What goes through my my mind when I read the news with my morning coffee. …Or for the Simon's Rockers in the group, this is my response journal.
The CEO of the popular DNA-testing company 23andMe has agreed to provide DNA kits to help reunite the hundreds of migrant families separated at the border in recent weeks, after Congresswoman Jackie Speier approached the Mountain View-based company with the idea.
“They have committed to providing all the tests necessary to test the parents and the children,” Speier told this news organization.
23andme donating DNA kits to help reunite migrant families
hmmmm
Baby Constance was born into a culture that was rich and well-adapted to the exceptionally harsh environment. Her ancestors had passed down skills for surviving — ways of reading the ice to know when walruses, seals and whales could be caught and methods of fishing in the cold water. Families worked together; subsistence hunting does not favor the greedy. Most people spoke the Alaska Native language, Yupik, with Russian and English words mixed in. That is the language Constance’s mother, Estelle, taught her daughter.
…When Constance was in middle school, she was forced by the federal government to leave her family and move to a boarding school operated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, part of the Department of the Interior. Mt. Edgecumbe High School in Sitka, Alaska, was 1,200 miles away. Classes were in English, the teachers were mostly white, and the students were forbidden to speak the languages they had grown up with.
…Constance Oozevaseuk was taught to hate a lot of things about her culture and, by proxy, about herself. The food she grew up eating, the clothes her family wore, the way they hunted and fished, the stories they told, the songs they sang and the very words they spoke were inferior, she was taught. It was traumatizing.
…A 2005 study on the long-term effects of boarding schools on Alaska Natives found that many students suffered from “identity conflicts” and later struggled when they had children of their own, in part because they had been separated from their own parents at such an early age and had never fully learned family traditions and subsistence skills.
…This is the root of what sociologists call intergenerational trauma. A family goes through something cataclysmic — in this case, a war on their culture. The family survives, but the effects of the trauma are passed down in the form of addiction, domestic violence and even suicide.
…Jeremy and Rene had moved back to Alaska, in part so Sam could be born at the Alaska Native Hospital where Rene had health coverage. As a child, Sam spent most of his time outside with his parents and with Rene’s family.
…Sam pestered his relatives to let him hunt seals with them. When Sam was 5 or 6 years old, they handed him a low-powered rifle and told him to start practicing; if he could shoot a ground squirrel “through the eye,” he could hunt with them. For a couple weeks, he shot all day, every day. By the end, he was ready to accompany his family out to the seal blind.
Sam’s cultural education was going well.
…Some teachers and counselors suggested Sam had a learning disability or a behavioral disorder. His parents entertained that possibility but explained that Sam was growing up in a different environment than his peers. The family still spent summers in Gambell. No one else at the school was from a subsistence hunting culture. Might it make sense that Sam would learn differently from most other students?
“They didn’t listen,” says Jeremy, standing at his kitchen table in Seattle and picking through a box of old progress reports from the time. “They told us: ‘You need to go back to Alaska. Go back to the village.’ It was terrible.”
…He saw some of his cousins struggling with alcohol abuse and suicidal thoughts, and he heard from his family in Gambell about how climate change made it difficult to pass down hunting traditions and to catch enough food to survive.
“I see that, among my peers, I am much less likely to fall prey to alcoholism and much less likely to be suicidal as a result of being brought up in the laps of my elders, listening to stories and being engaged on a cultural level,” Sam explains. “What I’ve seen is that when youth are not culturally engaged, you see higher rates of incarceration, higher rates of suicide, higher rates of alcoholism, higher rates of drug abuse — all these evils that come in and take the place of culture. We’re talking about my cousins and my family members.”
…”Her parents’ generation were all sent off to boarding schools,” Sam explains. He is talking, of course, about his grandmother, Constance Oozevaseuk.
“Nothing was put in the place of where culture was. I think some of that trauma was passed onto my mother. I’m not as deeply affected as she was, of course. But I am affected by it, because she wasn’t able to be a mother for a portion of my childhood, because she had to take care of herself.”
Rene agrees, although the fact of her family’s traumatization doesn’t make it any easier to deal with the guilt she feels over breaking down. “I wish I had been stronger,” she says.
…Sam says his cultural identity — formed during all those hours hunting and fishing with his family — is something to fall back on when things get difficult, a source of resilience.
“You’re sitting in a seal blind, you’re talking to your uncles, you’re telling stories — you’re disseminating culture, is what’s going on,” he explains. “It’s not only hunting, it’s passing down traditions, stories and ways of life that would otherwise not have a chance to be passed down.”
…I think having children must be really rewarding, and probably really scary,” he says. “I hope I’m able to be the one who stops the passing down of my family’s traumas. But I don’t know. We can only hope.”
