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From: Reveal <lmorel@revealnews.org> Date: June 27, 2019 at 4:00:58 PM EDT To: <rryals@comcast.net> Subject: Kids on the Line: ‘I have never heard of this level of inhumanity’ Reply-To: <us1-d2587bd347-c46d28d247@inbound.mailchimpapp.net>

(AP Photo/Cedar Attanasio)

Two decades ago, a settlement known as the Flores agreement established court protections for immigrant children in U.S. custody.

The agreement grants a small group of lawyers access to government facilities where children are held, at the border and across the country, that are otherwise shrouded in secrecy.

The public usually learns about their observations weeks or months later, through court filings in the Flores case. That’s how we learned about children who were being medicated without proper consent at a Texas facility with a documented past of abuse.

But after visiting a few Border Patrol facilities earlier this month, several lawyers and doctors spoke to the media directly about what they observed, drawing intense attention to the conditions children are experiencing at the border.

This is what they saw: Older children taking care of toddlers. Flu quarantines and lice infestations. Children in soiled clothes with no regular access to showers. A premature baby wrapped in a dirty towel.

Immigration attorney Hope Frye told Reveal that she got sick with the flu soon after visiting one of the facilities and was hospitalized for three days.

“I could hardly talk,” Frye said. “I called 911 because I couldn’t breathe.”

Under Flores, children cannot be held at Border Patrol facilities for more than 72 hours, but lawyers said they spoke to children who had been held for weeks.

Here are some of the interviews with lawyers and advocates who visited the facilities: WNYC Studios’ “The Takeaway” interviewed lawyer Elora Mukherjee: “When I interview children in detention, I try to sit close to them because we’re talking about such sensitive and traumatic subjects. But with some of the children, I had trouble sitting near them because of the stench.” Warren Binford, a law professor at Willamette University, told The New Yorker: “(The children) told us that they were hungry. They told us that some of them had not showered or had not showered until the day or two days before we arrived. Many of them described that they only brushed their teeth once.” Frye told HuffPost that she had spoken to a teenage mother being held in McAllen with her premature, one-month-old baby. The infant hadn’t received any medical attention, Frye said. “I looked at that baby and said ‘Who does this to babies?’ They were being sadistically ignored.” The Washington Post reported this week that many of the children were moved to other facilities.

In a statement to the media, U.S. Customs and Border Protection did not deny the team’s allegations. “Our short-term holding facilities were not designed to hold vulnerable populations and we urgently need additional humanitarian funding to manage this crisis,” the statement partially reads. “All allegations of civil rights abuses or mistreatment in CBP detention are taken seriously and investigated to the fullest extent possible.”

ICE DETAINING FEWER IMMIGRANTS WITH SERIOUS CRIMINAL CONVICTIONS

Since taking office, President Donald Trump has vowed to deport undocumented immigrants with criminal records. “Democrats are the problem. They don’t care about crime and want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our Country,” he recently tweeted.

But a new analysis by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonpartisan data research center, has found that the number of immigrants in custody with no prior criminal convictions increased by 39 percent between September 2016 and December 2018. During the same time period, the number of immigrants in ICE custody who had committed serious crimes dropped 17 percent.

“Despite the increasing number of individuals ICE detained, fewer and fewer immigrants who had committed serious crimes were arrested and held in custody by the agency,” the report says.

Find the report here.

WHAT WE’RE READING

Illinois’ child welfare agency has failed to place Latino, Spanish-speaking children in foster homes that speak their language. (ProPublica)

Shortly before the boy turned 1, at a visit with his father at a library, his foster mother sitting nearby, he spoke what was, for Matias, his child’s first word. Not in Spanish. Or in English. But in Slovak. Mamka. Mommy.

In that moment, Matias realized his son was being raised speaking a language he did not understand. He feared what would happen if it took longer to get him back.

Matias sought out the Eastern European men he worked with on carpentry jobs and learned to use language apps on his phone for useful words and phrases. Slowly, he picked up a handful of Slovak words: Blanket. Bottle. Up. Down. Tomatoes. Chicken.

But he couldn’t keep up. By the time the boy turned 2, in the summer of 2016, Matias told a therapist during a required session that he was worried about his growing inability to communicate with his son.

Asylum-seeking families were still being separated at the border as recently as May. (Houston Chronicle)

More than 700 children were taken from their parents or, in a few cases, from other relatives between June 2018 and May 2019, according to the most recent data the government provided to the American Civil Liberties Union in the ongoing federal court case overseeing family separations. They are placed in federal shelters or with foster parents until they can be reunified or resettled with relatives or sponsors. Sometimes they languish for months in federal care.

“In the last few months these types of separations have risen drastically,” said Lee Gelernt, lead lawyer for the ACLU case. “The government is trying to drive a truck through what was supposed to be a very narrow exception.”

He said many cases involve children as young as toddlers whose parents are accused of criminal history as minor as a traffic violation.

“The government is unilaterally deciding parents are a danger and then separating them without informing the children’s facilities that the child has been separated, without telling the parent the basis of the separation, and without affording any due process to the family to contest the separation,” Gelernt said.

A Honduran mother separated from her son at the border in 2015 sued the government, carving a legal path for other families to gain relief. (New Yorker)

As the lawsuit moved through the court system, Rodríguez grew more confident. The government tried to get the case dismissed, arguing that it should have been filed in Texas (where courts are more conservative), rather than in New Jersey, but the request was denied.

During discovery, (the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project’s) lawyers obtained tens of thousands of pages of government documents, including e-mails showing that top officials had approved Daniel’s placement in an unaccompanied-migrant shelter, even though he could have been released to his aunt. The lawyers were planning inspections of the facilities where Rodríguez had been held, and they fought to take depositions from high-ranking officials, including the former director of ice. Meanwhile, family separation was becoming a subject of widespread outcry.

One day last summer, Rodríguez sat at her desk, in Rent the Runway’s warehouse, surrounded by designer gowns. She had just started her morning routine—shaking dresses to see if a rogue stiletto or tube of lipstick tumbled out, and bravely sniffing the garments to test for freshness—when she got a text from Tegeler, at asap, who asked, “Can you talk?” Rodríguez had become close to the lawyers and detected excitement in Tegeler’s greeting right away. “It’s good news, Suny,” Tegeler said. “We reached a settlement.” The government had agreed to pay a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars to Rodríguez and Daniel. (An ice official told me, “As a matter of policy, ice cannot comment on the specifics of the settlement agreement.

However, lack of comment should not be construed as agreement with or stipulation to any of the allegations.”) As clothes whirled by on mechanized racks, Rodríguez allowed herself, finally, to feel a sense of relief.

Your tips have been vital to our immigration coverage. Keep them coming: border@revealnews.org. – Laura C. Morel

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