If you’re horrified by news of families being separated at the borders, here’s a bit of news you can use.
First, the policy: It helps to be incredibly clear on what the law is, and what has and has not changed. When Donald Trump and Sarah Huckabee Sanders say that the policy of separating children from their parents upon entry is a law passed by Democrats that Democrats will not fix, they are lying.
There are two different policies in play, and both are new.
First is the new policy that any migrant family entering the U.S. without a border inspection will be prosecuted for this minor misdemeanor. The parents get incarcerated and that leaves children to be warehoused. The parents then typically plead guilty to the misdemeanor and are given a sentence of the few days they served waiting for trial. But then when the parents try to reunite with their children, they are given the runaround—and possibly even deported, alone. The children are left in HHS custody, often without family.
Second is a new and apparently unwritten policy that even when the family presents themselves at a border-entry location, seeking asylum—that is, even when the family is complying in all respects with immigration law—the government is snatching the children away from their parents. Here, the government’s excuse seems to be that they want to keep the parents in jail-like immigration detention for a long time, while their asylum cases are adjudicated. The long-standing civil rights case known as Flores dictates that they aren’t allowed to keep kids in that kind of detention, so the Trump administration says they have to break up the families. They do not have to break up families—it is the government’s new choice to jail people with credible asylum claims who haven’t violated any laws that is leading to the heartbreaking separations you’ve been reading about.
So that is what is happening. Whether or not that is what the Bible demands is the subject of a different column. Good explainers on what is and is not legal detention of immigrants and asylum-seekers can also be found here and here and here.
Next: Which groups to support.
• The ACLU is litigating this policy in California.
• If you’re an immigration lawyer, the American Immigration Lawyers Association will be sending around a volunteer list for you to help represent the women and men with their asylum screening, bond hearings, ongoing asylum representation, etc. Please sign up.
• Al Otro Lado is a binational organization that works to offer legal services to deportees and migrants in Tijuana, Mexico, including deportee parents whose children remain in the U.S.
• The Florence Project is an Arizona project offering free legal services to men, women, and unaccompanied children in immigration custody.
• Human Rights First is a national organization with roots in Houston that needs help from lawyers too.
• Kids in Need of Defense works to ensure that kids do not appear in immigration court without representation, and to lobby for policies that advocate for children’s legal interests. Donate here.
• The Legal Aid Justice Center is a Virginia-based center providing unaccompanied minors legal services and representation.
• Pueblo Sin Fronteras is an organization that provides humanitarian aid and shelter to migrants on their way to the U.S.
• RAICES is the largest immigration nonprofit in Texas offering free and low-cost legal services to immigrant children and families. Donate here and sign up as a volunteer here.
• The Texas Civil Rights Project is seeking “volunteers who speak Spanish, Mam, Q’eqchi’ or K’iche’ and have paralegal or legal assistant experience.”
• Together Rising is another Virginia-based organization that’s helping provide legal assistance for 60 migrant children who were separated from their parents and are currently detained in Arizona.
This list isn’t comprehensive, so let us know what else is happening. And please call your elected officials, stay tuned for demonstrations, hug your children, and be grateful if you are not currently dependent on the basic humanity of U.S. policy.
Update, June 17, 2018: Thanks to readers who updated us with more organizations fighting this policy. Other good work is being done by the following:
• CLINIC’s Defending Vulnerable Populations project offers case assistance to hundreds of smaller organizations all over the country that do direct services for migrant families and children.
• The Michigan Immigrant Rights Center represents all of the immigrant kids placed by the government in foster care in Michigan (one of the biggest foster care placement states). About two-thirds are their current clients are separation cases, and they work to find parents and figure out next steps.
• The Northwest Immigrant Rights Project is doing work defending and advancing the rights of immigrants through direct legal services, systemic advocacy, and community education.
• The Women’s Refugee Commission has aggregated five actions everyone can take that go beyond donating funds.
• And finally, the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP)—which organizes law students and lawyers to develop and enforce a set of legal and human rights for refugees and displaced persons—just filed suit challenging the cancellation of the Central American Minors program.
