Tag: Trump immigration policy

Acting CBP Commissioner John Sanders resigns

Axios logoJohn Sanders, the acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, announced in an internal email Tuesday that he had handed in his resignation letter — effective July 5 — to acting director of Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan on Monday.

Why it matters: Sanders’ resignation as the administration’s top border enforcer follows heightened scrutiny over the past week of the conditions at migrant children’s detention centers at the southern border.

The latest: Tuesday’s reshuffle continued as 2 DHS officials told the Washington Postthat Trump intends to name Mark Morgan — the acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — as Sanders’ replacement.

View the complete June 25 article by Alayna Treene on the Axios website here.

‘A nightmare’: Even ICE agents are fed up with Trump’s ‘dumbsh*t’ political stunts

AlterNet logoWhen President Donald Trump is hoping to rally his base, one of the things he typically does is try to remind supporters how tough he is on illegal immigration. But according to a report by The New Yorker’s Jonathan Blitzer, agents for the U.S. Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are growing increasingly fed up with being used as a political football.

Blitzer notes that on June 17, Trump announced there’d be immigration raids the following week he promised would result in the deportation of “millions of illegal aliens.” But ICE, Blitzer reports, had to “scramble” in order to accommodate Trump’s announcement and wished he had given them more advance notice.

Carrying out the types of raids Trump wanted, Blizter explains, requires preparation — and ICE agents weren’t given nearly enough time to prepare. An ICE agent, interviewed anonymously, told Blitzer, “Almost nobody was looking forward to this operation. It was a boondoggle, a nightmare.”

View the complete June 25 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.

Doctor Says Detention Centers For Migrant Children Resemble ‘Torture Facilities’

The conditions at the Trump administration’s detention centers for immigrant children are so awful that one doctor compared them to “torture facilities,” according to an ABC News report.

Dolly Lucio Sevier, a board-certified physician, visited two so-called baby jails to check on the condition of hundreds of infants, toddlers, and children being detained. Lucio Sevier, along with lawyers representing the children, inspected one of the facilities after a flu outbreak sent five infants to the intensive care unit of a nearby hospital.

All the children showed signs of trauma, Lucio Sevier concluded. When they arrived, they found children sleeping on cold concrete floors, bright lights shining 24 hours a day, and unsanitary conditions. For example, teens said they had no access to wash their hands, and mothers were not able to wash bottles for their infants.

View the complete June 24 article by Dan Desai Martin on the National Memo website here.

Evangelical Christian Mike Pence defends imprisoning children without soap or toothbrushes

AlterNet logoChildren in immigrant detention centers are reportedly going without basic supplies like soap and toothbrushes but Vice President Mike Pence insisted on Sunday that it’s the fault of Congress.

During an interview on CNN, host Jake Tapper asked the vice president to “talk about the kids” who have been detained for crossing the border.

“Last week, legal advocates reported there are horrific conditions for children at the border,” Tapper said, pointing to reports that say children have gone without soap, toothbrushes and other itemsneeded for basic hygiene.

View the complete June 23 article by David Edwards from Raw Story on the AlterNet website here.

Trump says he will put deportation efforts on hold temporarily

Washington Post logoHe reversed the plan in a tweet Saturday, mere hours before the raids were set to begin

President Trump abruptly suspended his wide-ranging threat to deport “millions” of undocumented immigrants starting Sunday, demanding that Democrats and Republicans forge a plan to stanch the record flows of asylum-seeking families across the southern border into the United States.

Trump had announced the raids Monday in a surprise tweet that ignited a frenzy of fear in immigrant communities nationwide and drew criticism from law enforcement and elected officials in California, New York and other states. Then, in a move that has become a hallmark of his chaotic presidency, he reversed the plan in a tweet Saturday, mere hours before the raids were to begin.

Trump tweeted that he had “delayed the Illegal Immigration Removal Process (Deportation) for two weeks to see if the Democrats and Republicans can get together and work out a solution to the Asylum and Loophole problems at the Southern Border.”

View the complete June 22 article by Kayla Epstein, Nick Miroff, Seung Min Kim and Maria Sacchetti on The Washington Post website here.

