🏴‍☠️🤮👎🏻⚰️”PERP NATION” — Cowardly Regime Uses COVID-19 As Pretext For Grotesque Abuses Of Migrant Children, As Congress, Federal Courts Spinelessly Allow It To Happen! — “Crimes Against Humanity” Have Consequences For “Perp Nations!”

Lomi Kriel
Lomi Kriel
Immigration Reporter
Texas Tribune & Pro Publica

https://www.texastribune.org/2020/08/04/border-migrant-children-hotels/

Federal agents are expelling asylum seekers as young as 8 months from the border, citing COVID-19 risks

Thousands of migrant children have been expelled by the Trump administration since March. Some have been held in hotels without access to lawyers or family. Advocates say many are now “virtually impossible” to find.

BY LOMI KRIEL, THE TEXAS TRIBUNE AND PROPUBLICA AUG. 4, 20208 HOURS AGO

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

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

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

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

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

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

. . . .

A sense of deja vu

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

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

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

So far, both efforts have failed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What happened to the rest? No one would say.

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Read the rest of the article at the link.

It might be “below the radar screen” during COVID-19. After all, that’s what criminals like the Trump kakistocracy and their DHS accomplices count on — a diversion so that they can abuse children and violate human rights and human dignity to the content of their evil, White Nationalist hearts.

But, eventually, the truth about the “crimes against humanity” by the regime’s cowards as well as the complicity of legislators, the Roberts Court, and a host of others will come out.

How will we explain to future generations what we have done to our fellow humans, particularly the most vulnerable who have sought our legal protection and found only cruelty, racism, and lawlessness? How will we justify racist-driven institutionalized child abuse and “Dred Scottification” of  “the other” on our watch? We have become “Perp Nation!”

Due Process Forever!

PWS

08-05-20

FRAUD, WASTE, & ABUSE: INFANTS ORDERED TO APPEAR IN U.S. IMMIGRATION COURTS UNDER TRUMP & SESSIONS! – Shocking Stupidity, Inhumanity, & Waste Of Taxpayer Dollars!

https://www.texastribune.org/2018/07/18/immigrant-separated-families-infant-court-defend-donald-trump-zero-tol/

CHRISTINA JEWETT AND SHEFALI LUTHRA, REPORT FOR KAISER HEALTH NEWS IN THE TEXAS TRIBUNE:

The Trump administration has summoned at least 70 infants to immigration court for their own deportation proceedings since Oct. 1, according to Justice Department data provided to Kaiser Health News.

These are children who need frequent touching and bonding with a parent and naps every few hours, and some were of breastfeeding age, medical experts say. They’re unable to speak and still learning when it’s day versus night.

“For babies, the basics are really important. It’s the holding, the proper feeding, proper nurturing,” said Shadi Houshyar, who directs early childhood and child welfare initiatives at the advocacy group Families USA.

The number of infants under age 1 involved has been rising — up threefold from 24 infants in the fiscal year that ended last Sept. 30, and 46 infants the year before.

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The Justice Department data show that a total of 1,500 “unaccompanied” children, from newborns to age 3, have been called in to immigration court since Oct. 1, 2015.

Roughly three-fourths of the children involved are represented by a lawyer and they have to make their case that they should stay in the United States.

Officials who review such deportation cases say most children under 1 cross the border with a parent and their deportation cases proceed together.

But some of the infants were deemed “unaccompanied” only after law enforcement separated them from their parents during the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” immigration policy. The children were sent to facilities across the U.S. under the supervision of the Department of Health and Human Services.

“This is to some extent a … crisis of the creation of the government,” said Robert Carey, who previously headed the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which takes custody of unaccompanied minors. “It’s a tragic and ironic turn of events.”

Younger children are also considered unaccompanied if they enter the United States with an older family member who is not yet 18. The data do not clarify which children arrived that way or which were separated from their parents.

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The Justice Department did not respond to a request for further data about where the children are housed. They could be in a foster care home, in a group home, with a relative or sponsor, or reunited with a parent. HHS, which operates the refugee resettlement office, did not provide comment by publication time.

In previous statements, the government has argued that separation — and its consequences — are unfortunate but unavoidable under the law.

“There is a surefire way to avoid separation from your children. Present yourself legally … or stay back at your home country, and go through the process others do,” HHS Secretary Alex Azar said on a media call earlier this month. “None of us want children separated from their parents. I want no children in our care and custody.”

The number of unaccompanied children called in to court since Oct. 1, 2015, swells to 2,900 if kids up to 5 are included. The total will rise between now and Sept. 30, when the fiscal year ends, noted Susan Long, a statistician at Syracuse University and director of TRAC, a repository of immigration and federal court data. There’s also an ongoing backlog in entering the data.

