The essence of evil. Listen to Jacob Soboroff who draws on the the United Nations' definition and describes what our government did to these parents and families seeking asylum in the U.S.—to ultimately, over 5,400 children—as "torture." Based on a show of hands of numerous people that met at the white house that included Mike Pompeo, Alex Azar, the American Academy of Pediatrics referred to this as "government-sanctioned child abuse," with serious, "irreversible" consequences, as noted by the American College of Physicians.

Though Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen did not raise her hand to Miller's request for a vote, we must note that

"No one in the meeting made the case that separating families would be inhumane or immoral, the officials said. Any moral argument about immigration "fell on deaf ears" inside the White House, one of the officials said."

Such appalling cruelty. Yet where is the justice?

Let's vote this brutal, fascist regime out of office, my friends.

-Angela Valenzuela

Trump Cabinet officials voted in 2018 White House meeting to separate migrant children, say officials

"If we don't enforce this, it is the end of our country as we kno

White House policy adviser Stephen Miller at the Ohio Republican 

Party State Dinner in Columbus in 2018.Leah Millis / Reuters file

Aug. 20, 2020, 2:15 PM CDT 2:15 PM CDT

By Julia Ainsley and Jacob Soboroff

WASHINGTON — In early May 2018, after weeks of phone calls and private meetings, 11 of the president's most senior advisers were called to the White House Situation Room, where they were asked, by a show-of-hands vote, to decide the fate of thousands of migrant parents and their children, according to two officials who were there.

President Donald Trump's senior adviser Stephen Miller led the meeting, and, according to the two officials, he was angry at what he saw as defiance by Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen.

It had been nearly a month since Jeff Sessions, then the attorney general, had launched the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" policy, announcing that every immigrant who crossed the U.S. border illegally would be prosecuted, including parents with small children. But so far, U.S. border agents had not begun separating parents from their children to put the plan into action, and Miller, the architect of the administration's crackdown on undocumented immigrants, was furious about the delay.

Those invited included Sessions, Nielsen, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and newly installed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, according to documents obtained by NBC News.

Trump cabinet officials voted in 2018 meeting to separate migrant children, say officials

AUG. 20, 202003:55

Nielsen told those at the meeting that there were simply not enough resources at DHS, nor at the other agencies that would be involved, to be able to separate parents, prosecute them for crossing the border and return them to their children in a timely manner, according to the two officials who were present. Without a swift process, the children would enter into the custody of Health and Human Services, which was already operating at near capacity.

Two officials involved in the planning of "zero tolerance" said the Justice Department acknowledged on multiple occasions that U.S. attorneys would not be able to prosecute all parents expeditiously, so sending children to HHS was the most likely outcome.

As Nielsen had said repeatedly to other officials in the weeks leading up to the meeting, according to two former officials, the process could get messy and children could get lost in an already clogged system.

Two years later: Family separations at the border

JULY 12, 202004:43

Miller saw the separation of families not as an unfortunate byproduct but as a tool to deter more immigration. According to three former officials, he had devised plans that would have separated even more children. Miller, with the support of Sessions, advocated for separating all immigrant families, even those going through civil court proceedings, the former officials said.

While zero tolerance ultimately separated nearly 3,000 children from their parents, what Miller proposed would have separated 25,000 more, including those who legally presented themselves at ports of entry seeking asylum, according to Customs and Border Protection data from May and June 2018.

That plan never came to fruition, in large part because DHS officials had argued it would grind the immigration process to a halt. But after Sessions' announcement that all families entering illegally would be prosecuted, the onus had fallen on DHS to act.

Nielsen claims 'there was no policy to separate families' of migrants

JULY 23, 202002:38

At the meeting, Miller accused anyone opposing zero tolerance of being a lawbreaker and un-American, according to the two officials present.

"If we don't enforce this, it is the end of our country as we know it," Miller said, according to the two officials. It was not unusual for Miller to make claims like that, but this time he was adamant that the policy move forward, regardless of arguments about resources and logistics.

No one in the meeting made the case that separating families would be inhumane or immoral, the officials said. Any moral argument about immigration "fell on deaf ears" inside the White House, one of the officials said.

"Miller was tired of hearing about logistical problems," one of the officials said. "It was just 'Let's move forward and staff will figure this out.'"

Frustrated, Miller accused Nielsen of stalling and demanded a show of hands. Who was in favor of moving forward? he asked.

A sea of hands went up. Nielsen kept hers down. It was clear she had been outvoted, according to the officials.

