Inside a Texas Building Where the Government Is Holding Immigrant Children

Inside a Texas Building Where the Government Is Holding Immigrant Children

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/inside-a-texas-building-where-the-government-is-holding-immigrant-children

This week, a team of lawyers interviewed more than fifty children at one of those facilities, in Clint, Texas, in order to monitor government compliance with the Flores settlement, which mandates that children must be held in safe and sanitary conditions and moved out of Border Patrol custody without unnecessary delays. The conditions the lawyers found were shocking: flu and lice outbreaks were going untreated, and children were filthy, sleeping on cold floors, and taking care of one another because of the lack of attention from guards. Some of them had been in the facility for weeks.

We had approximately ten lawyers, doctors, and interpreters in El Paso this past week. We did not plan to go to the Clint Facility, because it’s not a facility that historically receives children. It wasn’t even on our radar.

So, in any event, the children told us that nobody’s taking care of them, so that basically the older children are trying to take care of the younger children. The guards are asking the younger children or the older children, “Who wants to take care of this little boy? Who wants to take of this little girl?” and they’ll bring in a two-year-old, a three-year-old, a four-year-old. And then the littlest kids are expected to be taken care of by the older kids, but then some of the oldest children lose interest in it, and little children get handed off to other children. And sometimes we hear about the littlest children being alone by themselves on the floor. Many of the children reported sleeping on the concrete floor. They are being given army blankets, those wool-type blankets that are really harsh. Most of the children said they’re being given two blankets, one to put beneath them on the floor. Some of the children are describing just being given one blanket and having to decide whether to put it under them or over them, because there is air-conditioning at this facility. And so they’re having to make a choice about, Do I try to protect myself from the cement, or do I try to keep warm?

And so they were given a lice shampoo, and the other children were given two combs and told to share those two combs, two lice combs, and brush their hair with the same combs, which is something you never do with a lice outbreak. And then what happened was one of the combs was lost, and Border Patrol agents got so mad that they took away the children’s blankets and mats. They weren’t allowed to sleep on the beds, and they had to sleep on the floor on Wednesday night as punishment for losing the comb. So you had a whole cell full of kids who had beds and mats at one point, not for everybody but for most of them, who were forced to sleep on the cement.

There’s no capacity for processing what’s going on in the real world. It is all about these kids and the horrific conditions they’re in. I just got back from this facility where laws were being broken right and left. There is a judgment in this case that says that children are supposed to be treated a certain way when they are in government custody. All of these children are in government custody, and those very basic standards are being violated.

Even the little things—when they are transporting the babies, transporting the toddlers and the preschoolers, they are not putting them in infant seats or booster seats, and they are driving along Texas highways, all of which require children to be properly placed in the vehicle. It is so frustrating to hear the current Administration talking about the rule of law when they flout the rule of law right and left.

Wow, that's just screwed up. I get the Republicans don't like brown skin color and all but this is 2019....

Trump's botched immigration, as expected. Just like how he botched foreign policy. This dude sucks at being President.

I hope you're not expecting Republicans to care because you will be disappointed.

Are all those employees there trump supporters or just regular employees cause these people are really bad at doing their jobs. Those are indeed very horrible conditions. Hygiene should be very important.

I don't get how a skin color can result in so much hate.

Humans are so strange. I personally find latinas the absolute hottest so the entire fiasco puzzles me.

Slow news day?

Lmao kids are suffering and you troll the thread like some incel.

@zaryia: nice meltdown, name calling.

You attacked my thread with a completely off-topic post, and now you're trying to derail it. If you don't like and do not want to discuss the facts in the thread don't click it.

P.S. Incels are a self named group, I'm sorry I thought you were part of them.

@zaryia: i didn’t think it was a legit posts. It’s missing a whole bunch of biased polls and general character assassination.

I'm aware you dislike facts especially as a conservative. And "biased polls"? Since when? I knew Trump's base was super low educated but wow!

But would you like to stop attempting to derail my thread and discuss this trending topic?

Look, I understand that you don't want people crossing the border illegally. But if you want to round up all of them, you need to start by building up the infrastructure to house them, and streamlining the process to deport them. Those two things come first, then you start rounding up everyone. I don't think I'm being partisan here. I understand that you don't like "catch and release". But if the holding capacity isn't there yet, then keep doing "catch and release" until it is.

They can’t build the infrastructure or even improve the infrastructure they already have if certain lawmakers are refusing to fund it.

@zaryia: So, the Trump administration built this place and it’s not a carry over from the previous administration(s)? Illegal migration just popped up during Trump’s term, right?

Wrong!

Trump 2020!

Tips For Staying Civil While Debating Child Prisons

Avoid unkind generalizations like equating the jailing of ethnic minorities with some malevolent form of fascism.

Consider that we all have different perspectives stemming from things like age, ethnicity, or level of racism.

Recall that violently rejecting a tyrannical government goes against everything our forefathers believed in.

Find common ground by recognizing that some kids are huge assholes.

Make sure any protests are peaceful, silent, and completely out of sight of anyone who could actually affect government policy.

