U.S. Deports 400 Migrant Children Under New Coronavirus Rules: A Kind Of Decision That Should Make Us All Shudder

On an Easter Sunday that also happens to be our first one in an epic national and worldwide coronavirus crisis, it is totally legitimate to ask ourselves what kind of people occupy the White House.  How could they be so callous toward these children whose lives have been the constant target for persecution?

I refer to this cruel and vile action of booting these children out of the country based on a change in administrative rules around three weeks ago on March 21st.  

It's the kind of decision that should make us all shudder.  

It's horrific to read that to perform this operation, they erased laws that provide protections for children from getting trafficked and putting children on a track for asylum in a U.S. immigration court. Instead, U.S. officials got the green light to "quickly remove people without standard immigration proceedings." Apparently, five out of twenty-three such children had tested positive for COVID-19 in early April and were among those deported.  

Melania Trump then came to mind as I recalled the trip that she took to the U.S.-Mexico border to visit migrant children in detention centers wearing a stylish, if vulgar and mean-spirited, green jacket that read, "I really don't care, do u?"

This wasn't a "bizarre" act, as the article expressed.  Nor did her jacket refer—as Trump said in a Tweet that day—to the allegedly "Fake News Media."

Rather, her behavior was consistent with her husband's recent callous and horrific acts of policy, as a response to an apparent coronavirus outbreak where children were returned without their parents to Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. We've known that they're evil all along, but somehow not everybody does in the U.S.

This story screams for justice. Again, it is incumbent and urgent that all of us of good conscience vote in November and get these horrible people with hearts of darkness out of the White House.

-Angela Valenzuela

"U.S. deports 400 migrant children under new coronavirus rules." 

WASHINGTON/NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. immigration officials have rapidly deported nearly 400 migrant children intercepted at the U.S.-Mexico border in the past two weeks under new rules billed as seeking to limit the spread of the novel coronavirus in the United States, according to government data seen by Reuters.

My last atrocious thing to report for the day. Here we have "Christian adoption trafficking mills" happening in our country to which U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos is directly implicated. To match the slavery, exploitation, and parent-child separations that are currently going on right now—as just posted.

So shameful. Thought I'd share.

-Angela Valenzuela

Migrant Children Are Being Given To An Adoption Agency Linked To Betsy DeVos

U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos  /
Gage Skidmore/CC BY-SA 2.0/Flick

byJakeThomas

Mar 6| The Intellectualist

Migrant children have gone to Bethany Christian Services, an adoption organization with deep ties to the DeVos family.

The Trump administration argued in court earlier this week that reuniting migrant children separated from their parents at the border would require too much effort and “would present grave child welfare concerns”, as the children would be traumatized by leaving their current sponsors’ homes.

Though concerns for the psychological well-being of the children are specious at best, considering the original trauma was inflicted by the administration, the situation has a second nefarious element: many of these children are being sent to a Christian adoption agency with ties to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

Via Progressive Secular Humanist:

As for the fate of the thousands of children the Trump administration does not want to reunite with their parents, Progressive Secular Humanist previously reported that many of the migrant children ruthlessly separated from their family by the Trump administration are being shipped to Bethany Christian Services, a Christian adoption agency with ties to the family of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

Rewire News reported last year that the agency was handling migrant children who suffered separation from their families under President Trump’s “zero-tolerance” immigration policy.

Migrant children in Michigan who have been separated from their parents by the Trump administration are attending “a special school” run by Bethany Christian Services, an anti-choice organization with a record of coercive adoption practices that has yet to receive instructions about how to reunify these children with their detained parents.

Progressive Secular Humanist notes that DeVos’ ties to the organization were confirmed by Snopes, which found several members of the DeVos family have provided financial support to Bethany Christian Services.

The links between the extended DeVos family and Bethany are undeniable. Tax filings archived by ProPublica show that between 2001 and 2015, the Dick and Betsy DeVos Foundation (the philanthropic organization run by DeVos and her husband) gave $343,000 in grants to Bethany Christian Services.

Between 2012 and 2015, Bethany received $750,000 in grants from the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation, which is run by the Education Secretary’s father-in-law, the billionaire founder of Amway Richard DeVos, and his wife Helen.