Update, June 18, 2018, 8:19 p.m.: Listed below are more organizations that are helping separated families at the border. Thanks again to readers who sent in information:
• Houston Immigration Legal Services Collaborative has a guide to organizations throughout Texas that provide direct legal services to separated children. Also listed within the guide are resources for local advocates, lawyers, and volunteers.
• Immigrant Justice Corps is the nation’s only fellowship program dedicated to expanding access to immigration representation. Some IJC fellows work at the border, and others work in New York, providing direct representation in immigration court to parents and children resettled in New York City and surrounding counties.
• The Kino Border Initiative provides humanitarian aid to refugees and migrants on both sides of the border. They have a wish-list of supplies they can use to help migrants and families staying in the communities they serve.
Several companies also match donations—if your company does this, you need to provide the tax ID of the charity you have given to, which is usually listed on these organizations’ websites.
If you’re horrified by news of families being separated at the borders, here’s a bit of news you can use.
First, the policy: It helps to be incredibly clear on what the law is, and what has and has not changed. When Donald Trump and Sarah Huckabee Sanders say that the policy of separating children from their parents upon entry is a law passed by Democrats that Democrats will not fix, they are lying.
There are two different policies in play, and both are new.
First is the new policy that any migrant family entering the U.S. without a border inspection will be prosecuted for this minor misdemeanor. The parents get incarcerated and that leaves children to be warehoused. The parents then typically plead guilty to the misdemeanor and are given a sentence of the few days they served waiting for trial. But then when the parents try to reunite with their children, they are given the runaround—and possibly even deported, alone. The children are left in HHS custody, often without family.
Second is a new and apparently unwritten policy that even when the family presents themselves at a border-entry location, seeking asylum—that is, even when the family is complying in all respects with immigration law—the government is snatching the children away from their parents. Here, the government’s excuse seems to be that they want to keep the parents in jail-like immigration detention for a long time, while their asylum cases are adjudicated. The long-standing civil rights case known as Flores dictates that they aren’t allowed to keep kids in that kind of detention, so the Trump administration says they have to break up the families. They do not have to break up families—it is the government’s new choice to jail people with credible asylum claims who haven’t violated any laws that is leading to the heartbreaking separations you’ve been reading about.
So that is what is happening. Whether or not that is what the Bible demands is the subject of a different column. Good explainers on what is and is not legal detention of immigrants and asylum-seekers can also be found here and here and here.
Next: Which groups to support.
• The ACLU is litigating this policy in California.
• If you’re an immigration lawyer, the American Immigration Lawyers Association will be sending around a volunteer list for you to help represent the women and men with their asylum screening, bond hearings, ongoing asylum representation, etc. Please sign up.
• Al Otro Lado is a binational organization that works to offer legal services to deportees and migrants in Tijuana, Mexico, including deportee parents whose children remain in the U.S.
• The Florence Project is an Arizona project offering free legal services to men, women, and unaccompanied children in immigration custody.
• Human Rights First is a national organization with roots in Houston that needs help from lawyers too.
• Kids in Need of Defense works to ensure that kids do not appear in immigration court without representation, and to lobby for policies that advocate for children’s legal interests. Donate here.
• The Legal Aid Justice Center is a Virginia-based center providing unaccompanied minors legal services and representation.
• Pueblo Sin Fronteras is an organization that provides humanitarian aid and shelter to migrants on their way to the U.S.
• RAICES is the largest immigration nonprofit in Texas offering free and low-cost legal services to immigrant children and families. Donate here and sign up as a volunteer here.
• The Texas Civil Rights Project is seeking “volunteers who speak Spanish, Mam, Q’eqchi’ or K’iche’ and have paralegal or legal assistant experience.”
• Together Rising is another Virginia-based organization that’s helping provide legal assistance for 60 migrant children who were separated from their parents and are currently detained in Arizona.
This list isn’t comprehensive, so let us know what else is happening. And please call your elected officials, stay tuned for demonstrations, hug your children, and be grateful if you are not currently dependent on the basic humanity of U.S. policy.
Update, June 17, 2018: Thanks to readers who updated us with more organizations fighting this policy. Other good work is being done by the following:
• CLINIC’s Defending Vulnerable Populations project offers case assistance to hundreds of smaller organizations all over the country that do direct services for migrant families and children.
