this needs it own webpage.
Category: American Injustice System,
Government Contractors Asked About The Religion Of Immigrant Women Trying To Reunite With Their Kids, Lawyers Say
Federal contractors working to reunite families separated at the border asked about the religious affiliation of at least two immigrant women seeking to get their children back, according to court documents and an attorney involved in one of the interviews.
The women, both currently living in the Boston area, were recently separated from their children under President Donald Trump’s “zero-tolerance” policy. Both of the women are asylum seekers, and one has already been reunited with her daughter.
…“Both of the families we’re working with are Christians,” Clark said. “But what if they weren’t? Are we saying now you can’t be reunified with your own child if you don’t share the religious preference of this particular vendor who runs these detainment centers for children?”
…According to Clark, court documents filed on behalf of one of the women and an attorney for the other, the questions about religion came up during phone interviews with caseworkers responsible for determining whether the two mothers were suitable sponsors for their own kids.
…The woman, identified only as W.R. in her complaint, alleges in the case that in June she was instructed to fill out a “Family Reunification Packet” and was asked by a caseworker from BCFS, a Christian non-profit that serves as another government contractor, about her religious affiliation.
“The case worker’s very first question to W.R. was whether she is religious, and if so, what religion she practices,” according to the complaint. “The case worker then asked W.R. whether she was Christian and attended church and how often. W.R. replied that she is religious and attends church regularly, the case worker responded, ‘Great!.’”
The complaint says W.R. was then asked a range of questions by the caseworker, from her marital status to how she would “discipline” her son.
“W.R. answered all questions without objection, because she feared that any objection would jeopardize or further delay A.R.’s release,” the complaint states.
…Throughout the process of applying to be reunited with her child, W.R. was identified as the “sponsor” for her son, according to her lawsuit. The BCFS caseworker also referred to her as a “sponsor” during a phone interview, according to the court filing.
“We have to start treating these parents as parents,” Clark said. “We separated them from their children, and we have to do everything we can to bring them back together as quickly as possible. And asking a religious test to receive your own child back, are we saying that if you are not Christian you may not have your child returned to you? I find that shockingly — ‘inappropriate’ wouldn’t even begin to cover it — it’s just shocking that we would ask that question of parents.”
…W.R. was told that in order to complete her reunification paperwork she would need to be fingerprinted at a specific location in Massachusetts, more than 50 miles away, before her reunification case could be evaluated. The lawsuit states W.R. offered to have fingerprints taken at a US Citizens and Immigration Services site in Boston, but was told that she could not go there.
Clark said Gonzalez-Garcia was also initially told to travel from where she now lives in the Boston area to a specific site in New Jersey for fingerprints and would have to bear the cost of the travel. Both women, the lawmaker added, had already had fingerprints taken at the border. Asked what the justification was for traveling to a specific site for the fingerprints, Clark said, “We could never get a clear answer on that.”
“Nobody can tell me where the policy is from. I’ve asked everyone,” Clark said. “Can you send me the policy that says these moms need to be re-fingerprinted even though … Border Patrol has them, and why we can’t be sharing that information to get this process moving? And nobody can point me to a policy, an email, a meeting, a phone conversation.”
Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
Fox & Friends has another irrational childish tantrum when faced with Democrat who supports abolishing ICE
“[Trump] keeps saying, ‘we’re doing this to to go stop all of the crime, all of the MS-13.’ I think it was 228 people at the end of last fiscal year out over 300,000 that were MS-13. So again, he’s taking a group of people and branding them as criminals, which is just false.” (According to the Border Patrol, only 56 unaccompanied minors out of the hundreds of thousands who have crossed the border since 2012 were suspected of having MS-13 ties.)
…“How many illegals have you captured?” Kilmeade said. “How many people have you cracked down on?… You seem more concerned about illegals than you are about the men and women who decided to go through the academy and qualify for ICE.” [insert eyeroll for people who think law officers are more valuable than the people the are supposedly charged with protecting here.]
