By David Futrelle
I haven’t done one of these CALL YOUR REPS posts in a while, but the news that the the Department of Health and Human Services has “lost” nearly 1500 migrant children, most of them fleeing violence in Central America, has made me feel sick. PLEASE CALL your Senators to demand that those responsible be held accountable for this, And demand that the Department of Homeland Security cease its policy of separating families at the border.
If you don’t have your Senators’ numbers already, go to 5calls.org.
Here’s some more details on the story from the New York Times:
WASHINGTON — A top official with the Department of Health and Human Services told members of Congress on Thursday that the agency had lost track of nearly 1,500 migrant children it placed with sponsors in the United States, raising concerns they could end up in the hands of human traffickers or be used as laborers by people posing as relatives.
The official, Steven Wagner, the acting assistant secretary of the agency’s Administration for Children and Families, disclosed during testimony before a Senate homeland security subcommittee that the agency had learned of the missing children after placing calls to the people who took responsibility for them when they were released from government custody.
The children were taken into government care after they showed up alone at the Southwest border. Most of the children are from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, and were fleeing drug cartels, gang violence and domestic abuse, government data shows.
At an anti-abortion event earlier this week, Trump declared sanctimoniously that “every child is a precious gift from God.” But apparently that only applies if they’re white.
What the fuck kind of country are we living in?
I think this is the clearest litmus test of character I’ve seen so far during this administration. If you’re not outraged by this situation, there’s something very wrong with you, and fuck you and your economic anxiety.
From Wonkette: Trump Says ICE Will Keep Losing Migrant Children Until Democrats Give In To His Demands:
Trump’s tweet:
By all means, put pressure on the Democrats. Put pressure on everyone!
Trump’s tweet is just the morality of the hostage taker and the domestic abuser.
“If you don’t do what I say, I’ll hurt people, and it’ll be your fault.”
I’m very angry about this at the moment. An immigration lawyer friend called me in tears during the week. She’s been trying to stop a deportation, pending the person getting an actual hearing, and the way ICE have been acting is like something out of a dystopian fiction. They moved her client from Seattle to Arizona so she couldn’t have access to her. Then when she actually got the stay, ICE had put her client on a plane to Honduras anyway. They literally deported her at three in the morning so the court wouldn’t be open. As it happens my friend managed to threaten the airline with contempt proceedings, so they brought her back. But all that does is give her a chance to argue her case. Ironically she has to show that if she is sent back to Honduras, she faces a “genuine and well founded fear of persecution”. Well of course she can get that in the US. Oh, and whilst all this is going on, her 14 year old kid is in another detention centre somewhere.
I know Nazi analogues are too common in political discourse, but ICE really are just Einsatzgruppen.
@Otrame
The U.S. was a role model for Nazi Germany. Particularly our dealings with the indigenous peoples.
@Dalillama
As well as our eugenics program.
Borders are bullshit, the people who are the biggest criminals are the ones sitting in boardrooms and legislatures who get VIP escorts across the same borders they’re trying to thicken, and ICE especially is basically Trump’s private Gestapo and needs to be abolished.
@Tovius
That too. Their main problem with our treatment of black people was the haphazard, harum-scarum nature of it all. The SS considered the KKK to be undisciplined amateurs, hardly deserving of the name of death squads.
@Zemlya
“The law will hang the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from the goose”
In a rare moment of honesty and clarity, trump is telling us that the republicans will never oppose these laws and only the dems might be able to do anything about them.
Here’s a twitter thread on the topic that I think everyone should really read.
https://mobile.twitter.com/jduffyrice/status/1000927903759110144
The writer, Josie Duffy Rice, is an immigration lawyer who is (as far as I know) on the side of good.
tl;dr: We’re conflating two entirely separate things here and it’s got the potential to not only confuse the issue but to provide bad people with a perfect excuse to do worse things.
Thanks for that link EJ. You know one of my common moans is that reports of legal matters are invariably inaccurate; so it’s good to see someone explain the actuality.
Of course, being a woman on the internet who has the audacity to know what’s she’s on about, I’m disappointed, but not surprised, to see Josie getting all the abuse and vitriol.
@EJ
I saw a lot of people on Twitter figuratively running around with their hair on fire this weekend over this story. I think an apt historical comparison is the 60s Scoop, where thousands of aboriginal children were taken from their parents in the 1960s by the Canadian government. If the government monitoring of those children wavered (and I’m not up on the details of the Scoop), it was probably a blessing in disguise, but the real crime was the first thing that happened: ripping children away from their parents.
@Katamount
The 1500 children in this case were not removed from their parents by the US government; they were unaccompanied minors that were sent to the states to flee violence in Honduras, etc.
The government IS removing children from their parents, don’t get me wrong, but that’s not what happened to THESE kids.
@Catalpa
Ah, I misread the tweet stream, you’re quite correct.
It’s a meaningless distinction in my mind.
One part of ICE lost thousands of unaccompanied minors.
Another part of ICE is creating thousands of unaccompanied minors by separating them from their parents who are accompanying them, then handing them to the care of the first part.
I don’t know that it’s a meaningless distinction, necessarily. It’s more like it’s two ugly sides of one very big problem. Since ICE is known for being particularly draconian and cruel and eager to victimize people, the guardians of the unaccompanied minors (who are often immigrants, documented or otherwise, since a best effort is made to place the kids with people who are related to them somehow) have a vested interest in avoiding ICE whenever possible. This makes it difficult for ICE to check up on the kids and determine which children were placed in unsafe conditions/trafficked and which ones are just with people who have a justified wariness and avoidance of ICE.
Oh gods, this is horrible, those poor children! They’ve already lived through violence, had to leave their families to try to get to safety, and now gods alone know where they are and what’s happening to them.
It’s the stuff of nightmares.
Not even the slightest bit surprised by this. Seriously, we Latinos have never been considered as human by the US, which is why we’re always being targeted with discriminatory policies, or getting our countries fucking invaded to install some asshole dictator favorable to your interests.
Let’s not fucking forget they backed the Coup in Honduras and put Republicans in charge of overseeing the election. Which, btw, was fraught with irregularities and fraud.
This story has been debunked, they weren’t really ‘lost’. The fact that so many children are being separated from their parents is still awful.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/1500-missing-immigrant-children-federal-government-fact-check-2018-05-29/