Furthermore, Brian DeVos — a cousin of Betsy DeVos’s husband Dick — was the Senior Vice President for Child and Family Services at Bethany as recently as 2015, and Maria DeVos — who is married to Dick DeVos’s brother Doug — has served on the board of Bethany.

Kathryn Joyce noted last year in a piece for The Intercept that news of migrant children heading to Bethany Christian Services caused alarm that the children could end up as "social orphans."

To adoption reform advocates, who monitor unethical and abusive practices in child welfare, it looked like any number of adoption crises in the past, like the airlifts out of Haiti in the wake of its cataclysmic 2010 earthquake. Then, masses of unaccompanied children were suddenly labeled orphans and became the focus of a deafening campaign in the U.S. to rescue them through inter-country adoption, even as Haitian adults were being warned not to try to come themselves.

Fears of a new adoption rush in today’s border crisis weren’t groundless. There was reason to be concerned. The former head of U.S Immigration and Customs Enforcement under President Barack Obama warned that some of the children who’d recently been separated would remain separated “permanently” and potentially be adopted. Reports surfaced of mothers who were told that their children would be adopted as an incentive to “behave.” On Tuesday night, the Daily Beast reported that the threat of adoption has become weaponized, as a Guatemalan mother detained by Customs and Border Protection earlier this month was allegedly presented with the ultimatum that if she didn’t abandon her asylum appeal, she would be jailed for a year and her daughter put up for adoption.

Bethany’s director of refugee and foster care programs, Dona Abbott, said last year that it was too early “to say whether these children will be available for adoption at all.”

But Progressive Secular Humanist noted that Joyce and others worry that Bethany, which allegedly uses coercive and misleading practices with birth parents in its domestic adoption program, would view the migrant children as a new supply source.

In fact, there is already in place a huge and thriving business in the trafficking of children via Christian adoption agencies like the DeVos connected Bethany. In her 2013 book, The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption, Kathryn Joyce documents this alarming trend of conservative Christians adopting children removed from their natural parents via nefarious means to feed the business of Christian adoption and serve the agenda of Christian theocracy.

Bottom line: The Trump administration says it can’t reunite missing migrant children with their families; instead, many of the children are being funneled through Christian adoption trafficking mills like the DeVos connected Bethany Christian Services.

Elliott Castillo, developed software to match and reunite parents with children

Just came across this.  Let's use technology as that proposed by Elliott Castillo 

a software developer to reunite children with their parents.

Angela

Here is the latest status update on the extent of immigrant children detention. It's sickening to say, but this is BIG business for the immigrant-detention-industrial complex, with large sums going to Southwest Key and Baptist Child & Family Services.

Friends, we as taxpayers with our taxpayer dollar are paying for this institutionalized cruelty with predictably troubling lifelong effects to children to the tune of more than $1 billion, annually.  Why go this route when there are humane alternatives, as presented by Sonia Nazario?

This is racist, fascist policy.  We would never contemplate such action toward Canadian parents and children if for some reason they had to make their way en masse across the U.S.-Canadian border.

Let's stop this madness.

-Angela Valenzuela

#FamiliesBelongTogether
#familiestornapart 
#AbolishICE

Detaining immigrant kids is now a billion-dollar industry

By MARTHA MENDOZA AND LARRY FENN | AP News

Jul. 13, 2018

SAN ANTONIO (AP) — Detaining immigrant children has morphed into a surging industry in the U.S. that now reaps $1 billion annually — a tenfold increase over the past decade, an Associated Press analysis finds.

Health and Human Services grants for shelters, foster care and other child welfare services for detained unaccompanied and separated children soared from $74.5 million in 2007 to $958 million in 2017. The agency is also reviewing a new round of proposals amid a growing effort by the White House to keep immigrant children in government custody.

Currently, more than 11,800 children, from a few months old to 17, are housed in nearly 90 facilities in 15 states — Arizona, California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Kansas, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia and Washington.

They are being held while their parents await immigration proceedings or, if the children arrived unaccompanied, are reviewed for possible asylum themselves.