• The Michigan Immigrant Rights Center represents all of the immigrant kids placed by the government in foster care in Michigan (one of the biggest foster care placement states). About two-thirds are their current clients are separation cases, and they work to find parents and figure out next steps.
• The Northwest Immigrant Rights Project is doing work defending and advancing the rights of immigrants through direct legal services, systemic advocacy, and community education.
• The Women’s Refugee Commission has aggregated five actions everyone can take that go beyond donating funds.
• And finally, the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP)—which organizes law students and lawyers to develop and enforce a set of legal and human rights for refugees and displaced persons—just filed suit challenging the cancellation of the Central American Minors program.
Update, June 18, 2018, 8:19 p.m.: Listed below are more organizations that are helping separated families at the border. Thanks again to readers who sent in information:
• Houston Immigration Legal Services Collaborative has a guide to organizations throughout Texas that provide direct legal services to separated children. Also listed within the guide are resources for local advocates, lawyers, and volunteers.
• Immigrant Justice Corps is the nation’s only fellowship program dedicated to expanding access to immigration representation. Some IJC fellows work at the border, and others work in New York, providing direct representation in immigration court to parents and children resettled in New York City and surrounding counties.
• The Kino Border Initiative provides humanitarian aid to refugees and migrants on both sides of the border. They have a wish-list of supplies they can use to help migrants and families staying in the communities they serve.
Several companies also match donations—if your company does this, you need to provide the tax ID of the charity you have given to, which is usually listed on these organizations’ websites.
Yeah well perhaps they should have figured out what a border is first. Because their parents broke the law by Crossing ours and better than spend the time in these facilities than a prison with grown adults who made the human traffickers not even their parents
Actually, let me enlighten you.
These people in detention have not committed a crime. – I don’t mean that in a moral or a figurative sense. I mean literally. It is NOT a crime to ask for asylum. – These people didn’t jump a fence, they didn’t sneak into the backyard. They are knocking on the front door and saying “People are trying to kill me in my home country, will you let me in?” – Now, I didn’t fall off the turnip truck. Some of these people are lying. That’s why you have a hearing. And because they might wander off, these people are held in detention until the hearing. – This hearing is NOT in a criminal court. It’s in an immigration court. Because these people have not committed a crime. – Immigration court is not like criminal court. You don’t have a right to an attorney. – So these people are waiting around, separated from their children, with no attorney, until they get a hearing. – In 2015, the median wait for an immigration hearing was 404 days. – Here’s where it gets even more twisted. If people plead guilty to asylum fraud, they get their kids back and get deported. – So these people knock on the front door, which is perfectly legal, and we take their kids, and tell them the quickest way to get the kids back is to confess to fraud. – If someone committed a crime (ie. shoplifting, armed robbery, murder) and you took their kids away to make them confess, that confession would be thrown out. – But these confessions are lawful, because this isn’t criminal court. – Because these people haven’t committed a crime. – Now some people think that if we make it so unpleasant for these people, they will stop trying to cross the border. – But the message this sends isn’t “Go Home.” The message it sends is “Sneak in.” – If they go home, they think they will be murdered. If they request asylum, they are separated from their children. – If they sneak in successfully, they’re safe. If they sneak in and get caught, they are no worse off than if they sought asylum legally. – And remember, these people haven’t committed a crime.
There’s been an avalanche of grim news centered on young immigrants apprehended at the border with Mexico. On Wednesday, the American Civil Liberties Union published a report documenting abusive encounters between young people and border agents during the administration of President Barack Obama. Last month, the government admitted it had lost track of more than a thousand children who had been placed with sponsors after being caught crossing the border alone.
In recent days, though, attention has been focused on a new crisis for immigrant children. Earlier this month, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a new policy in which families arriving at the border would be forcibly broken up, with children and parents separated from one another and detained separately. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes explored the practical ramifications of the policy: children as young as 1½, too young to form complete sentences, much less care for themselves, torn away from their parents and sent to government detention facilities.
It’s a policy specifically meant to serve as a deterrent to future immigrants, as White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly made clear in an interview with NPR a few weeks ago. Sessions tried to argue that it was meant to prevent trafficking and abuse, but Kelly’s insistence that it was a deterrent matches reporting that indicates President Trump himself authorized the change to limit a recent increase in the number of families seeking entry to the United States.