Give your political opponents the benefit of the doubt by letting this play out for 20 years and seeing if it gets any better on its own.

Realize that every pressing social issue is solved through civil discourse if you ignore virtually all of human history.

Remind yourself that you’re just two people having a cocktail at the same D.C. party and that politics is a game to you.

Avoid painting with a broad brush. Not everyone in favor of zero-tolerance immigration wants to see children in cages—it’s more likely that they just don’t care.

I wonder if the writers at The Onion just hang out here.

I like fact checking you:

Trump is trying to rewrite the history of his family separation policy before 2020

While it’s true that Obama did, during a 2014 surge in migration, implement wide-scale detention of families, Trump’s administration chose a much harsher path. As part of a broader border crackdown, Trump instituted a “zero tolerance” policy in April 2018 that called for every illegal entry case to be prosecuted. That policy resulted in thousands of children being separated from their parents before Trump walked it back two months later, amid international outcry, with an executive order. (The ACLU estimates over 700 families have been separated since then due to loopholes in a federal ruling that ordered the Trump administration to reunify separated families.)

The difference between family separations during the Obama and Trump presidencies, briefly explained

It is true that migrant and asylum-seeking families were separated while Obama was president, but only in extraordinary circumstances. The Los Angeles Times’s Scott Martelle explains:

During the Obama administration, family separations were rare and predicated upon two conditions: whether border officials felt the parents or guardians posed a threat to the children, or whether the adults, under U.S. immigration law, had to be detained based on prior criminal convictions.

While Obama was undoubtedly tough on immigration — his administration still holds the record for most deportations — border officials used discretion during his presidency to determine which illegal crossing cases to prosecute. On the other hand, in April 2018, the Justice Department under then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions instituted a “zero tolerance” policy that called for every illegal entry case to be prosecuted. This resulted in children being separated from parents — even when the parents had done nothing more than try to cross the border.

Vox’s Dara Lind explained the difference between the Obama and Trump-era policies after zero tolerance was implemented last year:

It’s not that no family was ever separated at the border under the Obama administration. But former Obama administration officials specify that families were separated only in particular circumstances — for instance, if a father was carrying drugs — that went above and beyond a typical case of illegal entry.

We don’t know how often that happened, but we know it was not a widespread or standard practice.

Under the Trump administration, though, it became increasingly common. A test of “zero tolerance” along one sector of the border in summer 2017 led to an unknown number of family separations. Seven hundred families were separated between October 2017 and April 2018.

Trump’s zero-tolerance policy resulted in heart-rendering images of kids being kept in cage-like facilities, and parents being reunited with young children who didn’t seem to recognize them after long separations. By June of last year — after more than 2,300 families had been separated — Trump signed an executive order walking it back.

In short, Trump didn’t end family separations because of humanitarian concerns about an Obama-era policy, as he now wants people to believe. He ended it because of international backlash against an inhumane policy his own administration implemented.

Deal with facts please. Obama's facilities were not designed to house the disaster Trump created by vastly altering the policy.

@Serraph105: LOL - it certainly makes you wonder, doesn't it?

@zaryia: "Deal with facts please."

Republicans have been refusing to do this for well over a decade. Why would any of them start now?

@ad1x2: yes but can’t give Trump any sort of win, “orange man bad” is more important right now especially with upcoming elections

Straw-Man, no one actually defers to that fake argument/meme created by low IQ right wingers.

Trump's failures are all on his own. Including this child separation disaster.

@zaryia: it’s a straw man that the border patrol and ice lack the funds to do much about the massive influx of immigrants and that AOC and her far left drones don’t want to do anything about it? I get that it doesn’t fit your F-Trump message but c’mon

Hmmm......maybe irresponsible tax cuts are to blame.

@zaryia: lol trending topic? Are you 16?

AOC said "NO MORE MONEY FOR CONCENTRATION CAMPS" lol https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YD9ohDy7kog

Are you saying you want to fund them?

@LJS9502_basic: yes, how are you going to complain about the living conditions and then not fund them. Whats the end game here? Democrats with the double speak is getting too insane levels.

"Omg they dont have food and tooth brushes, its dirty over crowded not enough people to take care of them, they dont have beds!!!"

"We cant give them any funding"

The mental gynastics going on is incredible on this board sometimes

@LJS9502_basic: if the conditions are inhumane, we should resolve it immediately. Who would we send down there to evaluate the situation first?

Nice straw-man..............

@LJS9502_basic: How is agreeing with you a strawman?

If we don’t fund the facilities so we can improve the conditions, then what is the alternative since people don’t want us to immediately deport them without due process? Release all of them to the public? Or maybe that is AOC’s endgame, to get the facilities shut down so the migrants can be released to the public and can stay here indefinitely?

She already went out of her way and tweeted ways for people that had final orders of removal to avoid capture, how is that different than a politician telling someone that skipped bail after being found guilty of a crime how to avoid arrest?

Do you expect anything different? Those ignoring our sovereignty and laws seem to get a pass. The fault is on everyone else oddly enough.

Please stop trolling.