“It was created after 9/11 with main focus being around people who might have terrorist activity,” Pocan said. “Now we are going after people with traffic violations at a church or at a workplace. That doesn’t make any sense. So the president is using this as own police force. That is something that is completely wrong.”
…As the show went to commercial break, Pocan noted that his bill wouldn’t actually result in the firing of agents. Instead, they would be reassigned to other law enforcement agencies that would take over tasks currently performed by ICE.
hmmmm
Immigration Attorney Says ICE Broke Her Foot, Locked Her Up
Immigration Attorney Says ICE Broke Her Foot, Locked Her Up
Law enforcement personnel with no oversight. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrreat. Just what this country needs!
ACLU Obtains Documents Showing Widespread Abuse of Child Immigrants in U.S. Custody
Law students in the International Human Rights Clinic examined a subset of the records obtained. The documents show numerous cases involving federal officials’ verbal, physical and sexual abuse of migrant children; the denial of clean drinking water and adequate food; failure to provide necessary medical care; detention in freezing, unsanitary facilities; and other violations of federal law and policy and international law. The documents provide evidence that U.S. officials were aware of these abuses as they occurred, but failed to properly investigate, much less to remedy, these abuses.
Examples of the documented abuses include allegations that CBP officials:
- Punched a child’s head three times
- Kicked a child in the ribs
- Used a stun gun on a boy, causing him to fall to the ground, shaking, with his eyes rolling back in his head
- Ran over a 17-year-old with a patrol vehicle and then punched him several times
- Verbally abused detained children, calling them dogs and “other ugly things”
- Denied detained children permission to stand or move freely for days and threatened children who stood up with transfer to solitary confinement in a small, freezing room
- Denied a pregnant minor medical attention when she reported pain, which preceded a stillbirth
- Subjected a 16-year-old girl to a search in which they “forcefully spread her legs and touched her private parts so hard that she screamed”
- Left a 4-pound premature baby and her minor mother in an overcrowded and dirty cell full of sick people, against medical advice
- Threw out a child’s birth certificate and threatened him with sexual abuse by an adult male detainee.
The report also shows evidence of CBP holding migrant children in excess of the 72-hour maximum period permitted by law, as well as officials’ efforts to deport children without due process and via coercion.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh. Monsterous.
Trump administration separated families. Reuniting them is a mess.
On Friday, in the latest sign of disarray in the administration, officials admitted in court that they may miss a judge’s Tuesday deadline to reunite children under 5 with their parents.
…But hopes that the reunions would be swift were dashed in court on Friday and by other reports of a badly malfunctioning system that was overwhelmed when the President ordered a so-called zero tolerance policy that led to separations with no plan for dealing with the kids.
Some parents who have gone through immigration procedures have told CNN they don’t know how to get in touch with their kids — despite a court deadline that expired Friday for the administration to at least put parents in telephone touch with their offspring.
One Guatemalan woman called Lesvia, who got out of a detention center in Texas on Thursday, told CNN’s Miguel Marquez on Friday that she received no answers about the whereabouts of her 10-year-old son, who she last saw on May 19.
…The administration has yet to tell Americans exactly how many kids are still in custody, how long they will remain split from their parents and when this grim chapter of modern political history will end.
…Trump is also a master of distraction, and he has a polished record of creating new political storms to disguise scandals and dramas that could damage him politically.
He also got lucky. The retirement of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy and a vacancy that could cement the court’s ideological balance for a generation have captured the political imagination of Washington for over a week.
Next week, Trump will leave for a foreign trip packed with high-profile photo-ops, which includes a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin that is likely to further shove the separations issue into the background.
Yet all this time, several thousand kids are wondering when they will see their parents again.
…Doubts about the Trump administration’s capacity to reunite children and their parents are being exacerbated by its unwillingness or inability to publicly describe the scale of the problem or to explain how much progress it is making toward ending it.
On Thursday, Azar said that “under 3,000” children from separated families were in custody.
On Friday in a court filing, HHS said that number included “approximately” 101 kids under 5.
But there is no certainty over how many kids are still separated from their parents and how many families have been reunited — let alone the issue of how the government will deal with new families who cross the border and who won’t be separated but will still presumably be treated as criminals under the zero tolerance policy.