In June, a district judge in San Diego ordered the government to reunify families within a month, specifically directing them to unite children younger than 5 with parents by July 10.

HHS reunited about half of those children by July 12 — 57 out of 103. Others, the government said, could not be placed with a parent, citing in some cases “serious criminal history” or parents currently being in jail.

In 12 cases, those children’s parents had already been deported. In another, the government had failed to figure out where the child’s parent was located, and in another, the parent had a “communicable disease,” HHS said.

The Department of Homeland Security, which issues the court orders, also did not respond to a request for comment.

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In the removal cases, children have no right to an appointed lawyer, but rather to a list of legal aid attorneys that the child’s current caregiver can contact.

And young children rarely know the details of why they fled their home country, especially without a parent present, noted Eileen Blessinger, a Virginia-based immigration lawyer who has been aiding parents she was connected with through advocates on the Texas-Mexico border.

“Think about it as a parent. You’re not going to tell your child they might be killed, right?” she said. “A lot of the kids don’t know.”

Immigration court, which is an administrative unit of the Department of Justice, is different from typical courts. It handles “respondents” who may be too young to speak, but has no social workers or legal remedies focused on the best interest of a child.

Lenni Benson, a New York Law School professor and founder of the Safe Passage Project, which provides legal services to migrant youth, said she was recently at a large family detention center in Dilley talking to families. She said it’s rare for the families fleeing violence in Central America to bring infants, given the dangers of the journey, which include risks of abduction and a lack of clean water.

“There are people who do that because they are terrified for their child” in the home country, she said.

Benson recounted being in immigration court in 2014 when a judge asked for a crying baby to be removed from the courtroom. She said she paused to inform the judge that the baby was the next respondent on the docket — and asked that the child’s grandmother stand in.

The stakes for the babies, and any migrant fleeing violence, are high, said Paul Wickham Schmidt, a former immigration judge who retired in 2016 after 13 years on the bench in Arlington, Va.

“Final orders of deportation have consequences,” he said. “For something that has a very serious result, this system has been described as death penalty cases in traffic court.”

Ashley Tabaddor, president of the National Association of Immigration Judges and a judge specializing in juvenile cases in Los Angeles, acknowledged that the Trump administration narrowed a directive on how much judges can assist juveniles in court. Still, she said, judges do their best to ensure that young children get a fair hearing.

Justice Department data show that asylum denials are at a nearly 10-year high at 42 percent, and the Associated Press reported that the administration has raised the bar for making a successful case.

At the same time, children can be strapped for resources, Blessinger said.

She described one client whose 7-year-old daughter received legal support from a New York-based charity. Even in that case, she said, the organization acted simply as a “friend of the court” — rather than a full-fledged attorney — requesting delays in proceedings until the child and mother could be reunited. That finally happened Tuesday night, she said.

“It’s the saddest experience. These people are not going to be recovering anytime soon,” she said. “The parents are crying even after they’re reunited.”

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a nonprofit news service covering health issues. It is an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation that is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

KHN’s coverage of children’s health care issues is supported in part by a grant from the Heising-Simons Foundation.

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Stupid policies driven by biased White Nationalist restrictionists squander judicial time, waste resources, make America look dumb!

Contrary to what HHS Secretary Alex Azar says, presenting oneself at a Port of Entry and applying for asylum has been a guarantee neither of prompt and professional processing of asylum applications nor that there will be no family separation.  Indeed, the “credible fear” process has now been “gamed” by Sessions and USCIS so that many legitimate asylum applications are summarily denied and the individuals subjected to expedited removal without appeals. And, to date, several “real” Article III Courts (in particular, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals) have “twiddled their thumbs” and failed to intervene to prevent the gross abuses of Due Process and our international obligations being carried out on a daily basis by this Administration.

Infants in court, real substantive asylum claims rejected without hearings — no wonder the U.S. Immigration Court system is broken and there is no time for “real”cases. The long-term solution might well involve more Immigration Judges and staff. But, at this point, that would be “throwing good money after bad.”

Before there can be expansion, the U.S. Immigration Court system needs to be fixed and returned to its original Due Process focus with Immigration Judges in change and empowered to remove cases like this from the active docket and to sanction Government Attorneys (as well as private attorneys) who waste valuable court time with frivolous litigation. Indeed, Congress did provide Immigration Judges with authority to hold attorneys from both sides in contempt. However, the DOJ has thumbed its nose at that statutory authorization over several Administrations and has never implemented the statute. (This is a good example of what the “rule of law” really means in the USDOJ!)

Removing the Immigration Court system from the Executive Branch is a necessary first step in reforming it to serve its original (and only) purpose: guaranteeing Due Process and fairness for all!

Meanwhile, as pointed out by Christina and Shefali, the damage to the health and welfare children and families might be irreparable.

PWS

07-19-18