How An Alaskan Family — And Their Teenage Son — Overcome A Legacy Of Pain : Goats and Soda : NPR
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The agents peer at everyone crossing, looking for people they think might be candidates for asylum. If the people say anything suggesting they might be requesting asylum — if they’re not Mexicans, and especially if they’re from Central America — the agents block their way and say to come back another time.
Local people who frequently cross the border started noticing the agents in early May, but did not know why they were on the bridge. Some people started calling Ruben Garcia, director of Annunciation House, a migrant shelter which encompasses a network of satellite shelters. The shelters have for years maintained a close relationship with ICE. They regularly take in immigrants who’ve been picked up by the Border Patrol, processed, and released by ICE pending the results of their immigration cases. Garcia says he is very familiar with how many people the government picks up from week to week, and with how much of their own space CBP and ICE have to process people.
…Garcia said he asked a low-level CBP agent, who was working at an international bridge, why Central Americans were being blocked. “This is a borderwide policy,” Garcia said the agent answered. Garcia believes the policy is connected to Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s “zero tolerance” policy initiated in early May.
That is when the Trump administration began routinely splitting up immigrant adults and children who were caught crossing into the U.S. Most were families from Central America.
By blocking asylum-seekers from crossing legally, CBP is pressuring them to cross illegally. Garcia believes that this new practice gives the government an excuse to split up even more families.
…Ramirez, 25, crosses frequently between El Paso and Juárez. On her way to El Paso one day after looking at Facebook, Ramirez saw a group of people who looked distressed. Speaking with them, she learned that all were from Guatemala: a 16-year-old girl and a woman with a frightened preschool-aged daughter. The teenager told Ramirez they had been prevented from crossing for days. They said they were considering coming into the U.S. by wading and walking under the bridge.
Ramirez knew that the wading and walking would result in the mother being criminally prosecuted and separated from her child, so she decided to act, even though she felt shaky. “My whole life, I’ve been scared and intimated” by border agents, she said. She gathered the teenager, the woman, and the child. She walked them to the top of the bridge.
…A supervisor arrived and seemed angry. Ramirez tried hard to remember the text of the Immigration and Nationality Act, the part about “aliens” in U.S. territory having the right to claim asylum. She wanted to quote it to the supervisor, but apparently he already knew the law. She remembers him scowling but waving the Central Americans past the blockade and toward the port of entry.
…But without advocates or press at their sides, other immigrants are still not getting past the bridge blockade. On June 9, two journalists — Bob Moore, a freelancer, and Claudia Tristán, of El Paso’s KFOX-TV — stood on the southbound side of the bridge, where they were not immediately visible to the CBP officials. Each pointed their phones toward the northbound side and filmed a woman — whom they later determined was a Honduran asylum-seeker — and her small son walking several feet into the United States. Their videos show the two being turned back to Mexico.
Karolina Walters is a staff attorney at the Washington, D.C.-based American Immigration Council, one of three groups representing plaintiffs in the Al Otro Lado lawsuit. She says these turn-backs of people already on U.S. soil constitute civil rights violations and “get to the heart of the lawsuit.”
…Garcia is training some of his recruits to go to the bridges in shifts and take notes when they see refugees being turned back from requesting asylum. He has another group that is learning to accompany the immigrants to the invisible line. He hopes those volunteers will be able to help asylum-seekers exercise their rights in the face of blockading border agents.
Desperate Asylum-Seekers Are Being Turned Away by U.S. Border Agents Claiming There’s “No Room”
Jeezus….
The Center for Effective Public Management has assembled the following key statistics on immigration to examine his claims and his policies.
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“There’s no excuse for these agents to not literally lay down their guns and badges and say that this is unlawful,” she said.
Former Border Patrol Agent To Current Agents: Refuse Orders To Separate Children | HuffPost
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Walmart said it was “surprised and deeply disturbed” to learn that one of its former Texas stores was being used to house migrant children who had been separated from their parents. “We sold the building in 2016 to a developer and had no knowledge then of its intended use today,” the giant retailer said in a Twitter post last week.
…As part of the sales agreement, Walmart made a long list of what the building could not be used for — mostly to thwart rivals and prevent adult or alcohol-related businesses from moving into the space.
The developer could not convert the property into a grocery store or a discount department store that might compete with Walmart. Also banned: a billiards parlor, slot machines and video stores selling NC-17 films.
There also could be no nude or “bathing suit-clad” models or dancers in the former store, according to real estate documents.
The deed did offer some potential uses, exceptions to the restrictions that included an “emergency care center, urgent or non-urgent medical service provider, or flea market.”
…But real estate records pointed to the potential use. A Walmart executive signed a document that indicated the buyer was purchasing the property with a $4.5 million loan from a nonprofit that runs migrant children shelters.
Walmart ‘surprised’ old store Is a migrant shelter. Records hinted at the possibility.