Trump’s acting DHS secretary appears wary of the president’s ICE raids. That says a lot.

Washington Post logoWhen President Trump announced his travel ban a week into his presidency, it was up to the Department of Homeland Security to implement it immediately. The result was chaos at our nation’s airports.

When Trump’s Justice Department announced a “zero tolerance” policy on illegal immigration, it was again up to DHS to make it workable. The result was the controversial — and since rescinded — separation of families.

Now Trump is trying to quickly implement another controversial immigration plan, by launching Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids to quickly deport undocumented families, starting Sunday.

And the head of DHS appears understandably wary.

View the complete June 22 article by Aaron Blake on The Washington Post website here.

Trump delays operation to deport migrant families

The Hill logo
President Trump announced he would delay for two weeks an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operation that would have deported as many as 2,000 migrant families.

Trump said the delay would allow for negotiations on Capitol Hill regarding immigration reform.

“At the request of Democrats, I have delayed the Illegal Immigration Removal Process (Deportation) for two weeks to see if the Democrats and Republicans can get together and work out a solution to the Asylum and Loophole problems at the Southern Border. If not, Deportations start!” Trump tweeted.

View the complete June 22 article by Tal Axelrod on The Hill website here.

Trump vows mass immigration arrests, removals of ‘millions of illegal aliens’ starting next week

President Trump said in a tweet Monday night that U.S. immigration agents are planning to make mass arrests starting “next week,” an apparent reference to a plan in preparation for months that aims to round up thousands of migrant parents and children in a blitz operation across major U.S. cities.

“Next week ICE will begin the process of removing the millions of illegal aliens who have illicitly found their way into the United States,” Trump wrote, referring to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “They will be removed as fast as they come in.”

Large-scale ICE enforcement operations are typically kept secret to avoid tipping off targets. In 2018, Trump and other senior officials threatened the mayor of Oakland, Calif., with criminal prosecution for alerting city residents that immigration raids were in the works.

View the complete June 17 article by Nick Miroff and Maria Sacchetti on The Washington Post website here.

The Youngest Child Separated From His Family at the Border Was 4 Months Old

Baby Constantin spent five months of his first year in a foster home. His family got a painful look at America’s experiment with family separation as an immigration policy.

KALAMAZOO, Mich. — The text messages were coming in all day and night with only two data points: Gender and age. With each one that arrived, the on-call caseworker at Bethany Christian Services in Michigan had 15 minutes to find a foster home for another child who was en route from the border. On a brisk winter day in February 2018, Alma Acevedo got a message that caught her breath: “4 months. Boy.”

Since the summer of 2017, the 24-year-old social worker had been seeing a mysterious wave of children arriving from the border, most of them from Central America. Those who were old enough to talk said they had been separated from their parents. “The kids were just inconsolable, they’d be like, ‘Where’s my mommy? Where’s my daddy?’” Ms. Acevedo said. “And it was just constant crying after that.”

None of them had been this young, and few had come this far. When he arrived at her office after midnight, transported by two contract workers, the infant was striking, with long, curled eyelashes framing his deep brown eyes. His legs and arms were chubby, seeming to indicate that he had been cared for by someone. So why was he in Michigan?

View the complete June 16 article by Caitlin Dickerson on The New York Times website here.

Mexico Releases Text Of ‘Secret’ Agreement With US On Refugee Policy

When President Donald Trump announced last week that he would not be imposing tariffs on Mexican goods being imported to the United States as he had threatened, he said President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s government had agreed to major concessions on refugee policy.

The New York Times quickly pointed out that the concessions the governments had agreed to had already been established months before, making it look like Trump had simply backed down from an empty threat. But Trump insisted this was wrong. There was, he said, a secret additional agreement with Mexico that included even more significant concessions.

And on Tuesday, Trump even waved around a folded piece of paper in front of reporters, claiming it was the secret deal. One intrepid reporter took a close-up shot of the paper, and because of the sunlight shining through it, parts of the text were visible. I suggested that, though it wasn’t entirely clear what the deal amounted to, the visible text indicated it was mostly vague promises.

View the complete June 14 article by Cody Fenwick from AlterNet on the National Memo website here.