On Saturday, Trump tweeted that the policy of ripping apart families was a law being supported by Democrats. That’s not true. It’s a policy he supported and implemented, apparently because of its “horrible” — his descriptor — deterrent effects.
The organization Kids in Need of Defense (KIND) has for a decade been supporting minors who are detained after entering the country. Its president, Wendy Young, spoke with The Washington Post by phone on Friday to explain how Trump’s policy shift affects young immigrants — and how it fits into his broader shift in how the country deals with immigrants.
Her organization provides pro bono legal services to immigrants who arrive at the border without a parent — unaccompanied children, in the parlance — once they leave federal detention facilities to join family members already in the country.
“This is the really sad and ironic and tragic part of this new policy of family separation,” Young said. “Obviously, from both a child welfare perspective and from the perspective of the U.S. immigration system in terms of its adjudication of cases when people arrive, it is much better to have a child arrive with a parent, because that’s a natural source of care and support for the child and that also means that the child’s case is attached to the parent’s case, and typically the parent is the one who has the information and the resources to inform the immigrant judge about what’s going on.”
“Now they’re making it a very formal policy to separate the child from the parent,” she said. “Because of that, the child is reclassified as unaccompanied.”
There are special protections under the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008 that apply to unaccompanied children. After all, young people may lack the ability to advocate for themselves in the way that an adult might. KIND helps provide representation to between 50 and 60 percent of those young people — but Young fears the percentage will drop now that the pool of unaccompanied children is being deliberately expanded.
“It has very serious consequences for the underlying case,” she said. “Because now you have a child — and this is being done with infants, even, babies — now you have a child with a much more challenging case detached from the parent. Very often they’re not being allowed to even communicate, and in some cases, the parent’s being deported and the child’s being left behind.”
When the child is meeting with an attorney or appearing before a judge, their ability to explain why they are there and the reasons they might be seeking refuge are limited. There’s a parent who could potentially answer those questions — but that parent was moved by the Department of Homeland Security to another facility. The child, detained by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, has probably had no contact with his or her parent.
It’s tricky for the attorneys to make contact, too.
“It can be extraordinarily challenging to figure out where that person went, to establish communication,” Young said. “If that parent is deported in the meantime, then you have the added challenge of trying to find the parent back in the home country.”
“From humanitarian perspective, we’re quite concerned about this,” she added, “but also from a government efficiency perspective, it’s creating an additional case in a backlogged system and it’s making it more challenging for the immigration judge or the [Citizenship and Immigration Services] officer to sort out what’s going on in this child’s life.”
Remember: Those legal complications begin only once the child is released from detention. That period in detention is problematic for its own reasons — and Young says that the amount of time children are spending in detention is increasing. Under Obama, children were held for about a month, Young said, while the government tried to find family members who could take them in. The law, she said, “is really grounded in the notion that children are better off cared for by their families than they are in a detention center by the federal government.”
That month-long detention is getting longer.
“We’re starting to see that creep up more into the 45- to 55-day range,” she added. “Which is also concerning to us because obviously locking children up is not a good thing.”
In part because of the new policy of child separation, the government is exploring opening detention centers on military bases, housing hundreds or thousands of kids. But such mega detention centers already exist.
“I actually was down at the border a few weeks ago,” Young said, “and saw a facility that opened in the past year or so, that’s actually a permanent facility, a converted Walmart with 1,200 beds.”
“Generally what we’re seeing there, through a whole lot of administrative changes, is they’re turning what were intended to be protection tools under the trafficking act into law enforcement tools,” Young said. She added, “The framework of protection is starting to really fragment.” KIND recently released a report documenting recent changes to immigration policy.
She said that her organization had seen an increase in the number of children separated from their families. Asked if she thought it would at least be an effective deterrent for future immigrants, she said it wouldn’t.
“This is truly a refugee crisis,” Young said. “People become refugees when they’re desperate to escape violence. The violence is throughout Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, and the governments are too weak or too corrupt to control it. So people make the only choice they feel they have available, and they run.
“You’re not going to be able to stop that,” she added, “until conditions in the home country improve.”
tora42's nonsensne 