America Torturing Children...and Their Parents (With Update)

From the Guardian:

"Here’s a quick update from the United Nations human rights office, which has said that Trump’s decision to stop separating children from their parents doesn’t go far enough and may amount to torture. From the AP:

Human rights office spokeswoman Ravini Shamdasani said Friday that “children should never be detained for reasons related to their or their parents’ migration status”.

Shamdasani urged the US to overhaul its migration policy, such as by relying on “non-custodial and community-based alternatives” under the “logic of care” rather than that of law enforcement."

Why would they say that?  A pediatrician who has worked for a decade with migrant children talked to the New Yorker about what she saw and experienced in one of the prison camps.  For instance:

The number of young children in detention facilities rose sharply. “The population I’ve been starting to see is younger, and it scares me,” Hart said. “These are little people, little babies. And they are ill-equipped to fend for themselves. They’re so totally traumatized. They don’t cry like normal kids. They don’t interact like normal kids.”

The doctor--Alica Schaffer--met an eight year old boy, surrounded by four men watching him:

"The boy had been in custody for over a month. One of his guardians told me that he had been ‘acting out’ and threatening to harm himself, by jumping from his bed. This man told me, ‘I’m his clinician,’ but he was definitely not a doctor. I don’t know if he’s a social worker, a medical assistant, a housekeeper. I have no clue. But he obviously had been granted some sort of authority in regard to assessing children and determining what their needs are. He wouldn’t provide basic background. I couldn’t find out any information because he would say, ‘I’m not at liberty to tell you that’ and ‘You don’t need to know that,’ even though a lot of my questions were relevant to taking care of the child. I was asking things like ‘Where are his parents?’

“This boy seemed devastated—quiet and withdrawn. He barely spoke. I asked if he needed a hug. I kneeled down in front of the recliner, and this kid just threw himself into my arms and didn’t let go. He cried and I cried. And to think he’s been in a facility for a month without a hug, away from his parents, and scared, and not knowing when he’ll see them again or if he’ll see them again. While I held him, I heard the men standing behind me muttering that I was ‘rewarding his bad behavior.’ Thankfully, it was in English, so I don’t think the boy understood what they were saying, but it just revealed their attitudes toward these kids."

Meanwhile the apparent White House change is policy is creating more chaos, and more captives.  The New York Times reports:

Lt. Col. Jamie Davis, a Pentagon spokesman, said the Pentagon is preparing to shelter as many as 20,000 migrant children on four military bases: Little Rock Air Force Base in Arkansas; Fort Bliss in El Paso; Goodfellow Air Force Base in San Angelo, Tex.; and Dyess Air Force Base near Abilene, Tex.
It was not immediately clear on Friday where the parents of children would go if they will no longer be separated from their families."

And that's not all:

"The U.S. Navy is preparing plans to construct sprawling detention centers for tens of thousands of immigrants on remote bases in California, Alabama and Arizona, escalating the military’s task in implementing President Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy for people caught crossing the Southern border, according to a copy of a draft memo obtained by TIME."

Update: The LA Times reports via Time that one of these bases is the US Marine base at Camp Pendelton, where preparations are underway to build a tent city "to detain as many as 47,000 migrants from Central America and other locations."

The militarization of concentration camps is a frightening change and profound threat to democracy.

How long will children continue to be imprisoned, with or without parents?  If the administration gets its way in court, indefinitely.  The Guardian again:
Also Friday, a group of nearly a dozen independent human rights experts commissioned by the UN said the new US policy “may lead to indefinite detention of entire families in violation of international human rights standards”.

  And indefinitely could be a very long time.  This NYTimes story also says:

"Federal immigration courts faced a backlog of more than 700,000 cases in May, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC, at Syracuse University. In some courts, the average wait for an immigration hearing was over 1,400 days; some hearings are being scheduled beyond 2021 before an available slot on the docket is found."

The U.S. Government Is Engaged in the Human Trafficking of Children

Cover of next week's New Yorker evoking the Statue of Liberty and also
Dickens' "A Christmas Carol"

The horror just accelerates as we learn more.  Numerous reports of children separated from their mothers at the border being secretly transported--leaving and arriving in the dead of night-- to be imprisoned in other parts of the country.

They are in New York City, Chicago, Seattle, Pittsburgh, the Bay Area, Los Angeles and elsewhere.  They were transported without the knowledge of local or state officials, and currently without granting access to these officials, including health officials.

 There as well as near the border, no one is permitted to see or talk to these children, or to see inside facilities, and report on what they've seen.  (Some do anyway.)  No photos, no images come out of them except a few smuggled photographs and those that the government creates and distributes.

Moreover, there is widespread agreement that the identities of these children are unknown--unknown!--not only to the public but to their captors, agents of our government.  They don't know the names of these children and they have not kept records that tell them who their parents are.  Information that some children had with them was reportedly taken away from them.

The new tent prisons are among those that are created and controlled by corporations who are, according to the New York Times, making a billion dollars.  Conditions inside such facilities in the past have included maggots in the food, child abuse and sexual abuse.  Meanwhile the Administration has applied to the relevant court to suspend the requirement for state and local licensing of these prisons, which means potentially worse conditions and certainly more secrecy.