Trump administration separated families. Reuniting them is a mess. – CNNPolitics
hmmmm
The government hasn’t answered key questions on family separations
US District Judge Dana Sabraw laid out a series of deadlines in a ruling last week. By Friday, officials must make sure every separated parent has a way to contact their child. By July 10, children younger than 5 must be reunited with their parents. And by July 26, all children should be reunited with their parents.
…Exactly how many kids from separated families are in custody? The last time officials released an official tally on this was June 26. Thursday, Azar said the number was “under 3,000” but added that reviews were ongoing and he could not provide more precise figure. This is an important number because — since officials have declined to specify the total number of families that have been reunited — looking at the number of children in custody is one of the few ways for the public to have any sense of whether reunions are happening, and how quickly.
…Officials haven’t disclosed how many parents from separated families were deported. But in court on Friday, Fabian revealed details about one subset: 19 parents of children younger than 5 were deported, she said.
…Parents have also been offered the option to sign voluntary departure orders to speed up their cases even if they still have other legal options — and told they’ll be reunited with their children before they are deported if they do.
Immigrant advocacy groups say they’re concerned that some parents may have been coerced or may have signed documents they didn’t understand.
The government hasn’t answered key questions on family separations – CNNPolitics
Agggggggggggggggggh
U.S. border deaths rise on family, child migrants: patrol agency
The number of migrants dying from extreme heat on the U.S.-Mexico border rose 55 percent in the past nine months after an increase in unaccompanied children and families trying to enter the United States illegally, the U.S. government said on Monday.
Heat-related deaths, the main cause of migrant fatalities on the U.S. southwest border, rose to 48, up from 31 over the same period in 2017, said U.S. Border Patrol spokesman Salvador Zamora.
…The death toll is expected to rise in the triple-digit heat of summer months as vulnerable, unacclimatized immigrants attempt to cross harsh environments, putting border fatalities on track for a year-on-year increase in 2018, Zamora said.
…Humanitarian groups such as San Diego-based Border Angels say the main cause of rising deaths is tighter border security and law enforcement, such as the recent imposition of a “zero tolerance” policy for illegal border crossers. That has prompted migrants to make long treks through hostile terrain via remote crossing points.
…Until four years ago, the vast majority of migrants arrested at the border were Mexicans. With improved economic conditions in Mexico, their number has fallen, as have overall arrests on the border, which dropped to 303,916 in 2017, down 26 percent from 2016, according to Border Patrol data.
Immigrants from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador now top the list of people arrested at the southern border as gun and gang-related violence drives an exodus from those countries, according to U.S. government data.
…“You really know someone is leaving a bad situation if they’re willing to risk their lives and their children’s’ lives for a chance to live,” said Cordero, 36, a water drop leader.
Morones suspects Border Patrol agents of destroying the water supplies left by his group. One such act was caught on video in Arizona by another humanitarian group called No More Deaths.
U.S. border deaths rise on family, child migrants: patrol agency | Reuters
hmmm
De Blasio: Feds have ‘no game plan’ for reuniting 300 immigrant kids in NYC with parents
Because the federal department of Health and Human Services has refused to provide information about how many children have been brought to New York, the city has resorted to reaching out to each provider with a contract with the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement. In the city, that’s Cayuga Centers, Lutheran Social Services and Catholic Guardian Services. Across the three, there are about 300 children here as a result of the policy, de Blasio said.
Most are at Cayuga — where a worker laid out the challenges involved with reaching their parents last week.
“She said some kids are old enough that they know the names of their relatives and they know the phone numbers. She said some kids have a scrap of paper in their pocket with a phone number for their mother or their grandmother, where they can reach them. She said younger kids a lot of time don’t have that, or they had the scrap of paper and they lost it,” de Blasio said.
…That the federal government has refused to provide information about the children to the city and the state is unprecedented, de Blasio said.
“People should see this as a very dangerous precedent where even senators and congress members can’t go into the centers in Texas and the federal government is refusing to give us a straight answer about how many kids are involved,” de Blasio said.
