Tag: Trump abuse of migrant children

Migrant Children Are Spending Months ‘Crammed’ in a Temporary Florida Shelter

New York Times logoHOMESTEAD, Fla. — About half of the roughly 2,300 children confined in a privately run Florida facility intended as a temporary shelter for migrant teenagers have been there for more than 20 days and many of them for months, despite legal standards that require children who cross the border to be speedily released or sent to state-licensed shelters that are equipped to offer longer-term care.

The Homestead center near Miami, the only one in the government’s large network of shelters run by a private, for-profit corporation, is intended to keep children for only a few days, but has been holding them for much longer as a result of the unusually large number of unaccompanied children arriving in recent months along the southwest border.

A recent population census, from June 25, showed that 1,162 children at the shelter had been there longer than 20 days. The report, obtained by The New York Times from a Homestead employee, listed 840 children who had been there more than 30 days, and 224 for at least 60 days.

View the complete June 26 article by Miriam Jordan on The New York Times website here.

Shep Smith delivers epic fact check to Fox News audience: We’re treating migrant children worse than prisoners of war

AlterNet logoAs favorable to President Donald Trump as Fox News generally is, certain Fox hosts aren’t shy about criticizing him at times. One of them is Shepard Smith, who equated conditions in immigration detention centers near the U.S./Mexico border with “violations of the Geneva Convention” during a Tuesday broadcast.

Trump has claimed that conditions in migrant detention centers in 2019 are “much better than they were under President Obama.” But Smith disagreed vehemently on Tuesday, describing conditions at a detention center in Clint, Texas as “horrendous” and saying that children were wearing clothes “covered in snot” and had “no access to toothbrushes or toothpaste or soap — basic necessities for any of us and all the more so for children.”

Smith was also highly critical of conditions in those detention centers during his Monday, June 24 broadcast. Following up the next day, Smith explained, “We reported accurately here yesterday that were these prisoners of war instead of innocent children, those withholding of those items would be violations of the Geneva Convention. That is what the president considers treating well the children of migrants who came across the border without documents — children who are now separated from their families.”

View the complete June 26 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet here.