The secrecy, the stripping of identity and secret transport goes beyond child abuse, goes beyond the concentration camp.  It is now the human trafficking of children.

This is the legal definition of human trafficking: The transportation or commercial exchange of an individual by coercion or deception for the purpose of exploitation.  These children are being coerced and transported for the purpose of commercial and political exploitation.  Everything about it fits the definition, even before we start asking questions about where particularly the youngest are likely to end up--in the hands of adoption agencies perhaps.

An immigration judge is quoted as pointing out that standard procedure means that if the government takes your wallet you get a receipt.  But this government is taking children without any accountability.

These prisons are refusing to disclose information or permit inspection by public officials.  The totalitarian nature of this is scheduled to increase as reports are that the U.S. military is being ordered to prepare prisons for 20,000 migrants, and military lawyers (known as JAGs) are being ordered to act as prosecutors of migrants.  This coming just after the current administration ended funding to support legal advocacy for children caught in the system.

The lives of at least 2300 children have been harmed forever, with physical and psychological effects that will last their entire lives.  There are babies who have lived an eighth of their lives imprisoned and separated from their mothers.

What this is doing to the rule of law, to human rights, to human decency is incalculable and ongoing.

Two Children, Two Americas

Executive Disorder

At best, the antipresident's executive order may curtail the imprisonment of more children and their functional disappearance--from public knowledge and in particular from their parents--and change that to the indefinite imprisonment of children together with their parents.

 Thus the progress from infant, toddler and child concentration camps to something a bit more like the Dickensian debtors prisons that housed entire families in the early to mid 19th century.

But it's not even clear that the end of family separations will happen, and especially happen soon.  There are reportedly no new orders to federales on the border.

Meanwhile, some 2,300 or more children already separated have been sent out to a reported 14 states with no plan for ever reuniting them with their parents--something that looks dangerously like federal child trafficking.

What the antipresident hoped he would accomplish by what was clearly a surrender and exposure of the lies he and his discredited minions have been telling was this: (1) to make himself a hero and (2) get the story away from the attention of voters as well as governors, mayors and major businesses, like the airlines announcing they won't fly these separated kids to any more states.

Neither has worked so far.  The media is not buying it, and they are still asking pertinent questions.  The momentum begun just a few days ago continued Wednesday in other sectors.  In particular, there's a lot more money headed to the border to provide legal representation and bail money for asylum seekers and others caught in this policy.

But as migrant concentration camps grow as combinations of prison and terrorist black sites, we'll see whether the media and the public exhibit more staying power than they have in the past.

Save the Children

Tuesday ended with the AP report that begins:

The Trump administration is reportedly operating three "tender age" detainment facilities in Texas, where undocumented babies and toddlers are sent after being forcibly separated from their parents.

The Associated Press reports that at least three facilities housing hundreds of children are already operational in Combes, Raymondville and Brownsville, Texas, while a fourth in Houston is being planned.

Also with a report of Rachel Maddow breaking down on air when trying to report on the AP's findings.

Several reports from the White House and elsewhere today said that the White House is delighted at the growing outrage because they see this only as a winning political issue with their base.  Meanwhile, normally articulate or at least blabbermouth politicians and reporters are practically speechless with horror at what is happening in America.

But Tuesday was also Juneteenth, the anniversary of the end of slavery in Texas and the Confederacy, celebrated as essentially the end of slavery in the US.  On this occasion, Jelani Cobb in the New Yorker noted that slavery had always entailed separating families and for an even longer period, selling African American children into slavery.  In other parts of the country--in California in particular--Native American slavery especially involved selling children.  And in a real sense, this practice has continued:

"Even the current system of child welfare reflects systematic biases regarding the removal of children from their parents’ homes. Black children were overwhelmingly more likely to be taken from their homes than white children, even when they faced problems of similar severity at home."

Now we are embroiled in controversy separating brown families and imprisoning toddlers, and possibly longer term exploitation.  This specifically is the responsibility of the current administration.  Cobb continues:

"On this Juneteenth, we have received the ambivalent blessing of clarity. We recognize the historic demise of an institution that justified the separating of parent from child in Texas only to see that phenomenon occur in a different time, under different circumstances, but with a similar trauma inflicted on children. The central value of history is to serve as inoculation against the stupidity, ignorance, and cruelties of the past. Yet the rearguard implications of Trumpism have been apparent since the day in June, 2015, when he rode down the escalator in Trump Tower and announced his Presidential campaign."

But as Helaine Olene writes in the Washington Post, children are more generally the victims of poor health care, education and poverty itself, as well as racial prejudice:  "Our politics reflects our almost inhuman ability to tolerate making children — especially poor and minority children — take it on the chin again and again."  And this is without even discussing school shootings and gun violence victims more generally--many of them children.

The plight of the children imprisoned at the border should broaden awareness on how often the insidious games adults play are paid for by the suffering of children, the maiming of lifetimes from a tender age.