Aghhhhhhhhhhhh
Migrants reportedly told they could reunite with children if they agree to deportation.
Detained migrants who have been split up from their children are reportedly being told they will be able to get their kids back if they agree to be deported. The Texas Tribune cites a 24-year-old Honduran man who is being detained in Texas and claims to have abandoned his asylum case out of “desperation” to see his six-year-old daughter. Two immigration attorneys also confirmed that they had heard about similar offers to other detained migrants.
…. In a fact sheet released Saturday night, the Department of Homeland Security says parents can request whether they want their children to be deported with them. In the past many have chosen to be deported without their children.
Even with a process supposedly in place, the Department of Homeland Security statement doesn’t detail how long it will take to reunite the 2,053 children currently in the government’s custody with their families.
…For now, the Port Isabel detention center in Texas has been set up as “the primary family reunification and removal center,” the statement said. For many, reunification likely won’t be simple to coordinate considering dozens were “being funneled from Texas shelters to foster homes across the country, including in South Carolina and Michigan,” according to the Houston Chronicle. It is also unclear how reunification would happen for migrants claiming asylum protections.
Migrants reportedly told they could reunite with children if they agree to deportation.
Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
Here’s how hard it is to trace a migrant kid who has been separated from his mom
An unknown number of parents have already been deported without their children. Wherever they are living or being held, it can be difficult for parents and families to connect with a caseworker on the federal hotline set up to reunify families. Parents will have to work with consulates and family members back home to produce identification documents that can prove they are the parents of a child.
…El Paso County Commissioner Vince Perez, whose precinct includes Tornillo, the so-called tent city where more than 300 children are being held, has been sharply critical of the use of the jail to hold immigrant detainees. “Depriving refugees of their children as a matter of policy is vile and we should not condone or facilitate this practice,” Perez said.
Taylor Levy, legal coordinator for Annunciation House, said staff would try as hard as they could to help the parents find their children.
“We know that’s going to be the first question that all these parents are going to have,” Levy said. “They’re all really worried about their children.”
Here’s how hard it is to trace a migrant kid who has been separated from his mom
sigh…
White House reasserts zero tolerance policy as Border Patrol suspends it
“We’re not prosecuting those parents,” McAleenan said. He cited as the reason President Donald Trump’s executive order last week requiring parents to be detained with their children, after an earlier policy of separating parents and children prompted a national uproar.
McAleenan said the suspension was temporary, but he didn’t say when prosecutions would resume.
Several DHS officials have said privately that the president’s order made it impossible to continue zero tolerance, but McAleenan was the first to say so publicly.
…But the Justice Department can’t prosecute parents who cross the southern border with children if Border Patrol doesn’t refer them for prosecution.
Border Patrol’s suspension of those referrals reinstates what Trump has publicly criticized as a “catch and release“ policy for migrant families.
Trump’s executive order barring the separation of parents and children rendered the zero-tolerance policy unenforceable almost immediately because there wasn’t sufficient detention space to house the thousands of family members who arrive at the border each month.
…The decision to suspend zero tolerance may ease a growing housing crunch for unaccompanied minors.
Under the policy, adults were referred for federal prosecution under illegal entry and re-entry statutes. Children traveling with them were then placed in the care of the Office of Refugee Resettlement.
The separated children flooded the shelter system, which held nearly 12,000 children last week.
To create additional shelter capacity, the administration opened a “tent city” earlier this month near a port of entry in Tornillo, Texas.
But the contract for that facility will end July 13, an HHS spokesperson told a local ABC affiliate. The federal government has not made a decision on whether to extend the contract, according to an ACF spokesman.
White House reasserts zero tolerance policy as Border Patrol suspends it – POLITICO
hmmm
Donald Trump Calls for Deporting Immigrants Without Judges | Time
The Supreme Court has long held that even non-citizens have the right to due process, the constitutional rule that every person should get a fair hearing in court before facing any punishment.
