‘Part of the stench’: CNN’s Anderson Cooper skewers Mike Pence for ‘awkwardly chuckling’ at talk of neglected migrant kids

AlterNet logoWhile Presiden Donald Trump has been trying to drum up fears about a crisis driven by waves of immigrants trying to invade the United States, the real crisis is a humanitarian one that forced many asylum seekers from Central America to leave their homes in the first place. And that humanitarian crisis continues on American soil in the camps and detention centers where children and others are being held in horrendous conditions, as many recent reports have documented.

CNN”s Anderson Cooper reflected on the crisis and the administration’s attempts to shift the blame to others on his show Tuesday night.

He noted that, in one powerful piece by the New York Times documenting the unsanitary and unsafe conditions of the migrants are forced to live in, Director of Columbia Law School’s Immigrant Rights Clinic Elora Mukherjee said, “There is a stench.” The children at these facilities were unable to clean themselves, she explained, though Cooper noted that the “stench” is also a metaphor for the administration’s disastrous handling of the situation.

View the complete June 26 article by Cody Fenwick on the AlterNet website here.

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.

U.S. asylum officers call on court to end Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy

Axios logoU.S. asylum officers on Wednesday implored a U.S. appeals court to block the Trump administration from requiring migrants to stay in Mexico while awaiting immigration hearings in the U.S., the Washington Post first reported.

Why it matters: The Trump administration’s ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy, which forces asylum seekers to wait in Mexico until their cases have been finalized, can put migrants fleeing dangerous situations at risk. The labor union for federal asylum officers called the program in an amicus brief filing. “fundamentally contrary to the moral fabric of our Nation and our international and domestic legal obligations.”

View the complete June 26 article by Gigi Sukin on the Axios 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.

‘A ‘A Constant Game of Musical Chairs’ Amid Another Homeland Security Shake-Up

New York Times logoWASHINGTON — Turmoil intensified on Tuesday inside the agency responsible for securing the country’s borders as a top official was replaced by an immigration hard-liner and former Fox News contributor who last week pushed for nationwide raids to deport undocumented families.

That hard-liner, Mark Morgan, will take over as the head of Customs and Border Protection, administration officials said Tuesday.

The move again overhauls leadership at the Department of Homeland Security, which is responsible for cybersecurity, disaster relief and the enforcement of customs, border and immigration law, just two months after a purge of officials destabilized the agency.

View the complete June 25 article by Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Maggie Haberman on The New York Times website here.

Mark Morgan to replace John Sanders as border chief as DHS shake-up continues

Washington Post logoA week after beginning his reelection campaign with promises of mass deportations, President Trump sent the agencies responsible for immigration enforcement deeper into disarray on Tuesday, replacing his interim border chief with a figure he plucked from cable news punditry last month.

Mark Morgan, who Trump installed as acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in early June, will take over as acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, replacing John Sanders, according to two Department of Homeland Security officials and a legislative staffer briefed on the move.

Trump ran for president promising a sweeping immigration crackdown and a monumental border wall, but he has presided over the worst migration crisis in at least a decade while dizzyingly hiring and firing DHS officials. The shake-up Tuesday comes after weeks of interagency squabbles and political knifings among agency officials who are struggling to cope with a record surge of migrant families and squalid conditions inside U.S. Border Patrol detention cells stuffed beyond capacity.

View the complete June 25 article by Nick Miroff and Josh Dawsey on The Washington Post website here.

House approves $383 billion spending package

The Hill logoHouse Democrats on Tuesday passed a $383 billion spending package, finishing work on three-quarters of the annual appropriations bills on its docket ahead of the July Fourth recess.

The package of five funding bills passed in a vote of 227-194, largely along party lines. It includes funds for commerce and justice; agriculture, interior and environment; military construction and veterans affairs; and transportation, housing and urban development.

The legislation’s passage means Democrats have successfully completed work on nine of the 12 annual appropriations bills in their chamber. They are set to pass a 10th bill, covering financial services and general government, this week.

View the complete June 25 article by Niv Elis on The Hill website here.

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.