By Julia Conley
Common Dreams (9/6/18)
Attempting to change two decades of precedent, the Trump administration announced its intention Thursday to lift court-ordered limits on how long migrant children can be detained—a proposal multiple critics promptly denounced as “Gitmo for children.”
The administration said Thursday it intends to enter into the Federal Register new regulations that would allow it to hold families who have crossed the U.S.-Mexico border indefinitely, for the duration of their immigration proceedings—a period that could last years.
“Locking up children indefinitely is cruel and heartless, even for the Trump administration,” CREDO Action campaign manager Nicole Regalado said in a statement. “It is nothing less than an assault on child safety and fundamental human dignity.”
The proposal flies in the face of the Flores settlement, decided in 1997 and reaffirmed in 2015, which states that immigrant children cannot be held in federal detention for longer than 20 days and that they must not be held in “jail-like” settings.
Reports of the plan come months after international outrage forced President Donald Trump in late June to reluctantly end his policy of separating families who had crossed the U.S.-Mexico border, a policy that was decried as a “serious violation of the rights of the child” by the United Nations. Though a court-ordered deadline of July 26 for reuniting the thousands of families Trump separated has long since passed, as of this week, more than 500 children remained in detention without their parents.
An earlier attempt to change U.S. law to allow the indefinite detention of children was condemned as a “cynical attempt to shift responsibility to the Judiciary for over 20 years of congressional inaction and ill-considered executive action that have led to the current stalemate” by federal Judge Dolly Gee in July.
Immigration cases often stretch on for years, with the average immigrant waiting 677 days to be seen by a judge. The Immigrant Legal Resource Center (ILRC) noted that national medical organizations are among those that have raised alarm over the administration’s intent to detain children for as long as it can.
“Both family separation and the detention of children have been condemned by leading medical professionals and the American Academy of Pediatrics as having the potential to cause negative health effects that can last a lifetime,” said Rachel Prandini, a staff attorney at the ILRC. “If there were ever a moment for this administration to show just an ounce of compassion in its decision-making, this is it. Instead of eviscerating Flores, which has been the bedrock of the limited rights that children do have and the most important mechanism that exists to allow children to challenge mistreatment, we should be looking for opportunities and creative solutions to take better care of the traumatized, unaccompanied children in our country.”
Immigrant rights advocates have worked in recent weeks to draw attention to reports out of the highly secretive detention centers where young immigrants are already being held, regarding the torture and severe neglect that has reportedly taken place in some.
“Trusting ICE with the housing and nutrition of children is a recipe for even more suffering and abuse,” said Regalado. “These proposed regulations show that the Trump regime will stop at nothing to advance its horrific goal of deterring immigration by inflicting irreparable harm on children and their families.”
(This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.)
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Nation Of Child Abusers: Outrage Over Trump’s ‘sickening’ Plans To Imprison Migrant Children Indefinitely
The Guardian (9/7/18)
Opponents of Donald Trump’s approach to immigration have lined up to condemn as “inhumane” and “sickening” proposals to facilitate indefinite detention of migrant children and their families.
The administration has announced it plans to withdraw from a federal court agreement that strictly limits the conditions under which authorities can detain migrant children. And the government proposed new rules it said would enable it to detain minors during their immigration proceedings.
The administration has long targeted the Flores Settlement Agreement, a 1997 federal consent decree that places significant curbs on how long and in what conditions the government can detain migrant children as it seeks to dissuade migrants from crossing the US southern border.
If it goes into effect, the regulation would enshrine some of the protections while circumventing other key ones, by allowing the government to detain children in facilities not licensed by state authorities to hold minors. …
- Democracy Now! As 400+ Children Remain Separated Prom Parents, Trump Admin Wants To Imprison Kidnapped Children Indefinitely — The Trump administration is attempting to remove court-imposed time limits on the detention of immigrant children. The administration’s proposal would allow immigrant families to be held in detention indefinitely, ending the long-standing 1997 Flores agreement which says that children cannot be jailed for more than 20 days. … Read the Rest, Transcript and 10-Minute Video
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School Safety Efforts Becoming Trapdoor To Abuse: Students Are Getting Tasered, Pepper-Sprayed & Beaten By Police
By Rebecca Klein
HuffPost (9/8/18)
Jalijah Jones, then a freshman at Kalamazoo Central High School in Michigan, remembers the punch of thousands of volts hitting his slight frame. At 5 feet, 4 inches tall and weighing 120 pounds, he was small for his age.
He remembers four school security guards officers pushing him up against a hallway wall before a school police officer arrived and Tasered him. He remembers a feeling of intense cold as if his high school hallway had just turned into a walk-in freezer. He remembers falling to the ground, his muscles betraying his mind’s desire to stand.
Then he remembers nothing.
Jones, who loves to run track and play football, had never been in a physical fight at school before. It was just a teenage drama. He owed another kid a small amount of money. Angry words were thrown back and forth, then a push and a shove and some swinging. But no one had been hurt until a school police officer Tasered the teen.
Jones, who says he blacked out after falling to the ground from the shock of the stun, remembers being cuffed a few seconds later, and the school cops dragging him through the hallways and out of school. His body shook furiously as he was loaded into a police car, before being escorted to the hospital in an ambulance. He was charged with resisting arrest ― a charge that he is still fighting many months after the December 2017 incident.
No One Tracks Police Brutality In Schools
The police officer who stunned Jones is one of over 80,000 currently stationed in public schools around the country, according to the most recent data available from the U.S. Department of Education, covering the 2015-16 school year. In 1997, only 10 percent of public schools had police officers, but in 2016, 42 percent did.
The number has risen sharply in the past few years and will continue to grow. Amid the recent spate of deadly school shootings, there has been an increase in federal money funding school police officer positions. This is true at the state level as well: New legislation in places like Florida has devoted millions of dollars to install more armed police officers in hallways. More armed guards lined the hallways as kids returned to school this year. …
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Fascist Abuse: Cincinnati Police Officer Under Investigation For Using Taser On 11-Year-Old Girl