…In fact, the Supreme Court has ruled on the very issue Trump was describing. In a 1953 case, Kwong Hai Chew v. Colding, the Supreme Court found in an 8-1 decision that a permanent resident of the United States could not be deported without a hearing under the constitutional right to due process.
“Although Congress may prescribe conditions for his expulsion and deportation, not even Congress may expel him without allowing him a fair opportunity to be heard,” the court wrote.
…Trump has also complained about proposals to add more federal immigration judges. A bill from a group of Senate Republicans including Florida Sen. Marco Rubio would add another 225, while a proposal from Republican Sen. Ted Cruz would add 375, but in both cases the total number of judges would still be in the hundreds, not, as Trump has said, in the thousands.
Donald Trump Calls for Deporting Immigrants Without Judges | Time
hmmm
Illegal Immigrant Families: Prosecution Suspended at Border
U.S. Customs and Border Protection commissioner Kevin McAleenan has temporarily stopped referring for prosecution adults who attempt to cross the border illegally with children, he told reporters Monday.
…McAleenan’s admission comes as Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in Reno, Nev. that federal prosecution of adults who cross the border illegally would continue despite Trump’s executive order. Those prosecutions cannot occur without referrals from CBP agents.
Trump’s executive order, which prohibits the separation of children from parents awaiting prosecution for crossing the border illegally, reportedly sparked widespread confusion among Department of Homeland Security officials about how exactly to enforce it. The officials were not told about the order in advance and were unsure how to proceed with criminal prosecutions without separating families because of a 1997 consent decree which established that minors cannot be held in federal custody for longer than 20 days. In addition to the legal obstacle preventing prolonged detention of children, there are not enough shelters equipped to house families, exacerbating confusion about how exactly to comply with the order.
Illegal Immigrant Families: Prosecution Suspended at Border | National Review
hmmmm
Commander of Texas tent city blasts “dumb, stupid” zero tolerance immigration policy
The commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) said on Monday the agency has stopped referring immigrant parents for criminal prosecution until federal agencies can agree on a plan to keep parents and children together. More than 500 children have been reunited with their families since the president ordered agencies to stop separating them, but more than 2,300 remain separated.
CBS News met five migrant parents. …The group was released from detention on Sunday after criminal charges were dismissed — the most recent evidence of the U.S. CBP’s policy not to turn over people who cross illegally for prosecution.
…During the tour, the commander in charge said the administration’s “zero tolerance” policy was “a dumb, stupid decision” and one that “should never have happened.”
“We are working as fast as we possibly can to reunify children with sponsors here in the U.S.,” said Mark Weber, with the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the facility.
Commander of Texas tent city blasts “dumb, stupid” zero tolerance immigration policy – CBS News
hmmmm
How The Loss Of U.S. Psychiatric Hospitals Contributes To A Mental Health Crisis
A severe shortage of inpatient care for people with mental illness is amounting to a public health crisis, as the number of individuals struggling with a range of psychiatric problems continues to rise.
…A study published in the journal Psychiatric Services estimates 3.4 percent of Americans — more than 8 million people — suffer from serious psychological problems.
The disappearance of long-term-care facilities and psychiatric beds has escalated over the past decade.
…A 2012 report by the Treatment Advocacy Center, a nonprofit organization that works to remove treatment barriers for people with mental illness, found the number of psychiatric beds decreased by 14 percent from 2005 to 2010. That year, there were 50,509 state psychiatric beds, meaning there were only 14 beds available per 100,000 people.
…”Many times individuals who really do require intensive psychiatric care find themselves homeless or more and more in prison,” Sisti says. “Much of our mental health care now for individuals with serious mental illness has been shifted to correctional facilities.”
…Many of the private mental health hospitals still in operation do not accept insurance and can cost upwards of $30,000 per month, Sisti says. For many low-income patients, Medicaid is the only path to mental health care, but a provision in the law prevents the federal government from paying for long-term care in an institution.
As a result, many people who experience a serious mental health crisis end up in the emergency room. According to data from the National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey, between 2001 and 2011, 6 percent of all emergency department patients had a psychiatric condition. Nearly 11 percent of those patients require transfer to another facility, but there are often no beds available.
