Tag: Trump immigration policy

‘This is it for you. You’re fu**ed.’: Inside Trump’s abuse of migrant kids at an old Walmart

The following article by Alan Pyke was posted on the ThinkProgress.org website July 23, 2018:

From holding cells nicknamed the “hielera” or icebox, to the supposedly friendlier housing at “Casa Padre,” migrant kids describe a hellscape of cruel guards, sickening food, and psychological torture.

A security guard checks cars at the entrance to Casa Padre, a former Walmart, now a center for unaccompanied immigrant children. Over 2,300 immigrant children wereseparated from their parents. Credit:  Spencer Platt, Getty Images

Children are being cussed out by guards and subsisting on meager rations of beans, crackers, and tortillas that leave them feeling ill in a converted Walmart in south Texas.

The new reports of harsh physical conditions, humiliating psychological abuse, and basic deprivation come from children held at the so-called “Casa Padre” facility in Brownsville, Texas, almost a month after President Donald Trump took symbolic steps to quash public outcry over his family separation policy aimed at punishing and deterring migrants.

The children and parents who swore out hundreds of affidavits to attorneys appealing the United States government’s treatment of migrants have mostly fled violence in Central America. The conditions in which they find themselves today in the world’s richest and most powerful country shock the conscience — and almost certainly violate the conditions of the legal settlement that’s bound American officials in treatment of minors in immigration detention for decades, lawyers say.

View the complete article here.

Trump’s Family Separation Crisis

Credit: John Moore, Getty Images

Today, the Trump administration has defied a court order and failed to meet yet another reunification deadline to reunite more than 1,500 children who were separated from their parents. Make no mistake–Trump created the family separation crisis, and his own policy has led to thousands of children being separated from their families.

When history is written, Trump’s treatment of immigrant families will be remembered as one of our nation’s darkest hours. America has forever been a nation of immigrants, yet the Trump administration is actively engineering a humanitarian crisis.

Now, the Trump administration is using every excuse not to reunite separated families. They’ve continued to incarcerate children in nightmarish conditions, deport parents without their children, and refuse immigrants urgent medical care with dire consequences. They’re even putting infants into deportation court by themselves. The only reason any children have been reunited with their parents is because courts are forcing the Trump administration to start dealing with the crisis they created. Trump officials deserve no credit for these reunifications. Continue reading “Trump’s Family Separation Crisis”

Trump’s Immigration Plan Imposes Radical New Income and Health Tests

The following article by Melissa boteach Sawn Fremstad, Katherine Gallagher Robbins, Heidi Schultheis and Rachel West was posted on the Center for American Progress website July 19, 2018:

Immigrant families and activists rally outside the Tennessee state Capitol in Nashville, May 31, 2018. Credit: Drew Angerer, Getty

President Donald Trump is preparing to unilaterally and fundamentally change the U.S. system for legal immigration in ways that would restrict immigration to the wealthiest and most privileged applicants. Under a new policy being drafted by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), an archaic federal immigration provision known as the “public charge” test would be reinterpreted to limit both family-unity and diversity-based immigration in ways that are a radical departure from current immigration law.1 Under the rewritten test, people would generally fail if they had income and resources of less than 250 percent of the federal poverty guidelines or had a medical condition and no unsubsidized source of health insurance.2

In this brief, the Center for American Progress aims to give the public a sense of the radical nature of the unilateral action the Trump administration is planning. To do so, the authors estimate what would happen if all people in the United States—U.S.-born citizens and immigrants alike—had to take this “Trump test,” based on the most recently leaked draft of the rule.3 According to CAP’s estimates, the proposed Trump test is so restrictive that more than 100 million people—about one-third of the U.S. population—would fail if they were required to take it today.

This estimate is a conservative one that is based on a snapshot of people’s current circumstances. Yet the Trump test is ongoing, so people who pass the test today could very well fail it in the near future due to economic downturns, mass layoffs, job insecurity, health problems, disability, or other factors. While, in this brief, the authors do not estimate an upper bound for Trump test failures, it is reasonable to assume that at least half of all people in the United States could fail this test over a period of several years.4

View the complete article here.

Trump Administration Considers Unprecedented Curbs on Asylum for Migrants Image

The following article by Caitlin Dickerson was posted on the New York Times website July 18, 2018:

A Honduran asylum seeker waited to cross from Matamoros, Mexico, to Brownsville, Tex., in June. CreditCallaghan O’Hare, The New York Times

The kidnappings and mass killings were a fact of daily life for Francisco Miguel-Francisco, a young man living in Cerro Martín, a small village tucked into the indigenous highlands of Guatemala. He grew up in fear of the warring factions that battled for control of the region and that would kill without hesitation for a transgression as small as sharing food or water across enemy lines.

Fed up and desperate, he set out for the United States in 1984 and won asylum. He now lives in Arizona as a legal permanent resident with his daughter, who goes to an American school and speaks unaccented English.

Three decades later, his son Miguel, who had been left behind in Guatemala, began his own journey away from a life that had become intolerable. Miguel reached Arizona on May 15, 2018, to a much different reception.

View the complete article here.