Moves Toward the End Game

By complete coincidence, the United States just pulled out of the UN Human Rights Council, a day after the head of it criticized the US policy of taking children from asylum-seekers at the border.

Meanwhile NBC News has an interview with a former director of the immigration police who confirms that due to poor record keeping and other bureaucratic problems, some separations may become permanent, leading to thousands of immigrant orphans.

Analysis of data performed by reporters for McClatchy news services suggests that US officials may have already lost track of some 6,000 unaccompanied migrant children.  Obviously this doesn't bode well for the children separated from their parents.

While AG Jeff Sessions unsuccessfully tried to dodge Nazi comparisons, Homegrown Hitler lived up to his name by asserting that migrants "infest" America.  He says America doesn't need more judges to decide asylum cases, it needs a Wall.  But the most chilling and portentous play from the Nazi playbook is his reported intention to accelerate his anti-immigrant venom and use it in his campaign rallies.  

Homegrown Hitler is right on track.  He's created chaos everywhere--in the federal system, the courts, the country, the world.  He's established a cult that consumed a former political party. He's got a police force in ICE.  And now he's set to motivate his xenophobic and racist base, in the guise of nationalism, with the twin tools of cruelty and demagoguery.  

The conventional wisdom would say this is a political effort to secure the base.  But that can't win elections, especially when no electoral college is involved.  But it is the Nazi playbook for an eventual dictatorship.  Can Brownshirts at the polling places be far behind?

Now that the political establishment is just about unanimously opposed to these family separations--and even one of the most dishonest and evil men in America, Mitch McConnell wants to pass a bill ending them--it will be interesting to see what Republicans catch on to the fact that Homegrown Hitler's efforts are basically separate from them, that he is building a Nazi Party within the Republican Party, and that's going to be increasingly evident in the coming months.

Don't Worry, It's Just "Alien Children"

Monday was the day that the issue of asylum-seeking families being torn apart by American border agents just exploded.  The current First Lady, and even more strongly and to the point, the four living former First Ladies publicly condemned the policy, beginning with a Washington Post oped and tweets by Laura Bush, joined by statements by Michelle Obama,  Rosalyn Carter and Hillary Clinton.

More voices on Capitol Hill condemned the policy, including Republicans--notably also not supporting the antipresident's lie that it is the law.  Even a partisan stiff like Senator Lindsay Graham said plainly that the antipresident could end it with a phone call.

The antipresident tweeted back, his press secretary dissed Laura Bush, and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen lied about the policy while doubling down on it. In her White House press briefing, she continually referred to the children involved as "alien children."  That's what the blond lady said.

She claimed that only Congress can stop it--an assertion that could soon come back to haunt her or the administration.

Then came the release of audio from inside one of the intake centers, with the unforgettable voices of young children: a 6 year old pleading to call her aunt to come and get her, and an unknown children repeatedly calling for "Papi."  Reports described the children as "screaming" but this child was not screaming, she was utterly desperate.

As desperate as this moment was, health experts are talking about the future effects of such trauma and the imprisoning itself.  The characterization of the day by experts, reports and pundits was "child abuse."

But in addition to the political and humanitarian fury that dominated the news on Monday, there was actual new information--all of it portraying the situation in even worse terms.

New information confirmed that the pace of separations has increased to nearly 70 families a day.

Several news outlets reported that many if not all of these family separations are being forced on asylum-seekers--people escaping from being murdered by repressive governments and drug dealers (including those who own banks) in Central America.  Some brought children to save them from being forced into gangs by drug dealers.

They are legally entitled to apply for asylum, but border agents are stopping them from entering the US at official ports of entry so they can apply.  Consequently many are avoiding the official ports of entry to enter illegally so they have standing to apply for political asylum under US law.  It is at this point--after a long and dangerous journey escaping for their lives--that they are arrested and their children taken away.

Jonathan Blitzer in the New Yorker reported that the government has no plan or procedure for reuniting these families.  Others report that there appears to be no tracking of parents and children after they are separated to even know who the parents of the children are.

Another reporter who interviewed children released from a facility said that conditions were poor inside, and that children were stripped of all their possessions, including pieces of paper bearing the phone numbers of relatives in the US.

A shortage of qualified social workers and caregivers was reported.  A shortage of judges to hear the mounting cases of the parents is predicted.  A separate story this weekend said that because of this administration's shrinking-the-government cutbacks, there are dangerously few trained prison guards in federal prisons, with secretaries, teachers and other personnel drafted to guard prisoners.

There were reports of parents deported but their children left behind, and a report of a child who was told her parents might be deported and she might be abandoned.

There still have been few reporters or officials allowed into these facilities, and those who have are restricted in what pictures they can take, no film, and they haven't been permitted to speak with prisoners.  All of this would be permitted for--and demanded by-- a UN human rights visit of a POW camp.

Those camps that have been visited have all been for older boys.  A reporter asked Homeland Security chief Neilsen what is happening to the girls.  She said she didn't know.

There was a later report that some Members of Congress toured a "facility" where girls were imprisoned, along with toddlers and infants.  They witnessed one of the girls changing the diaper of an infant, because no one else would touch the baby.