…Most hospitals are unable to take care of people for more than 72 hours, Sisti explains, so patients are sent back out into the world without adequate access to treatment.
How The Loss Of U.S. Psychiatric Hospitals Led To A Mental Health Crisis : NPR
hmmmm
Philly’s new top prosecutor is rolling out wild, unprecedented criminal justice reforms.
In the church, queries and complaints from constituents that might have made his predecessors cringe were softballs for Krasner: a loved one has been wrongfully incarcerated? Send the case to the revamped Conviction Review Unit, a sort of in-house innocence project. How can lying officers be kept off the stand? He has staff working to verify and expand a formerly secret “do not call” list of 29 suspect officers. Late in the meeting, one elderly woman asked a question that cuts to the core of concerns for those who doubt Krasner’s reforms: What would he do about the drug dealers and users on her street that make her feel unsafe? He didn’t miss a beat: “The past solution was to lock [corner drug dealers] all up and that didn’t work. We have to go after root cause,” he says. This came after an extended riff promising “to go after doctors, and pharmaceutical corporations” for their role in the nation’s opioid crisis. Notably, his office had already initiated legal proceedings against some of those pharmaceutical companies.
…Krasner issued a memo to his staff making official a wave of new policies he had announced his attorneys last month. The memo starts: “These policies are an effort to end mass incarceration and bring balance back to sentencing.”
Over 90 percent of criminal cases nationwide are decided in plea bargains. …In an about-face from how these transactions typically work, Krasner’s 300 lawyers are to start many plea offers at the low end of sentencing guidelines. For most nonviolent and nonsexual crimes, or economic crimes below a $50,000 threshold, Krasner’s lawyers are now to offer defendants sentences below the bottom end of the state’s guidelines. So, for example, if a person with no prior convictions is accused of breaking into a store at night and emptying the cash register, he would normally face up to 14 months in jail. Under Krasner’s paradigm, he’ll be offered probation. If prosecutors want to use their discretion to deviate from these guidelines, say if a person has a particularly troubling rap sheet, Krasner must personally sign off.
…Krasner’s lawyers are also now to decline charges for marijuana possession, no matter the weight, effectively decriminalizing possession of the drug in the city for all nonfederal cases. Sex workers will not be charged with prostitution unless they have more than two priors, in which case they’ll be diverted to a specialized court. Retail theft under $500 is no longer a misdemeanor in the eyes of Philly prosecutors, but a summary offense—the lowest possible criminal charge.
…When a person does break the rules of probation, minor infractions such as missing a PO meeting are not to be punished with jail time or probation revocation, and more serious infractions are to be disciplined with no more than two years in jail.
In a move that may have less impact on the lives of defendants, but is very on-brand for Kranser, prosecutors must now calculate the amount of money a sentence would cost before recommending it to a judge, and argue why the cost is justified. He estimates that it costs $115 a day, or $42,000 a year, to incarcerate one person. So, if a prosecutor seeks a three-year sentence, she must state, on the record, that it would cost taxpayers $126,000 and explain why she thinks this cost is justified. Krasner reminds his attorneys that the cost of one year of unnecessary incarceration “is in the range of the cost of one year’s salary for a beginning teacher, police officer, fire fighter, social worker, Assistant District Attorney, or addiction counselor.”
…Krasner’s election was consistent with Philadelphia’s recent mood around criminal justice. Two years ago, the city elected Mayor Jim Kenney, who Philadelphia Magazine labeled “Mr. Criminal Justice Reform.” Under his leadership and with the help of a multimillion-dollar grant from the MacArthur Foundation, the city has brought the jail population down by 26 percent since July 2015.
Philly’s new top prosecutor is rolling out wild, unprecedented criminal justice reforms.
Wild.
Patient Demands Treatment And Release From NH Prison Since He Didn’t Commit Crime
Patient Andrew Butler, 21, who was a well-known athlete as a Hollis Brookline High School student, argued through his attorney that he is locked up in a maximum-security prison because of mental illness even though he hasn’t committed a crime.