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Notes from a town hall held for Citizenship and Immigration Services asylum officers on Feb. 2, 2017, show that the agency’s asylum chief, John Lafferty, told the officers they might have to “hold mothers longer” and “hold children in HHR/ORR,” an acronym for facilities for children run by HHS.
…In the town hall two weeks after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, Lafferty laid out a number of policies specifically intended to lower the number of immigrants claiming asylum. According to the notes, he provided attendees with the latest asylum numbers, which were at their highest point in 20 years in 2016, and then said the administration was “in the process of reviewing” a number of policies, including separation of parents and children, to try to curb those numbers.
…Some of the proposals, like raising the bar for passing the initial interview for claiming asylum, have already been implemented. Other policies, like detaining “almost everyone coming over,” have run into logistical difficulties.
…NBC News has found that some women are separated from their children even if they are legally claiming asylum and not being referred for prosecution. [emphasis: mine] In those cases, the children are kept in the same facility, but they are still separated for days without being told whether they will be reunited.
Former USCIS Director Leon Rodriguez, who served under the Obama administration, said families who presented themselves for asylum between ports of entry were not previously prosecuted.
Trump admin discussed separating moms, kids to deter asylum-seekers in Feb. 2017
Aggggggggggggggggggggggggggggh!
All four living former first ladies — Rosalynn Carter, Hillary Clinton, Laura Bush and Michelle Obama — have stepped out of political retirement to condemn the Trump administration’s practice of separating parents and children at the border.
…”Those who selectively use the Bible to justify this cruelty are ignoring a central tenet of Christianity,” the former first lady said. “These policies are not rooted in religion. What is being done using the name of religion is contrary to everything I was ever taught.”
Clinton added, “Jesus Christ said, ‘Suffer the children unto me,’ not ‘let the children suffer.'”
…Meanwhile, Bush, who almost never speaks out on political issues, broke partisan ranks in a Washington Post op-ed.
“I live in a border state. I appreciate the need to enforce and protect our international boundaries, but this zero-tolerance policy is cruel. It is immoral. And it breaks my heart,” she wrote.
…Bush laid the blame squarely on the president’s policies — namely, the Department of Justice’s “zero tolerance” policy with which it began.
…”These images are eerily reminiscent of the Japanese-American internment camps of World War II, now considered to have been one of the most shameful episodes in U.S. history. We also know that this treatment inflicts trauma; interned Japanese have been two times as likely to suffer cardiovascular disease or die prematurely than those who were not interned,” she wrote.
Rosalynn Carter called the policy of separating families “disgraceful and a shame to our country.”
Michelle Obama also weighed in to support Bush.
The current first lady, Melania Trump, commented over the weekend on what’s happening at the border, pushing for bipartisan cooperation to end the separation of migrant children from their parents at the border.
“Mrs. Trump hates to see children separated from their families and hopes both sides of the aisle can finally come together to achieve successful immigration reform,” according to a statement from her spokeswoman. “She believes we need to be a country that follows all laws, but also a country that governs with heart.”
All four living former first ladies condemn Trump border policy
hmmmm
N.H. ACLU: Concord Coach Lines Complicit With Immigration Officials | New Hampshire Public Radio
Clearly and willfully complicit with Gestapo tactics.
“We are being boarded by Border Patrol. Please be prepared to show your documentation upon request,” the driver said, according to her June 7 Facebook post, written a day after the incident.
An unabashed Smalls, who knew her rights, immediately sprang into action, informing other passengers that the agents’ actions were illegal.
“This is a violation of your 4th amendment rights. You don’t have to show them *s- -t*!!! This is illegal,” she said, according to her Facebook post.
…She even used Google translate to help her deliver the same message in Spanish.
Smalls said the woman seated next to her, who didn’t speak English, “looked terrified.”
Smalls loudly accused the agents of harassment and racial profiling, exclaiming they had “no legal right or jurisdiction here,” she wrote in the Facebook post.
Her resistance paid off — the Border Patrol agents allegedly retreated and told the bus driver to “go ahead.”
Go Girl!
The trauma endured by children separated from their parents at the border — many of whom are fleeing chaotic or violent circumstances back home — will devastate them psychologically for years to come, experts say.
…Inside those facilities, children are devastated: an audio clip published by ProPublica captures the sounds of children sobbing for their parents, begging to be allowed to call a family member.
“It is a form of child abuse,” Dr. Colleen Kraft, head of the American Academy of Pediatrics, told CBS News after she’d spent time in a Texas facility where kids under 12 are being held.
Kraft said she was told staff members there weren’t allowed to hug or hold crying children at the facility to comfort them.
…Every interaction a child has with adults lays the groundwork for their identity and sense of self, so that doesn’t bode well for children in a setting where they’re reportedly not even allowed to be hugged, Kinder said.
“What we say to them, what we do, how we look at them, how we interact with them — all of those interactions add up to a sense of self,” she said. “I can promise you that these interactions are laying neural pathways that are not positive.”
hmmm
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