Trump Deports More Than 450 Immigrant Parents Without Their Children

Ahead of a court-ordered reunification deadline on Thursday, more than 1,500 children remain separated as a result of Trump’s family separation policies, and last night the Trump administration admitted in court that it has deported more than 450 immigrant parents without their children.

The Trump administration said in court that it has deported more than 450 immigrant parents without their children.

Reuters: “More than 450 immigrant parents who were separated from their children when they entered the United States illegally are no longer in the country though their children remain behind, according to a joint court filing on Monday by the federal government and the American Civil Liberties Union.” Continue reading “Trump Deports More Than 450 Immigrant Parents Without Their Children”

Trump Is Taking America To An Evil Place

The following article by David Cay Johnson was posted on the DCReport.org website July 13, 2018:

Every American, including native-born whites, should be alarmed about the advancing Trump administration plans to build mass detention facilities, which could fast be turned into concentration camps to hold opponents of Trump policies.

Abundant signs reveal Trump administration planning for mass roundups. News of these plans is out there but easily missed in the endless flurry of stories about Trump White House chaos. This story needs, but has not received, focused attention from our mainstream news media, from the minority party and especially from principled Republicans.

The Trump administration acknowledges planning on mass detention camps designed, initially, to hold 20,000 people.

View the complete post n the DCReports.org website here.

HHS secretary: Separating immigrant families is ‘one of the great acts of American generosity’

The following article by Rebekah Entralgo was posted on the ThinkProgress.org website July 11, 2018:

Secretary Azar boasted of the Trump administration’s abusive policy, claiming his department had nothing to hide.

Alex Azar, HHS Secretary. Credit:  Win McNamee, Getty Images

The same day the federal government missed a court-imposed deadline to reunite roughly 84 children under the age of 5 with their families — after being forcibly separated from them at the U.S.-Mexico border — Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar appeared on CNN to defend how his agency has handled the recent immigration crisis.

“We have nothing to hide about how we operate these facilities,” Azar told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer Tuesday night, referring to the juvenile and “tender age” facilities in which many of the separated children are currently being detained, which HHS officials have barred media outlets and public figures from filming or visiting unannounced.

Speaking to the conditions in which the children are being held, he added, “It is one of the great acts of American generosity and charity, what we are doing for these unaccompanied kids.”

View the complete article on the ThinkProgress.org website here.

Trump administration seeks more time to reunite some migrant families split at border

The following article by Maria Sacchetti was posted on the Washington Post website July 6, 2018:

Migrant families line up to enter a bus station after they were processed and released by U.S. Customs and Border Protection on June 24. Credit: David J. Phillip, AP

Lawyers for the Trump administration on Friday asked a federal judge for more time to reunite immigrant children with their parents, the latest signal that the government is struggling to bring families back together after separating thousands as they crossed the U.S.-Mexico border earlier this year.

U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw in San Diego ordered the government to return children younger than 5 to their parents by Tuesday, but federal lawyers said they could meet that deadline for only about half of the 101 children in that age group.

Officials say they have deployed hundreds of government employees and opened a command center usually reserved for natural disasters to match parents and children. But the massive effort is complicated by difficulty in locating some parents and, in other cases, uncertainty about the parents’ identities. Some parents have been deported and others have been freed in the United States, apparently without a system to monitor everyone’s whereabouts.

View the full post on the Washington Post website here.

Fact-checking President Trump’s numbers on the ‘human toll of illegal immigration’

The following article by Meg Kelly was posted on the Washington Post website July 6, 2018:

The president has made this claim for over two years — but there is still no evidence. (Meg Kelly/The Washington Post)

“So here are just a few statistics on the human toll of illegal immigration. According to a 2011 government report, the arrests attached to the criminal alien population included an estimated 25,000 people for homicide, 42,000 for robbery, nearly 70,000 for sex offenses, and nearly 15,000 for kidnapping. In Texas alone, within the last seven years, more than a quarter-million criminal aliens have been arrested and charged with over 600,000 criminal offenses. … Sixty-three thousand Americans since 9/11 have been killed by illegal aliens. This isn’t a problem that’s going away; it’s getting bigger.”
— President Trump, remarks at the White House, June 22, 2018

In the midst of uproar over his administration’s family separation policy, President Trump highlighted the stories of families who have been “permanently separated” because a loved one was killed by an undocumented immigrant. This theme is nothing new. The president has claimed without evidence that undocumented immigrants bring “tremendous crime” since he announced he was running for office.

We’ve looked at the overarching claim here, here and here — but what caught our eye in these comments were all the specific numbers Trump used. It’s rare for the president support his case with statistics.

View the full article on the Washington Post website here.

Trump claims he ‘never pushed’ House Republicans to vote for hard-line immigration bill

The following article by Max Greenwood was posted on the Hill website June 30, 2018:

President Trump falsely claimed on Saturday that he never urged congressional Republicans to pass a pair of immigration bills, saying that he knew all along that the measure would not win enough Democratic votes to pass in the Senate.

“I never pushed the Republicans in the House to vote for the Immigration Bill, either GOODLATTE 1 or 2, because it could never have gotten enough Democrats as long as there is the 60 vote threshold,” he tweeted. “I released many prior to the vote knowing we need more Republicans to win in Nov.”

View the complete article on the Hill website here.