This blog on Texas education contains posts on higher education, as well as preK-12 policy accountability, testing, bilingual education, immigration, school finance, race, class, and gender issues at both the state and national level. It also represents my digital footprint, of life and career, as a community-engaged scholar in Texas.
This is a developing story. To what fates, I wonder? How will they now be cared for? Certainly, when advocates say that we should free these children and families, it's not to precarity that puts them at great risk.
(CNN) Nearly 9,000 unaccompanied migrant children have been kicked out of the United States without court hearings under the Trump administration's coronavirus restrictions at the border.
A court declaration Friday from US Border Patrol Deputy Chief Raul Ortiz revealed the number, which previously hadn't been released to the public.
Since the Trump administration invoked a public health law to implement new restrictions at the border on March 20, the agency has expelled more than 159,000 people, according to Ortiz. That figure, Ortiz says, included 8,800 children who were traveling alone and 7,600 family members.
The declaration was filed as part of the government's appeal of a recent court ruling over a controversial aspect of the coronavirus restrictions: the increasing use of hotels to detain migrant kids rather than licensed and monitored facilities.
But Ortiz and other US officials argue that doing so will put the public at risk, interfere with efforts by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to contain Covid-19 and increase the likelihood that US Customs and Border Protection agents and others caring for children in custody could contract coronavirus. They are asking California's 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to block Gee's order.
In his declaration on Friday, Ortiz stated that being forced to stop detaining migrant children in hotels would cause "three significant problems" for the government: crowding and an increased risk of Covid-19 exposure in Border Patrol facilities, an increased risk of Covid-19 exposure in Health and Human Services and Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities and the straining of an "already overburdened system."
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.
"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.
"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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
Look at what is happening to #TrumpsChildren. I use this hashtag not to refer to his biological children but rather to the traumatized children whose families legally sought asylum in the U.S. that he continues to terrorize through his policies and administrative decisions.
He, as well as this situation, reminds me so much of the late Nicolae Ceaușescu, a Romanian tyrant about whom I recently blogged whose policy decisions surrounding children were brazenly harmful to no less than 100,000 children, that history remembers him and them in the encapsulating phrase, "Ceausescu's children."
As the article here graphically shows, a whole generation of largely Central American children and their parents are indelibly impacted by Trump's inhumane immigrant and detention policies, with COVID-19 making matters worse. It just breaks your heart. 💔
Since the coronavirus broke out, the Trump administration has deported hundreds of migrant children alone — in some cases, without notifying their families.
The last time Sandra RodrÃguez saw her son Gerson, she bent down to look him in the eye. “Be good,” she said, instructing him to behave when he encountered Border Patrol agents on the other side of the river in the United States, and when he was reunited with his uncle in Houston.
The 10-year-old nodded, giving his mother one last squinty smile. Tears caught in his dimples, she recalled, as he climbed into a raft and pushed out across the Rio Grande toward Texas from Mexico, guided by a stranger who was also trying to reach the United States.
Ms. RodrÃguez expected that Gerson would be held by the Border Patrol for a few days and then transferred to a government shelter for migrant children, from which her brother in Houston would eventually be able to claim him. But Gerson seemed to disappear on the other side of the river. For six frantic days, she heard nothing about her son — no word that he had been taken into custody, no contact with the uncle in Houston.
Finally, she received a panicked phone call from a cousin in Honduras who said that Gerson was with her. The little boy was crying and disoriented, his relatives said; he seemed confused about how he had ended up back in the dangerous place he had fled.
Important message from Raices. Here is something we can all do right away. Please urge ICE to release all immigrants as they are at risk of coronavirus now.
We sent a letter to Daniel Bible at ICE today, demanding that he use his powers to release immigrants in detention who are at great risk during normal times, let-alone during a pandemic. We’re asking you to join us, and use the form below to add your voice. Send a message to Daniel Bible and ICE, to free detained immigrants.
The immigrant community is at grave risk.
“Infectious disease outbreaks have a long history of preying on society’s most vulnerable, disenfranchised members.” – NY Times
#COVD19 is no exception.
That is why we are asking you to take action with us, using the form below, to tell ICE to release all immigrants in detention, because detention is no place for a family, and no place for a family to be during a pandemic.
All those who have been subject to the Trump administration’s roster of anti-immigrant policies are in a vulnerable position; from those in detention to those living under MPP. Immigration detention conditions are already poor, so a coronavirus outbreak could be a disaster. Neither DHS, ICE or EOIR have provided any sort of contingency plan that would help reduce exposure to detained immigrants, their families, government staff, judges, or jail staff.
RAICES attorneys are extremely concerned for the health and well being of our clients held at Karnes and Pearsall Detention Centers in Texas right now. At Karnes, there are families with children, and those at Pearsall are trans women with HIV. We are working with at least six children with symptoms of cold, cough and flu with several families complaining of inadequate testing and/or treatment. We are currently aware of 4 pregnant women and 14 babies under two years old detained there.
Let’s make this clear: Their lives are in danger. Let us remind you what ICE has already done:
Federal immigrant officials have refused to give detained kids and families flu shots in the past.
There was a mumps outbreak in detention centers between September 2018 and August 2019.
Clean water and soap are NOT guaranteed in detention.
Dangerous overcrowding has already been reported at facilities.
The list goes on…
And how have officials responded to the upcoming crisis? By ordering immigration court staff to remove CDC posters designed to slow the spread of coronavirus.
We must stop this from getting worse and demand ICE to release everyone from immigration detention. They must act now.
