This blog on Texas education contains posts on accountability, testing, K-12 education, postsecondary educational attainment, bilingual education, immigration, school finance, environmental issues, and Ethnic Studies at the state and national levels. It addresses politics in Texas. It also represents my digital footprint, of life and career, as a community-engaged scholar in Texas.
I, for one, am thrilled about the Biden-Harris ticket. Among other things, she has been strongly opposed to the atrocities against children and families on the U.S.-Mexico border. Our government has brought such pain and suffering to untold numbers people, perhaps especially children who have been traumatized by our reactionary response to their presence along the U.S.-Mexico border.
This is a community that has had to endure great distress, misery, and affliction, that is fleeing violence in their countries back home in hopes of a sanctuary, a safe haven, in the U.S. for which U.S. policy—nothwithstanding our toxic, political landscape under Trump—has been amenable. Accordintly, please see my earlier blog post titled, "Why is El Salvador so dangerous? 4 essential reads," by Beth Daley," on why this violence exists in the first place, including how the U.S. government and its punitive policies created the very situation we have been witnessing.
I very much hope that a Biden-Harris presidency not only addresses asylum policies that consist of laws that Trump has thwarted through administrative changes, but works with its countries to the south with whom our fates are inextricably linked.
Catesby Holmes, of "The Conversation," provides a quick synopsis here for folks to acquire an understanding of gang violence in Central American that has resulted in thousands of families fleeing for their lives to the U.S.-Mexico border. In 2016 alone in El Salvador, the country registered a staggering 81.2 murders per 100,000, making it, as stated in this piece below, the "deadliest place in the world that’s not a war zone." I doubt that much has changed given the level of corruption related to gangs' increased political power, that includes their ability to provide political backing to politicians that, as a consequence, sustain, if not institutionalize rampant violence on the streets of El Salvador and other places like Honduras and Guatemala.
It may come as a surprise to you the truth that these violent gangs have their literal origins in the U.S., dating back to the 1980s in Los Angeles. Not only did the gangs become transnational as a result of migration patterns, but the police response in both the U.S. and El Salvador was similar.
Termed the "mano duro" (firm hand) approach of rounding up and imprisoning thousands of gang members both in the U.S. and El Salvador may have been symbolically good for "tough-on-crime" politicians, but it had the collateral impact of not only bringing gang members into contact with others who had been previously imprisoned, but it also hardened gang members' attitudes toward police.
It's unfortunate that our country failed to properly address gang violence to begin with by addressing the underlying conditions like poverty, subtractive schooling, segregation, low wages, and so on that marginalize and alienate youth in schools and in society. The punitive response that ignored such factors only increased their levels of marginalization and in the long run, their power in the streets of many Central American cities that account for increased migration to the U.S. from these places in recent years.
-Angela Valenzuela
Transnational gangs like MS-13 are a major driver of violence in El Salvador,
but they are far from the only problem. Jose Cabezas/Reuters
Editor’s note: This is a roundup of material from The Conversation archive.
The Department of Homeland Security has confirmed that it will eliminate the Temporary Protected Status that gave provisional U.S. residency to Salvadoran migrants after a 2001 earthquake. Some 200,000 Salvadorans now have until Sept. 9, 2019, to leave the United States, obtain a green card or be deported.
According to a Jan. 8 DHS statement, the decision was made “after a review of the disaster-related conditions upon which the country’s original designation was based,” which determined that they “no longer exist.”
How did El Salvador become so violent? These four articles shed some light on the country’s complex crime problem. Spoiler: It’s not just about the gangs.
1. It all started in the U.S.
President Donald Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions often claim that lax immigration policies allowed fearsome Central American gangs like MS-13 to spread from El Salvador into the U.S.
“The street gang Mara Salvatrucha 13, commonly known as MS-13, was born in the United States,” he explains.
Formed in Los Angeles in the early 1980s by the children of Salvadoran immigrants who’d fled that country’s civil war, MS-13 was at first just “kids who met hanging out on street corners,” writes Cruz.
It wasn’t until the early 2000s that the group spread into Central America. There, it has brutally deployed extortion, human smuggling and drug trafficking, terrorizing neighborhoods and helping to turn the so-called Northern Triangle – El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras – into the world’s deadliest place.