In May, the agency issued requests for bids for five projects that could total more than $500 million for beds, foster and therapeutic care, and “secure care,” which means employing guards. More contracts are expected to come up for bids in October.

HHS spokesman Kenneth Wolfe said the agency will award bids “based on the number of beds needed to provide appropriate care for minors in the program.”

The agency’s current facilities include locations for what the Trump administration calls “tender age” children, typically under 5. Three shelters in Texas have been designated for toddlers and infants. Others — including in tents in Tornillo, Texas, and a tent-and-building temporary shelter in Homestead, Florida — are housing older teens.

Over the past decade, by far the largest recipients of taxpayer money have been Southwest Key and Baptist Child & Family Services, AP’s analysis shows. From 2008 to date, Southwest Key has received $1.39 billion in grant funding to operate shelters; Baptist Child & Family Services has received $942 million.

A Texas-based organization called International Educational Services also was a big recipient, landing more than $72 million in the last fiscal year before folding amid a series of complaints about the conditions in its shelters.

The recipients of the money run the gamut from nonprofits, religious organizations and for-profit entities. The organizations originally concentrated on housing and detaining at-risk youth, but shifted their focus to immigrants when tens of thousands of Central American children started arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border in recent years.

They are essentially government contractors for the Health and Human Services Department — the federal agency that administers the program keeping immigrant children in custody. Organizations like Southwest Key insist that the children are well cared for and that the vast sums of money they receive are necessary to house, transport, educate and provide medical care for thousands of children while complying with government regulations and court orders.

The recent uproar surrounding separated families at the border has placed the locations at the center of the controversy. A former Wal-Mart in Texas is now a Southwest Key facility that’s believed to be the biggest child immigrant facility in the country, and First Lady Melania Trump visited another Southwest Key location in Phoenix.

Advocates on both sides of the aisle criticize the growing number of kids housed in government shelters, but they have different reasons — and they blame each other.

“You can’t put a child in a prison. You cannot. It’s immoral,” said Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, a New York Democrat who has been visiting shelters.

Gillibrand said the shelters will continue to expand because no system is in place to reunite families separated at the border. “These are real concerns that the administration has not thought through at all,” she said.

But President Donald Trump says cracking down on immigration ultimately can lead to spending less money and having fewer immigrants in government custody.

“Illegal immigration costs our country hundreds of billions of dollars,” he said at a recent rally. “So imagine if we could spend that money to help bring opportunity to our inner cities and our rural communities and our roads and our highways and our schools.”

In April, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a “zero tolerance policy” directing authorities to arrest, jail and prosecute anyone illegally crossing the border, including people seeking asylum and without previous offenses. As a result, more than 2,300 children were turned over to HHS.

In a recently released report, the State Department decried the general principle of holding children in shelters, saying it makes them inherently vulnerable.

“Removal of a child from the family should only be considered as a temporary, last resort,” the report said. “Studies have found that both private and government-run residential institutions for children, or places such as orphanages and psychiatric wards that do not offer a family-based setting, cannot replicate the emotional companionship and attention found in family environments that are prerequisites to healthy cognitive development.”

Some in the Trump administration describe the new policy as a “deterrent” to future would-be immigrants and asylum-seekers fleeing violence and abject poverty in Central America, Mexico and beyond.

But Steven Wagner, acting assistant secretary for the Administration for Children and Families — an HHS division — said the policy has exposed broader issues over how the government can manage such a vast system.

“It was never intended to be a foster care system with more than 10,000 children in custody at an immediate cost to the federal taxpayer of over $1 billion dollars per year,” Wagner said in a statement.

The longer a child is in government custody, the potential for emotional and physical damage grows, said Dr. Colleen Kraft, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

“The foundational relationship between a parent and child is what sets the stage for that child’s brain development, for their learning, for their child health, for their adult health,” Kraft said.

“And you could have the nicest facility with the nicest equipment and toys and games, but if you don’t have that parent, if you don’t have that caring adult that can buffer the stress that these kids feel, then you’re taking away the basic science of what we know helps pediatrics.”

A judge in California has ordered authorities to reunite separated families within 30 days — and the government has completed more than 50 of the reunions of children under 5 by Thursday.