Wrong, Trump absolutely owns this mess and there is no question about it. Yes, the Dems who just took the house should work on fixing Trump's mess, but lets not forget the GOP completely mucked this entire situation up for years now, and even allowed it to happen in the first place. It's not a straw-man to suggest the situation we are in is completely Trump's fault going by all historical records starting with Jeff Session's no tolerance policy down to the DHS's Kristen Nielsen incompetence beginning last year when the GOP were in complete control. This is a Trump administration cluster-F through and through, much like the Iran foreign policy disaster. To say otherwise is to be a cultist.

And yes, there are plenty of Dems actually are trying to get funding worked out as we speak. But some do have reservations as they think funding more camps will just result in more separation and bad policy. Overall a complete and utter disaster, one that won't reflect well on the GOP (not DNC) in 2020. Fixing the GOP's mess, as usual.

It´s always a slow news day for Zaryia, it´s amazing how much BS they can post in a day.

By the sound of things the kids may be better off in federal prisons sharing a cell block with inmates.

Wait, they're getting 775 per person per day and can't cover the cost of soap in that? I'm skeptical it's a funding issue.

Also the whole question of, "Well, why aren't the democrats funding our concentration camps" is complete bs. Also, why aren't we putting funding towards putting Japanese back in their own concentration camps? Why didn't Germany just give more funding to their concentration camps back in WW2 when they were imprisoning the Jews?

The problem is the concentration camps. Perpetuating their continued existence with more money only perpetuates the goddamn problem. We should be funding their end and put them in housing, with families being together.

This topic is huge right now worldwide......

I know this is a huge negative stain on the GOP and Trump (who has one of the worst approvals in history) but are you two serious? Stop trolling. The posts have nothing to do w/ this thread.

There is a bill going through congress right now to increase funding to deal with the situation, which means they have been working on this since way before the story broke. And yes, we are running large deficits right now, so any money that goes toward this will have to be borrowed. And yes, we had deficits before the tax cuts, but they sure didn't help matters.

I wasn't talking about the facilities. I was talking about concentration camps per the quoted user.

We have to do something with the migrants, unless people are just going to say let them go. If that is the case there’s no point in having border patrol. When AOC says concentration camps she is obviously talking about the detention facilities since she’s the one that got it trending on social media.

Trying to fix the GOP's mess,

House passes border aid bill despite White House veto threat

https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/25/politics/house-vote-border-funding/index.html

Hey someone has to pocket 750 out of those and a few guards has to be paid.

then replace those lawmakers.

When the United States arbitrarily takes people with legal status and/or invades southern nations and imprisons people, sure, I'll agree with the term of the day which is "concentration camps." That's not happening but I expect such ignorant terminology by the left.

House passed a funding bill yesterday, but this is kind of beside my point. If you want to change policy to round people up and keep them in custody, you build the infrastructure first, then implement the policy change. Top down policy changes lead to clusterf*cks on the ground, like this current situation or say the travel ban before that.

I know you are in favor of this policy, and I am not trying to change your mind. What I'm saying is this policy is being badly implemented and it is leading to conditions that are clearly terrible for the children involved, and frankly unfair to the border patrol agents tasked with overseeing this mess.

AND IF LAWMAKERS ARE THE ONLY THING STANDING IN THE WAY, MAYBE IT'S TIME FOR THE WORLD'S GREATEST DEAL MAKER TO SIT DOWN WITH SAID LAWMAKERS AND MAKE A FREAKING DEAL!

The president isn’t a dictator, he can’t fire lawmakers that don’t agree with him. It’s up to the voters, many of whom hate Trump and will continue to vote for those lawmakers as long as they keep saying they will do whatever they can to stop his agenda and possibly impeach him.

As bad as it may be for those children, the lawmakers that have been blocking funding for the facilities know that it is to their political advantage to do so. Granted, they finally passed a bill for emergency funding, but not before making sure the public got it in their heads that the detainment facilities are concentration camps, which makes them think of the Holocaust even if AOC passively denies the comparison.

Another thing that is funny is the Wayfair workers that are boycotting the facilities for making children sleep on the ground for....buying beds for the children to sleep on. What’s next, workers at companies that provide them food boycotting their company until they stop selling food to the government?

The GOP was in total control when Trump's new family separation policy took action. During this time the negative consequences were witnessed. For a year, when the public was already seeing dire conditions and overcrowding in 2018 in weekly reports. The Dems took the house this year, and half way in they have offered a humanitarian relief 4.5B package to clean up the GOP mess.

Stop spinning this Republican disaster. You'll only trick people who can't click on fact check sites and look at dates.

The House bill got shot down in the Senate. The Senate passed its own bill. The House won't vote on the Senate bill because... I guess it might pass.

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/06/26/immigration-border-fight-congress-1383717

Both Pelosi and her top lieutenant, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), spoke positively about the Senate version on Tuesday and declined to rule out passing that measure.

“The Senate has a good bill. Our bill is much better,” Pelosi said.

“I think most think [the House bill is] preferable to the Senate bill. Although the Senate bill is not a bad bill either,” Hoyer said.

Come on Nancy, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good (bill).