In the days immediately following the meeting, Nielsen had a conversation with Kevin McAleenan, then the Customs and Border Patrol commissioner, in her office at the Ronald Reagan Building and then signed a memo instructing DHS personnel to prosecute all migrants crossing the border illegally, including parents arriving with their children.

Nielsen did so despite her stated reservations in the Situation Room and her having been warned in a legal memo by DHS General Counsel John Mitnick — which was also sent to her chief of staff at the time, Chad Wolf, who is now the acting secretary of DHS — that the decision would result in separation of families. Of the practice, Mitnick wrote, "a court could conclude that the separations are violative of the INA, Administrative Procedure Act, or the Fifth Amendment Due Process clause."

Less than two months later, Trump signed an executive order halting family separations and a federal judge in California ordered family reunifications on the grounds that the separated families' due process rights were violated.

At the time, no plan was in place to track the children who had been separated or to create a system to reunite thousands of separated families, according to the two former officials.

According to an invitation list obtained by NBC News, those expected to be in attendance at the meeting included: Sessions, Nielsen, Miller, Pompeo, Azar, Undersecretary of Defense John Rood, then-White House chief of staff John Kelly, White House deputy chief of staff Chris Liddell, then-White House counsel Don McGahn and Marc Short, who was then director of legislative affairs and is now chief of staff to Vice President Mike Pence.

November: Emails show how Stephen Miller promoted anti-immigrant views

NOV. 14, 201903:44

Asked about the show-of-hands vote, Judd Deere, a White House spokesman, said, "This is absolutely not true and did not happen."

In response to a request for a comment about the meeting and the show of hands, HHS spokesman Michael Caputo said, "This never happened."

The State Department and DHS referred NBC News to the White House. Sessions, Nielsen, Kelly and John Bolton did not respond to requests for comment. McGahn and Rood could not be reached for comment.

Before Trump ended zero tolerance by executive order on June 20, 2018, over 2,800 children had been separated from their parents. When a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to begin reuniting the families it had separated, it became clear that there was no method to track both parent and child as they moved through the system. As a result, some took months to reunite, and, in hundreds of cases, parents were deported from the U.S. without their children.

On May 4, Gary Tomasulo, who was then the senior director for border and transportation security on the National Security Council, sent an email to the deputies and lower-level staffers tasked with carrying out immigration policy, telling them that their bosses had agreed to the new zero tolerance prosecution and separation policy and that they needed to develop plans to support it.

At the time, some of the subordinates to the Cabinet secretaries who were responsible for carrying out zero tolerance had raised moral objections, according to a source familiar with the discussions.

In the email, obtained by NBC News, Tomasulo told the deputies and other subordinates that their bosses "acknowledged that there are no easy solutions, but remained committed to collectively do everything possible to develop innovative solutions that leverage the full resources, capabilities, and authorities of the U.S. government."

He went on to say, "I ask that if you are unable to participate in these meetings, the message of commitment and resolve expressed by our principals is communicated and internalized by those that represent your departments and agencies."

Julia Ainsley

Julia Ainsley is a correspondent covering the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice for the NBC News Investigative Unit.

Jacob Soboroff

Jacob Soboroff is a correspondent for NBC News and MSNBC and author of the New York Times bestseller "Separated: Inside an American Tragedy."

 

ICE continues to terrorize our community. This report by policy organization, CLASP, is harrowing.  You can download the entire report HERE. 

-Angela Valenzuela

The Day That ICE Came: How Worksite Raids Are Once Again Harming Children and Families

IMMIGRANT CHILDREN AND FAMILIES

Young Men and Women of Color

Report/Brief

July 13, 2020

By Wendy Cervantes, 

Rebecca Ullrich, & 

Vanessa Meraz

Introduction

As a nation, we value hard work and believe that all children deserve the opportunity to achieve their full potential. Immigrants have played a critical role in our workforce throughout history, and children of immigrants now comprise one in four of all children in the United States.[1] Yet, hardworking immigrants continue to be humiliated and punished due to an unjust system that relies on and often exploits their labor. Their children, the majority of whom are U.S. citizens, are forced to suffer the long-term harmful consequences of harsh immigration policy decisions that are often politically motivated.[2]

Recent efforts to ramp up immigration enforcement in the interior of the United States and drastic changes in enforcement policies—such as making parents of U.S. citizen children priorities for deportation—have made families across the country increasingly vulnerable to being separated. The reemergence of worksite raids is an example of the Trump Administration’s enforcement-heavy approach to immigration policy that harms not only the workers targeted, but also their families and communities. Previous research on worksite enforcement clearly documents the short- and long-term harms to children’s physical and mental health as well as the strain on local communities attempting to respond to families’ immediate and long-term needs.[3] Public outcry against massive worksite raids under the George W. Bush Administration led to the creation of “humanitarian guidelines” to better protect children and other individuals impacted by worksite actions. The practice of large-scale worksite enforcement largely came to an end under the Obama Administration.

