Tag: Trump cruelty

Minnesotans in Congress get troubling look at U.S.-Mexico border

Reps. Dean Phillips and Pete Stauber saw wretched conditions at U.S.-Mexico border.

WASHINGTON, DC – The national immigration debate has turned the southern border into a popular destination for members of Congress, including several Minnesota lawmakers from both parties who report being shocked by what they saw.

“I’d seen the photos and read some accounts,” said Rep. Dean Phillips, a Democrat. “I anticipated I’d see difficult conditions, but what I saw was almost indescribable. I couldn’t believe that, in my own country, that people were being kept in the ways that I saw.”

Phillips’ most recent trip to the Rio Grande Valley in Texas was on July 19, where he and a bipartisan group of House members inspected ports of entry, a Border Patrol station, a centralized processing center and the border itself. It was his second visit in a period of less than two months, following a conversation with Rep. Pete Stauber about his own visit in there in April.

View the complete August 2 article by Patrick Condon on The Star Tribune website here.

The Dire Consequences of the Trump Administration’s Attack on Transgender People’s Access to Shelters

Center for American Progress logoThe U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) fall 2019 regulatory agenda revealed that the agency is planning to essentially eliminate critical nondiscrimination protections for transgender people seeking safe shelter. This is despite the fact that HUD Secretary Ben Carson assured Rep. Jennifer Wexton (D-VA) during a congressional hearing that such protections would remain in place. Transgender people face persistent social, cultural, and economic barriers due to discrimination which lead to high rates of homelessness, including higher rates of unemployment; vulnerability to eviction because of their gender identity; family rejection; and interpersonal violence. In the general population, the lifetime rate of homelessness is around 4 in every 100people. According to the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey, however, nearly 1 in 3 transgender respondents experienced homelessness at some point in their lives. Policies that prohibit discrimination based on gender identity such as HUD’s 2016 Equal Access Rule are necessary to ensure safe and equal access to shelters for people in need. HUD’s latest proposal would unnecessarily erode these strong protections, causing confusion for providers and putting transgender people, nonbinary people, and others at risk.

Proposed revisions to the Equal Access Rule would undermine protections for transgender people

Recognizing the need for clear protections against discrimination in housing, HUD promulgated a rule in 2012 to ensure that all HUD-assisted or -insured housing programs are open to all eligible individuals and families regardless of sexual orientation, gender identity, or marital status. In 2016, HUD issued a rule to clarify that gender identity nondiscrimination includes equal access to sex-segregated shelters. The rule provides crucial support for transgender people who are unstably housed, chronically homeless, and/or seeking emergency shelter by ensuring equal treatment. Continue reading “The Dire Consequences of the Trump Administration’s Attack on Transgender People’s Access to Shelters”

Trump officials tighten asylum rules, enlist foreign nations to deter migration

Washington Post logoIn court, at the border and through arm-bending negotiations with regional neighbors Mexico and Guatemala, the Trump administration has been devising elaborate new immigration measures to buttress against potential judicial setbacks and the possibility of a new migration surge this fall.

The effort proceeds along two main fronts: a long-range push to narrow access to the U.S. asylum system for migrants seeking protection, and a more immediate attempt to create new deterrents by enlisting foreign governments instead of congressional Democrats.

Late Friday, the administration announced a major new migration accord with Guatemala that would make the country a faraway repository for asylum seekers from other nations. It has been rolled out so hastily that U.S. lawmakers have yet to receive a copy.

View the complete July 31 article by Nick Miroff on The Washington Post website here.

The enduring cruelty of Trump’s immigration agenda

Washington Post logoIn a parallel universe, the scene could have flooded newspaper front pages and cable news networks for days. But in the whirlwind of the Trump presidency, it’ll end up just another footnote in a forgotten chapter of White House absurdity.

Last week, President Trump hosted a delegation of some two dozen victims of religious persecution from around the world. The diverse group, which included a Jewish Holocaust survivor, a Tibetan who fled China and a Rohingya Muslim chased out of Myanmar by a government-backed campaign of ethnic cleansing, huddled around the president’s desk at the Oval Office. They took turns explaining their plight to Trump and what drove them to escape their homelands for safe haven elsewhere.

It was already an awkward set piece, but it turned all the more cringeworthy with Trump’s comments. One exchange in particular — between the president and Nadia Murad, a Yazidi woman from Iraq who was raped and tortured and whose family members were murdered by the Islamic State — stood out. The president was not particularly attentive, only perking up when questioning Murad on how she could have won the Nobel Peace Prize.

View the complete July 26 article by Ishaan Tharoor on The Washington Post website here.

Trump’s legal battles over census go public

The Hill logoThe Trump administration’s internal legal struggles to add a question on citizenship to the 2020 census are spilling out into the open.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) announced late Sunday that it was cleaning house on the team of lawyers that have spent the past year defending the citizenship question in court. That move came just days after DOJ attorneys told a federal judge that they were caught off guard by President Trump’s announcement that he still wanted the question on the census after the Supreme Court ruled against it. 