As a whole, “Latin America is where the most murders in the world happen,” Muggah writes. Home to just 8 percent of the world’s population, the region sees over 38 percent of global homicides. Every day some 400 Latin Americans are killed.
Many factors contribute to this homicide epidemic, according to Muggah, including “the war on drugs, abundant unlicensed firearms, persistently unequal gender relations and, in Mexico and Central America, thousands of marginalized, uprooted, and sometimes convicted U.S. deportees.”
Governments have responded to rising violence by sinking money into police forces, prosecutors and prisons. It hasn’t worked, Muggah writes. Only 20 percent of murders in Latin America results in conviction. And in San Salvador, El Salvador – last year the seventh-deadliest city in the world – just 10 percent do.
For example, in 2015, Honduras had the highest rate of feminicide – or female murder – in the world. Environmental advocates who stand up to illegal mining and other kinds of resource exploitation in Central America are also frequent targets of violence.
Those two facts are not unrelated, Estévez warns. “It’s a common mistake to consider violence against women a private, non-political act. But women are often on the front lines of activism” she writes, because they tend to fight against activities that are “harmful to their children, homes and communities.”
Feminists across Latin America have protested the region’s high rates of violence against women.Edgard Garrido/Reuters
4. El Salvador’s government isn’t helping
José Miguel Cruz agrees that gangs like MS-13 are not the sole cause of crime in Central America. Rather, he contends, they are “largely a symptom of a far more critical issue plaguing the region – namely, corruption.”
According to Cruz, groups like MS-13 have grown and thrived in El Salvador because the political class protects them. In August, prosecutors there showed that the country’s two main political parties had colluded with MS-13 and other gangs, paying more than US$300,000 for help winning the 2014 presidential election.
The same nexus between government and organized crime has been exposed across Central America, where political institutions routinely shield gangs in exchange for economic support and political backing in the barrios they control. Few are ever prosecuted for this crime, Cruz says.
That erodes Central Americans’ belief in the rule of law, which, in turn, makes it harder to fight violence. “Root out corruption in the Central American ruling class,” he wagers, “and the gangs and crooks will go down with it.”
With a focus on the Karnes Detention Center here in Texas, here is a hard-hitting report by Raices, the organization that has been advocating on behalf of children and families detained in our nation's immigration detention centers as they struggle for U.S. asylum.
Key quotes in line with the #BlackLivesMatter movement:
Immigration is an inherently intersectional issue, affecting people of any background. That is not to say that people of differing backgrounds receive the same treatment,29 but rather that the struggle for liberation in the immigrant rights movement is inherently tied to other struggles for liberation, including the Movement for Black Lives and the movement to defund the police.30 The movements for abolition of the police, prisons, ICE, and immigrant detention are inherently intertwined.31 ICE and CBP operations mirror those of the U.S. police in many ways, including in the prevalence of abuses committed against people in their custody, the targeting of Black and Brown people, and the huge quantity of taxpayer money put towards these militarized systems of oppression that could otherwise be used to support community services. Furthermore, multiple organizations focused on Black liberation explicitly identify the end of immigrant detention as a policy demand.32 Ending family detention minimizes harm wrought against multiple communities at the hands of the U.S government, and insofar as multiple movements for liberation call for abolition of detention, family detention is an obvious immediate target.
The unique role the United States has played in contributing to the root causes of immigration from Latin America must also be acknowledged. The violence immigrants flee, particularly in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, is rooted in U.S. intervention and exploitation. The United States backed military coups and dictatorships that committed massacres and other atrocities against innocent civilians, including genocide like the mass physical and sexual violence attempted against the Maya in Guatemala. The impunity Central America struggles with today is largely rooted in these years of violence. The present narrative surrounding immigration is egregiously estranged from the reality of the United States’ history in Latin America; in March, 2019, the president cut off about $500 million in aid to Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras.33
Read this painful exposé and cry. Support Raices. Oppose fascism.
SURVIVING FAMILY SEPARATION AND PROLONGED FAMILY DETENTION: A REPORT ON THE FAMILIES OF KARNES
CONTENT WARNING: This report includes the following topics: family separation, detention, torture, sexual violence, death, suicide, genocide, mistreatment of indigenous communities, and abusive behavior by those in positions of power.