Shortly after President Trump took office, officials in his administration ordered the reinstitution of worksite raids, which they have conducted more frequently and in larger scale over time.[4] In the summer of 2018, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) carried out multiple raids, including large-scale operations that each had more than 100 arrests. A series of raids on poultry processing plants in Mississippi in August 2019—resulting in the arrest of nearly 700 workers and affecting more than one thousand children—remains the largest singlestate worksite operation in U.S. history. The national scope of these raids, their unpredictable nature, and the excessive force with which they have been carried out has raised concerns once again about the high human cost of such operations.

Building on research conducted in 2017,5 the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) conducted a series of site visits in 2019 to document the impact of recent worksite raids on children, families, and communities. It is important to note that the devastating impacts of the worksite raids covered in this study represent yet another insurmountable hurdle for children and families already affected by the stresses of poverty, increased anti-immigrant discrimination, and constantly changing immigration policies.

Across all the sites, a common theme was the excessive use of force and the highly dramatic nature of the operations. The workers arrested in the raids were often mothers and fathers—many of whom had lived in the community for decades, rarely missed a day of work, and had no criminal record. Workers and community members alike expressed difficulty understanding the logic behind the choice to arrest workers in such an aggressive, public manner. Many immigrants talked about the large number of agents, often at least one per worker, the use of helicopters, and such physical and verbal aggression as pushing and yelling while handcuffing and transporting workers. In Mississippi, several providers and community members likened the raid to a terrorist attack.

The findings in this report and in previous studies are clear on the serious implications for our country’s collective future: if we continue down a path of harsh enforcement-only immigration policies and disregard the safety and long-term wellbeing of millions of children in immigrant families across the country, we as a nation will ultimately pay the price. Rather than undermine the healthy development of children of immigrants through policies that separate them from their parents or prevent them from having their basic needs met, it is critical that policymakers reverse course to advance policies that address the significant harm already inflicted upon our nation’s children and help them thrive

Key Findings Include:

• Family Separation: Families experienced separation ranging from several hours to months, including long-term separation due to the deportation of a parent.
• Harm to Children’s Mental and Physical Health: Children experienced significant harm to their mental and physical health immediately after the raid and in the long term, including changes to their daily routines.
• Harm to Parents’ Mental and Physical Health: Parents arrested in the raids and those left behind experienced adverse consequences to their mental and physical wellbeing, which were often exacerbated by related hardships and the need to provide emotional support for children.
• Economic Hardship: Families faced additional economic hardships as a result of the raids stemming from the sudden loss of income and difficulty finding employment.
• Stress on Providers and Community Leaders: Providers and community leaders working directly with immigrant families affected by the raids had to quickly organize and shift their priorities to meet the short- and long-term needs of families, often with consequences for their own mental and physical health.

We are tired of it': Latinos denounce police violence as they protest George Floyd death by Suzanne Gamboa

This piece is about how many Latinos, like African Americans, are also regular targets of police violence. What's the latest anyway with all the children we have locked up in detention centers around the country?  A number of those children have died in federal custody, as well.

I really appreciate how Texas State Congressman Joaquin Castro calls out Governor Abbott as sanctioning police violence with the passage of Senate Bill 4 (SB4), a 2017 law passed in Texas during his administration that among other things, deputizes local governments and police to enact federal immigration policy. This means that local officers can both legally racially profile folks and ask them about their immigration status whenever they stop or arrest someone even for minor traffic violations, like a malfunctioning car lamp light which happened to someone I know and but for local mobilization efforts, would have gotten deported.

That said, according to this information put out by the ACLU, people do need to know their rights under SB4.

While clearly not all of police violence is related to SB4 as this article by Suzanne Gamboa indicates, it is nevertheless the case that with anti-immigration polices and the Federal U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE), Latinas/os have the tragic distinction of having a "police force" designed specifically for them.  How racist is that?

And yes, Governor Abbott and the anti-immigrant state leadership are indeed "the problem," as Representative Castro states.  

If our nation is heading in the direction of de-funding police departments, can we not also abolish ICE while we're at it?

-Angela Valenzuela

#AbolishICE 

We are tired of it': Latinos denounce police violence as they protest George Floyd death

Beside police brutality cases, Latinos point to "stop-and-frisk" policies and officers stopping people to question them about their immigration status.