Legal experts were shocked by the decision to change attorneys. But it may have been the only way the administration could continue pushing for the citizenship question in court.

View the complete July 8 article by Jacqueline Thomsen on The Hill website here.

Trump sees a border threat. Others see a crisis of conscience.

Washington Post logoThe numbers of asylum-seeking migrants arriving at America’s southern border may be dropping, but the political pressure is not. President Trump and his opponents seem to be locked in a weekly struggle over immigration and identity in America. Critics decry the conditions and methods that thousands of migrants have been subjected to at the border. Last week, a Nicaraguan man became the 12th person to die in the custody of U.S. immigration authorities since September.

Trump remains undeterred and is sticking to his hard-line stance. He sees the influx of predominantly Central American migrants as an epochal crisis — and a political opportunity. In rallies, he has sought to rile up a nationalist base with his misleading insistence that his Democratic opponents favor “open borders” and zero enforcement. Even after securing funding from Congress for a raft of border security measures, he has renewed his promise to carry out mass deportations of undocumented migrants living in various parts of the country.

“I don’t know when I leave in the morning if I’ll come home in the night,” said Eva, who arrived illegally 19 years ago from Mexico and whose teenage daughter is a U.S. citizen. “They could come and get me at any time.”

View the complete July 8 article by Ishaan Tharoor on The Washington Post website here.

New York Times Hits Back At Trump Claim Of ‘Phony’ Story On Migrant Detention

The president denied the paper’s report about nightmarish conditions at a Clint, Texas, facility.

The New York Times is hitting back at President Donald Trump after he accused the paper of fabricating a story about nightmarish conditions inside a Clint, Texas, migrant detention center.

On Sunday, Trump tweeted that the Times had written “phony and exaggerated accounts,” adding that “people should not be entering our Country illegally, only for us to then have to care for them.”

In response, the publication’s communications department told the president it stood by its reporting.

“We are confident in the accuracy of our reporting on the U.S. Border Patrol’s detention centers,” it said.

View the complete July 7 article by Amy Russo on the Huffington Post website here.

We Can Enforce Border Security Without Trump’s Racist Cruelty

You don’t have to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement or “decriminalize” illegal entry into the United States to humanize the Border Patrol. You don’t have to close all the detention centers into which migrants are now cramped and stacked as if, yes, they are in concentration camps (though that would help). You don’t have to give up enforcing the country’s borders.

You do have to replace President Donald J. Trump, who has stage-managed the cruelty and fed the racism that seeps through ICE. And you have to fire many of the men now working as Border Patrol agents — men so steeped in racism and misogyny and violence that they never should have been hired in the first place. The agency can be fixed, but many of its hirelings cannot be.

That is clear from reading some of the “secret” messages that were posted on a Facebook page that was closeted from public view — a page for retired and current Border Patrol agents. Aired earlier this week in an investigative report by ProPublica, the messages ranged from the crude to the violent. Some made light of the deaths of migrants trying to cross into the United States illegally. Others used racist language and ugly stereotypes to refer to both migrants and Latino members of Congress.

View the complete July 6 article by Cynthia Tucker on the National Memo website here.

The evidence of Trump’s crimes against humanity is piling up

AlterNet logoThere may come a time when top officials of the Trump administration, including the president himself, will no longer be able to travel abroad without fear of arrest by international authorities. Every day now, evidence accumulates that Trump and his appointees are perpetrating crimes against humanity on the southern border.

Even Trump’s conscience seems to have been shocked, momentarily, by the wrenching news video of a father and his little daughter drowned in the Rio Grande last Sunday. Or so he wants us to believe. The images of Oscar Alberto Martinez holding his 23-month-old Angie Valeria, their bodies face down in the river, forced the nation’s attention to the terrible effects of his administration’s crackdown. Driven away from safer ports of entry, those innocents perished as the father tried to save his child at a dangerous crossing point.

Trump being Trump, he immediately sought to deflect blame onto “the Democrats,” suggesting that his opponents’ humane attitude draws refugees northward at their peril. But by now he knows that his ill-treatment of those migrants has done nothing to dissuade them from fleeing violence and starvation in their home countries — a consequence of U.S. foreign policy that predated Trump but that he has only made worse.

View the complete June 27 article by Joe Conason from Creators.com website on the AlterNet website here.

Detained, Abused & Denied Medical Care: How Trump Immigration Policies Led to Child Deaths at Border

A 16-year-old Guatemalan boy died in U.S. custody Monday after spending a week in immigration jail. Carlos Gregorio Hernandez Vasquez was found dead at a Border Patrol station at Weslaco, Texas, just one day after being diagnosed with the flu. He was not hospitalized. This marks the fifth death of a Guatemalan child apprehended by Border Patrol since December. Before last year, it had been more than a decade since a child died in the custody of U.S. immigration officials. We speak with Fernando Garcia, the founding director of the Border Network for Human Rights, an advocacy organization based in El Paso, and Jennifer Harbury, a longtime human rights lawyer based in the Rio Grande Valley, Texas.

View the May 21 video on the Democracy Now! website here.