Miller did not object, saying that Mr. Trump is “now campaigning on four years of success.”

Windthin · October 30, 2020, 6:21pm

More Than 40 Immigrants Have Died In ICE Custody In The Past Four Years. Here Are Thousands Of Records About What Happened.

BuzzFeed News has obtained thousands of pages of documents from internal investigations of deaths of immigrants held in ICE custody.

Since January 2017, at least four dozen people have died while being held in detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Some were old, and some were young. Some had been in the US for years before being detained; others came here only recently, seeking refuge or better economic circumstances. Some were in terrible health upon arrival; others became ill while in custody.

One man from Jamaica, who had an aggressive but treatable form of cancer, was locked in solitary confinement for over a week without receiving medical care and died a month later. A Honduran transgender woman who sought asylum in the US was severely dehydrated, showed signs of starvation, and wasn’t given antiretroviral medication before she died, according to the local medical examiner, of complications from AIDS. And at least three people killed themselves even though they were supposed to be under close observation for mental health concerns.

In June 2019, BuzzFeed News filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking the release of emails, investigative reports, medical records, and other documents related to 25 deaths in custody that ICE had publicly disclosed since President Donald Trump took office.

When the agency did not promptly provide records, BuzzFeed News filed a successful lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency. To date, DHS has produced more than 5,000 pages of documents related to deaths in ICE custody. Collectively, they tell the story of how ICE has in some instances failed to provide adequate care to detainees, some of whom are locked up for months or years before their immigration cases are resolved.

The agency is expected to hand over more records in the future; BuzzFeed News today is releasing all of the case files that have been turned over. Although there have been news reports and congressional investigations on many of these incidents, the full record behind these deaths has never before been made available.

ICE has publicly insisted that both the detention facilities it runs as well as those that are operated by private, for-profit corporations provide thorough and adequate medical care to all detainees. In response to a request for comment on this story, ICE said the agency takes the health and safety of detainees very seriously and while deaths are “unfortunate and always a cause for concern,” they are “exceedingly rare.”

But internal emails show that ICE’s own investigators raised serious concerns about the agency’s care of the people it detains, with one employee describing the treatment leading up to one death as “a bit scary.”

The documents show that:

In multiple instances, guards who were supposed to observe detainees placed in solitary confinement for extra monitoring falsified records to hide apparent dereliction of duty. In at least two cases — at Eloy Detention Center in Arizona and Adelanto Detention Facility in California — people died while they were not being watched but should have been. “During the 51-minute period, the officer documented three welfare checks, none of which were supported by video surveillance,” one internal death review states. The guard resigned two days later, documents show.

After Roxsana Hernandez, a 33-year-old trans asylum-seeker from Honduras died in custody in May 2018, ICE initially blamed her death on cardiac arrest. But some investigators took issue with her treatment, noting that Hernandez lost 40 pounds in custody, and questioned why Customs and Border Protection had transferred someone in such a vulnerable medical state. A private consulting firm retained by ICE to review detainee deaths, Creative Corrections, appeared to offer to exclude potentially troublesome information about her care while in custody from its findings. “If you want me to back off,” one of the company’s analysts wrote, “I will modify the report accordingly. Let me know your druthers.”

Medical staff at some detention facilities — including a psychiatrist at Krome North Processing Center in Miami and nurses at Glades County Detention Center, also in Florida — at times did not use an interpreter when treating a detainee with limited English proficiency. The detainee was asked to sign documents related to his care in a language that he may not have understood. He later died while still in ICE custody.

Investigators found other failures that point to serious lack of care even if they did not lead directly to death. One man whom doctors noted had no lower teeth and was missing several upper teeth during a physical, for example, was not given a special diet to make sure his nutritional intake was adequate. In another instance, surveillance footage showed a detainee falling out of his wheelchair and struggling to move, but nurses told a guard who expressed concern that the detainee was faking or exaggerating his symptoms. Later that day, the detainee died.

CoreCivic, which operates several ICE detention centers through contracts with the agency — including Cibola County Correctional Center in Milan, New Mexico, where Roxsana Hernandez was held before her death — said in a statement that it takes seriously its obligation to adhere to federal detention standards, though in the majority of its facilities it is not responsible for the healthcare services to detainees. (The company’s full statement to the media after she died is available on its website.) GeoGroup, another private firm running facilities for ICE, referred questions to the agency.

Under Trump, who has pushed for aggressive immigration enforcement, ICE has locked up people in record numbers. The population in custody peaked in the summer of 2019 when roughly 55,000 immigrants were being held in local jails and private prisons across the country, where ICE is responsible for their healthcare and safety.

Although ICE has maintained that it takes the well-being of its detainees seriously and spends hundreds of millions of dollars on their medical needs, immigrant advocates have repeatedly questioned the quality of care in ICE custody, concerns that grew this year as detainees began contracting COVID-19. Despite a dramatic dip in the detention population in recent months due to the pandemic, 21 immigrants died in ICE custody in the most recent fiscal year ending Sept. 30, the highest number of such deaths under the agency’s watch in 15 years. Several of those who died tested positive for the coronavirus.

As part of agency protocol, ICE reviews each death and also notifies the DHS Office of Inspector General. Death reviews can involve reviewing documents and interviews of representatives of detention center operators, outside healthcare providers, and third-party consultants, as well as senior agency leadership.

The documents themselves:

dragonfly9 · November 9, 2020, 10:31pm

Unconscionable and horrific situationb at this juncture…more children, now 666 and 1/3 UNDER 5 yo can not be returned to their parents.

WASHINGTON — Lawyers working to reunite migrant families separated by the Trump administration before and during its “zero tolerance” policy at the border now believe the number of separated children for whom they have not been able to find parents is 666, higher than they told a federal judge last month, according to an email obtained by NBC News.

About one third of those children were under 5 at the time of the separation, according to a source familiar with the data.

In the email, Steven Herzog, the attorney leading efforts to reunite the families, explains that the number is higher because the new group includes those “for whom the government did not provide any phone number.” Previously, the lawyers said they could not find the parents of 545 children after they had tried to make contact but had been unsuccessful.

Windthin · November 9, 2020, 10:46pm

I just can’t get past how horrifically appropriate this number is for this evil regime.

dragonfly9 · November 10, 2020, 12:16am

Yeah, I noticed that too.

Windthin · November 12, 2020, 7:35pm

Something sneaky going down with ICE; their twitter account has disappeared.

Nothing good ever happens when the Trump regime gets more secretive…