Protesters chanting at the Texas State Capital in downtown Austin on May 31, 2020.Mario Cantu / Cal Sport Media via AP Images

For many Americans, Floyd’s death after a Minneapolis police officer pressed his knee on his neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds was a breaking point.

But the national protests that have followed resonate with Latinos like Barrón, not just as an act of solidarity, but because of the ways police tactics and law enforcement have been used against Latinos — from laws that give police the authority to question a person’s citizenship and authorization to be in the country to deadly shootings in police actions.

“Being a Latino and having the experience where I see people both in my community and on the news all the time being hurt and being abused by a police officer, there doesn’t seem to be any accountability," Barrón said.

"You don’t need to be black to see how horrible it is,” he said. “With more police accountability, that will help us, too.”

In Austin, the protests were also billed as demonstrations against the April 24 police shooting death of Mike Ramos, described as African American and Latino. Police are investigating the officer, Christopher Taylor, who shot Ramos.

According to reports, police responded to a 911 call of people doing drugs in a car and that one of the people had a gun. Police said Ramos, 42, got out of the car but did not comply with officers’ commands. One officer fired at Ramos with a bean-bag rifle, prompting Ramos to get back in the car and start to drive away, The Austin American-Statesman reported.

According to reports, Taylor then fired at the car, killing Ramos. Police said no gun was found in the car.

At a news conference Sunday, Ramos' mother, Brenda Ramos, said: “I cry every day. Now I’m in this terrible, heartbreaking club. It’s a club of mothers of black Americans who have been murdered by police."

In a April 25 online news conference after Ramos' death, Angelica Erazo, vice chair of Austin’s Hispanic Quality of Life Commission, called on the Latino community to “not leave all the heavy lifting to the black community.”

“All too often, we do not show up when it comes to police violence and your voice is powerful and needed, too,” Erazo said.

Remembering Anthony Baez, stop-and-frisk

Following the killing of George Floyd, Juan Cartagena, president and general counsel of the national Latino legal civil rights organization, LatinoJustice PRLDEF, asked Latinos who have lost loved ones at the hands of police to “unequivocally say, Black lives matter!”

Cartagena, in a statement, pointed to the 1994 case of Anthony Baez, a 29-year-old security guard who died after a New York City police officer, Francis Livoti, put him in a chokehold while trying to arrest him and his brother outside their family home.

A New York state judge acquitted Livoti, who had other police brutality complaints against him. But the Justice Department won a civil rights conviction against Livoti, who was then sentenced to seven years in prison. Baez's mother's fight for justice, along with two other mothers on behalf of their children, was the subject of the film "Every Mother's Son."

In New York City, black men and Latinos, including many who identify as Afro-Latino, were caught up in the contentious stop-and-frisk policing practice that essentially sanctioned racial profiling as an anti-crime tactic.

The operation recently catapulted back into the news as former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg waged his presidential campaign and sought to enlist black and Latino support. An analysis from the New York Civil Liberties Unionfound that in 2011, when Bloomberg was mayor, more than 685,000 people had been stopped and frisked, most of them black or Latino — and nearly 9 in 10 were innocent.

Cartagena said that the video of Floyd’s arrest struck a chord with Latinos and others who have been following and seeing police abuse for decades.

“If you ever found a more perfect convergence of shared interest among Muslims, LGBTQ, black people, Latino people, everybody was clearly unified against the practices of stop and frisk,” Cartagena said.

When police enforce immigration

Often Latinos are seen only through the lens of immigration. But many have decried the increasing way they are criminalized under the guise of immigration enforcement.

In the aftermath of Floyd’s death, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said in a statement that Texas and America mourn George Floyd “and the actions that led to his death are reprehensible and should be condemned in the strongest terms possible.”

Rep. Joaquín Castro, D-Texas, chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, called out the governor in a tweet as “part of the problem” and reminded Abbott that he “enacted — SB4 — that encourages racial profiling by law enforcement.”

The Texas law, SB4, was billed as a means to ensure that cities and communities cooperate with immigration officers, preventing so-called sanctuary cities. The law allows police to question the citizenship and immigration status of anyone they arrest, detain or stop, even on minor traffic stops. It allows the removal — and jail time — of any city police chief, sheriff or other official in charge if they prevent their officers or employees from cooperating with federal immigration officials.

Joaquin Castro

✔@JoaquinCastrotx

You enacted a bill — SB4 — that encourages racial profiling by law enforcement, Governor.

You’re part of the problem. #GeorgeFloyd https://twitter.com/GregAbbott_TX/status/1266805280890896387 …

Greg Abbott

✔@GregAbbott_TX