INTRODUCTION
On April 6, 2018, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that the Department of Justice would seek to criminally prosecute migrants who crossed the southern border outside of ports of entry, an action for which prosecution is typically discretionary. In practice, this policy provided the legal basis for the Department of Homeland Security to forcibly separate children from their parents. Children were ripped from parents while parents were referred for criminal prosecution for crossing the border without prior authorization, even though many families fled to the U.S. to seek asylum. It is legal to seek asylum when in the territory of another country under both U.S. and international law. The affected families primarily migrated from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. 1
The U.S. government has been found to repeatedly misrepresent data on family separation, with the number of families separated originally reported as 1,556.2 However, as of October, 2019, that number was estimated to be over 5,400, though some of that increase may be due to continued, illegal family separations.3 To date there is no definitive count of families separated by the policy, nor of children who still remain separated from their parents. Reports estimate at least 300 children were yet to be reunified as of 2019.4 At least 471 parents were deported without their children as a result of the inhumane policy.5 In the words of U.S. Judge Dana Sabraw, who oversaw the family separation case Ms. L v. Sessions, “The reality is that for every parent who is not located, there will be a permanently orphaned child, and that is 100% the responsibility of the administration.” 6
This report intends to illuminate the experiences of the 278 families who were separated and subsequently detained at the Karnes family detention center (“Karnes”) in Karnes City, Texas. The Karnes Pro Bono Project, under the auspices of RAICES, offers free legal services to people detained in Karnes under a universal representation model. This meant that any formerly separated family at Karnes could seek legal services from RAICES until they were released from detention. Many families also continued to receive services from RAICES after their release. Because of the universality and scope of services offered, RAICES, through the work of the Karnes Pro Bono Project is uniquely positioned to comment on the issues of families detained in Karnes.
After months of separation, fathers and sons remained in detention together in Karnes, fighting their immigration cases. The following report of experience aims to illustrate in detail how family separation and detention are unacceptable policies. Additionally, this report attempts to add to the public record of atrocities committed against migrant families in the ongoing fight for immigrant justice. Finally, this report seeks to elevate the voices of formerly separated families who bravely spoke out against prolonged family detention based on their own experiences in response to the Trump administration’s ongoing attempts to expand family detention and family separation.
SEPARATION
Families separated under the Zero Tolerance policy crossed the U.S. southern border in spring of 2018, and were then separated for long periods of time ranging from forty-five days to six months or more. The average length of separation was 52 days. At the time of their separation, children who were reunited to be detained with their fathers in Karnes ranged from four to seventeen years old. Families were separated in Customs and Border Protection (CBP) detention facilities known as the “hieleras” and “perreras.”7 Parents reported a variety of situations surrounding the initial separation from their child. One father recalled officers told him they were taking his seven-year-old son for a bath, mirroring tactics of the Nazis in the Holocaust. 8
A father recalls officers deceiving him when they separated him from his son, telling him they were only going to bathe the child.
After these separations, parents were sent to various, often multiple, adult prisons and immigration detention centers across the U.S. There was no uniformity in the way that children’s cases were processed, and children were transported to various sites around the United States. While separated, most families reported having little to no contact with each other. They did not know where the other was. They did not know if the other was detained, deported, or released into the United States. Fathers often reported squalid conditions in federal prison or adult immigrant detention centers, including being made to eat while chained at the ankle, waist, and wrists. Some families were able to speak on the phone once or twice during the months of separation. The conversations were typically limited to two to ten minutes.
One father recalled being able to speak to his son for a few minutes after a month with no contact and no word on where he was. He was only able to speak to his son because his family outside of detention helped him find him; the government did not respond to his requests to locate him.
Many families had no idea if, when, or where they would be reunified until it took place. On July 15, 2019, the first twelve families reunited at Karnes arrived. Many parents had just been reunited at 4:00 in the morning after months without contact with their children and with no warning that they were about to be reunited. Within about a week the population at Karnes swelled to several hundred formerly separated fathers and sons, with cases in a wide variety of legal postures.
On average, formerly separated families spent 68 days detained in Karnes after reunification, bringing the average total length of time in immigrant detention to 120 days. The last family of the hundreds of families who arrived in late July would not leave Karnes until December 27, 2018, some five months after reunification. The atrocities the U.S. government inflicted on these families did not end with their reunification, as they continued to face the harm inherent to detention for months on end afterwards.