…“He is held as a mental health patient without being in an accredited hospital, denied contact visits with his father, denied contact visits with his attorney, forced to wear prison clothing,” wrote his attorney Sandra Bloomenthal. “He is locked down 23 hours a day. He has been tasered. The treatment he has received is cruel and unusual punishment without having been convicted of a crime and with no pending criminal process.”
…[Butler’s father] believes his son may have reacted badly to illegal drug experimentation on a trip to Vermont in late August of last year.
…The problem, he believes, was compounded by the psychotropic drugs Andrew was prescribed.
…[Andrew Butler] was civilly committed to the New Hampshire Hospital, the state’s psychiatric hospital, in the fall of 2017, then involuntarily transferred to the Secure Psychiatric Unit at the men’s prison, according to his father, Douglas Butler.
…The state labels his son as psychotic and schizophrenic, [Douglas Butler] said, diagnoses that he doesn’t believe and is unable to get a second opinion or consider alternative treatments because he is no longer Andrew’s guardian.
…Andrew Butler is being denied his “right to due process of law by the State holding him indefinitely in a maximum-security prison,” attorney Bloomenthal wrote. “He is not being treated by an accredited hospital for his mental illness and in fact his treatment is harmful and cruel and violates the Americans with Disability Act.”
Patient Demands Treatment And Release From NH Prison Since He Didn’t Commit Crime | InDepthNH.org
hmmmm
Trump administration’s ‘secret shutdown’ of immigration program discriminated against Latinos: Lawsuit – ABC News
In 2014, more than 50,000 minors reached the southern U.S. border seeking asylum from the violence wracking three Central American countries: El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. The largest wave yet of child migrants, it forced the Obama administration to take a multi-pronged approach: sending millions more in aid to the three countries; detaining families who had crossed the border illegally, until a court ordered them to stop [emphasis: mine] two years later; and creating a path for children to come here legally.
That path became the Central American Minors, or CAM, program, which allowed parents lawfully present in the U.S. to apply for refugee resettlement or a temporary status called parole for their children and other eligible family members — the child’s other parent or caregiver or the child’s own child, the parent’s grandchild.
…Families had to prove their relations through a DNA test, applicants had to be interviewed by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, or USCIS, and applicants had to meet the definition of a refugee — someone outside the U.S. who is fleeing persecution due to race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group.
If a CAM applicant did not qualify for refugee resettlement, they were automatically considered for parole status and informed of whether or not they were granted it when they got their refugee decision.
Parole allows non-U.S. citizens to enter the country for a period of time on humanitarian grounds, although it does not automatically provide a path to legal status. Similar programs were created in the past for Vietnamese fleeing in the 1980’s, Filipino World War II veterans, and certain eastern Europeans after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
CAM parole applicants had to prove they were not at risk of harm, had cleared background vetting, and had someone to financially support them. Once they were granted approval, there were a series of final checks to clear: a medical exam and paying the U.S. or its contractor to arrange flights. They’d then be given a travel date and instructions to meet an official at the airport and receive their paperwork and plane ticket.
…The Central American Minors program, which reunited children and other eligible family members with parents legally residing in the U.S., was one of Trump’s early targets as he sought to crack down on legal immigration. Designed during the Obama administration to avoid the scenes at the U.S.-Mexican border that have gripped the nation this week, its termination is now being blamed by some for worsening the migrant crisis and possibly sending more children north.
…They were told by authorities they would be given final documentation and a plane ticket to travel in two weeks time — but months went by, and nothing ever came.
Without notifying them, …Trump’s administration had already frozen the program just days into his term, even as it solicited and collected thousands of dollars from S.A. and others like her who had been granted conditional approval, according to a new lawsuit that argues the administration broke the law and was driven by “racial animus against Latinos.”
…The administration’s “unprecedented, unexplained, and unsupported secret shutdown” of the program is also under fire for how it was carried out, with little to nothing communicated to recipients months after the decision was seemingly made and no real explanation ever given.
Sigh…
Comments From The Peanut Gallery 