What America Has Become: Migrant Children Detail Horrific Experiences Done In Our Name In Border Patrol Stations & Concentration Camps

 

“The way I have been treated makes me feel like I don’t matter, like I am trash.”

[Editor’s Note: Nothing better exemplifies the degradation of this nation than the institutionalized, for-profit terrorizing and abuse of immigrant families and — most especially — their kidnapped children. As we can expect, many of the most brutal and base among us are drawn to manning the icy holding cells and hidden interrogation rooms of the appropriately named ICE. But make no mistake; as long as this casual corporate brutality continues we are all — every single taxpayer and voter — collectively responsible for this human rights atrocity. If you do not speak out against this abuse then you are an active collaborator because — as in all fascist governments: Silence = Consent. And remember what history has taught over and over again: When we accept the abuse of any one group that brutality spreads to other groups … perhaps your group. Resist. Speak up, or, accept the moral guilt. Your choice. — Mark L. Taylor]

By Angelina Chapin
HuffPost (7/17/18)

Over the course of four days in June, Keylin says, U.S. Border Patrol guards would kick her body to keep her awake throughout the night. The 16-year-old, whose last name was redacted from court documents, told a lawyer that she would lie in fear on the cement floor of the Border Patrol station in Texas, surrounded by chain-link fence. She was separated from her mother, who had been held at gunpoint three times in Honduras, after they crossed the U.S. border.

According to a court filing, Keylin says the female guards also made girls “strip naked” in front of them before taking a shower, so they could leer at their bodies (her mother, Daise, corroborated her daughter’s account in a statement she gave to a lawyer). She adds that guards called the group of migrants “filthy” and “made fun of us.”

Keylin barely ate because she says the food was frozen, and she wasn’t given a toothbrush or toothpaste. Though she says the cells were so cold that she shivered and developed pain in her leg, the teen kept quiet. The guards said that anyone with an injury would be detained longer, and she couldn’t take that chance.

“I was very frightened and depressed the entire time,” Keylin told a lawyer on June 29, after she had been transferred to a family detention center and reunited with her mother. “I am still depressed. I also have nightmares and a lot of anxiety because of the separation.” At the time of their June 29 declaration, there was no plan for Keylin and her mother’s release.

“This story is more than just separating children from their parents. The bigger picture is forced starvation and sleeplessness and terrorizing these children.”

HuffPost learned that the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law filed a report in a federal court in Los Angeles on Monday with more than 200 accounts from migrant children and their parents, detailing the horrific conditions they face in Border Patrol stations, Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities and detention centers. The allegations, which HuffPost reviewed, include physical and verbal assault, untenable sleeping conditions and unsanitary drinking water.

Shocking & atrocious

Peter Schey, the executive director of the law center’s foundation, wrote in the case filing that roughly 90 percent of the testimony he and a team of about 100 lawyers collected is “shocking and atrocious” and that the children they’ve spoken to were “crying, trembling, hungry, thirsty, sleepless, sick, and terrified.”

“The treatment of these children amounts to torture,” Schey told HuffPost, adding that the situation has become worse under the Trump administration. “We see a policy of enforced hunger, enforced dehydration and enforced sleeplessness coupled with routine insults and physical assaults.”

ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CPB) did not return HuffPost’s requests for comment.

Over the past two months, Schey and other lawyers have conducted interviews with migrant parents and children, some of whom were separated from one another under Trump’s zero tolerance policy, which stepped up the use of criminal prosecutions. The court filing does not include the current status of each child, and most said they were not told of their legal rights, including the right to be speedily released to a legal guardian or relative. …

Read the Rest

(Commoner Call cartoon by Mark L. Taylor, 2018. Open source and free for non-derivative use with link to www.thecommonercall.org )

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Lawsuit: Migrant 14-Month Old Child Returned To Mom With Lice After 85 Day Separation

Cruelty is the norm.

By Morgan Gstalter
The Hill (7/6/18)

A migrant mother said her 14-month-old son was “full of dirt and lice” after being separated from his family for months by the Trump administration.

Olivia Caceras’s claims are included in a lawsuit against the Trump administration’s immigration policy separating families that was filed by 17 states and the District of Columbia, PBS News Hour reported Thursday.

Caceras’s testimony is one of many in the nearly 1,000-page court filing.

Caceras said she was separated from her son for roughly 12 weeks before they were reunited.

“He continued to cry when we got home and would hold on to my leg and would not let me go,” Caceras said in her testimony, as reported by PBS. “When I took off his clothes, he was full of dirt and lice.”

“It seems like they had not bathed him the 85 days he was away from us,” she added.

The administration would not comment to PBS on the allegations because of pending litigation.

PBS reported that while it is hard to prove Caceras’s claims, there is a Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) shelter for children at the location where Caceras said her child was held.

The lawsuit also accuses the Trump administration of housing detained migrants in cramped and freezing cells and the guards of unnecessary cruelty and psychological and verbal abuse. …

Read the Rest and Griping 5-Minute Video

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In Fiery Exchange, Warren Tells Trump Nominee Kathy Kraninger Her Role In Cruel Child Detention ‘A Moral Stain That Will Follow You For The Rest Of Your Life’

By Jessic Corbett
Common Dreams (7/19/18)

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) verbally eviscerated Kathy Kraninger, President Donald Trump’s “unqualified” nominee to run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), during a Senate confirmation hearing on Thursday in which her role in the administration’s cruel child detention policy was a focus.

Unsatisfied with Kraninger’s responses to questions about her role in implementing the Trump administration’s “fundamentally immoral” policy of forcibly separating immigrant families—as an associate director at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB)—Warren declared: “You were part of it, Ms. Kraninger. It is a moral stain that will follow you for the rest of your life, and if the Senate votes to give a big promotion to you after this, then it is a stain on the senators who do so.”

The senator posted her exchange with Kraninger on Twitter:

Innocent kids have been traumatized by the Trump Admin’s family separations. Kathy Kraninger played a role in that policy, but won’t tell us what she did. And she refuses to say whether the policy is immoral.#FamiliesBelongTogether. Kraninger doesn’t belong at the @CFPB.

While Warren’s hearing questions heavily focused on Kraninger’s role in implementing the family separation policy, in a report released Wednesday detailing the nominee’s “dismal management record,” she expressed concerns about Kraninger’s involvement with the Trump administration’s “botched” response to the humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria.
Warren—who is co-sponsoring legislation that aims to improve the federal government’s ongoing recovery efforts in Puerto Rico—is far from alone in her worries about Kraninger’s record. …