Blade_Runner wrote:
That is a bald faced LIE. Go figure.
Can't fix stupid.
A Scathing Denunciation of Some Administration’s Immigration Enforcement.
The PBS Frontline special entitled “Lost In Detention” represents a scathing indictment of the administration’s immigration policy. The yearlong investigation did an extensive and deep dive into the U.S. immigration enforcement system and stories of hidden abuse in detention centers.
The nearly hour long report makes for harrowing viewers: Women who have been detained complaining about being harassed by guards for sexual favors, sexually assaulted by guards, and guards threatening to k**l the women they are harassing if they talk. A single mom with two daughters who overstayed a visa gets deported back to Mexico just because she changed lanes without signaling. Cops describe patrolling neighborhoods with significant number of i*****l i*******ts, where people instinctively run from the sight of a police car. A mother of five American-born children being deported over a speeding ticket.
The report describes, “a vast network of 250 detention centers, from county jails to large centers run by private prison companies, where immigrants facing deportation are held until they can be removed from the country. In the past decade, three million immigrants have been detained in the system.” The report shows white-domed tents surrounded by barbed wire, and are described as overcrowded warehouses of people. Those who have been through the detention centers describe beatings, racial slurs, official coverups, and threats to deport anyone who complains. The problem is described as more than a few “bad apples,” but more of “barrels of bad apples.”
In the Frontline report, the administration insists the current enforcement policies are necessary to protect the American people. The report shows the president traveling to El Paso and boasting, “We have strengthened border security beyond what many believed was possible. We now have more boots on the ground and we are deporting those who are here illegally.” The deputy director of ICE boasts of “record-breaking numbers in terms of criminal alien removals” that include “1,000 murderers, 6,000 sex offenders, 45,000 serious drug violators. As we expand the deployment of Secure Communities, focus on criminal aliens, you’ll see that number continue to go up and up.” Officials from the administration boast that they’re finally taking enforcement seriously, a contrast with their lax predecessors.
One of the president’s immigration advisors callously declares, “At the end of the day, when you have a community of 10 million, 11 million people living and working in the United States illegally, some of these things are going to happen. Even if the law is executed with perfection, there will be parents separated from their children. They don’t have to like it, but it is a result of having a broken system of laws.”
Critics complain that the administration’s policy is just “enforcement on steroids.” The report warily details how ICE has extended its reach by enlisting the help of local law enforcement to better identify i*****l i*******ts who have committed crimes — turning local cops into a de facto enforcement branch of federal i*********n l*w.
Wait, wait, I’m sorry, this Frontline special is from October 2011, and describes the immigration policies of the Obama administration. Clearly, these policies do not warrant a heated national conversation, are not a national scandal, outrage, or embarrassment, and do not deserve furious denunciation all across the political spectrum. If they did, we would have heard all of this eight years ago. While the allegations of abuse are repulsive, they simply didn’t seem to interest the media or the public on a large scale back in 2011.
And regarding the way i*****l i*******ts are being hunted, arrested, and deported, clearly the president knew what he was doing and this was simply tough enforcement of the i*********n l*ws on the books. If it wasn’t, surely all of the current Democratic p**********l contenders who are furious about the current policies would have noticed. I mean, Joe Biden was vice president when all of this was going on.
Or is it just that these longstanding enforcement policies are acceptable under President Obama but not acceptable under President Trump?
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Mandatory detention was officially authorized by President Bill Clinton in 1996, with the enactment of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty and the I*****l I*********n Reform and Immigrant Responsibility acts.
That is a bald faced LIE. Go figure. br br Can't ... (
show quote)
Immigrant Detention Conditions Were Atrocious Under Obama. Here’s Why They’re So Much Worse Under Trump.
By BEA BISCHOFF
The past week has been filled with news that the Department of Homeland Security is holding hundreds of children in squalid conditions in Customs and Border Protection detention facilities on the border. On Tuesday, it was reported that 100 children had been returned to the Clint, Texas, facility that independent monitors had described as having “unconscionable” conditions following an aborted t***sfer from the location. On Monday, it was reported that CBP was refusing donations of soap, toothpaste, and other hygiene products that have been reported to be absent from these facilities, while a Republican congressman said that if the children detained in these facilities without their parents don’t like the conditions, “there’s not a lock on the door” and they’re “free to leave at any time.” This followed an argument last week from administration lawyers that children don’t need to be provided beds, toothbrushes, or soap while detained in these facilities, despite a consent decree in which the government had promised to keep children in “safe and sanitary” conditions. Ultimately, this week has seen the Trump administration receive the most widespread pushback against its immigration enforcement policies since its misbegotten family separation policy last summer.
But Trump isn’t the first president to oversee inhumane immigration and detention policies. In fact, many of the current immigration enforcement actions that are receiving criticism under Trump were in place during the Obama administration. Trump’s policy changes and focus on deporting as many people as possible, however, has created all-out chaos in a system that was already pushed to the brink. Here are some of the key differences between the situation under the Obama administration and the current situation under President Donald Trump.
Immigration Detention
The Marshall Project found that every president for the past 25 years has overseen growth in immigration detention, with the average daily population hovering between 30,000 and 40,000 during Obama’s presidency. In fiscal year 2018, under Trump, the average daily population was 45,890, and it has continued to rise this year.
According to numbers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, there are about 53,515 people currently detained in ICE facilities waiting for a disposition in their immigration cases. So far in fiscal year 2019, there have been more than 274,798 initial book-ins to ICE detention centers. This number does not count those who were detained by CBP in processing centers, which are the facilities getting the bulk of the attention right now.
CBP Facilities
CBP facilities have long faced criticism for their abysmal conditions. A lawsuit filed in 2015 during Obama’s presidency challenged the situation at these “hieleras,” or “iceboxes,” alleging “appalling conditions” including people held in “freezing, overcrowded, and filthy cells for extended periods of time, no access to beds, soap, showers, adequate meals and water, medical care, and lawyers in violation of constitutional standards and Border Patrol’s own policies.”
Many of the photos showing the squalid conditions inside the detention centers were obtained during this lawsuit, which is still ongoing. It is hard to say whether the terrible conditions in CBP facilities currently are “worse” than they were under Obama, but what seems to be clear is that a focus on detaining people—including children—is forcing more people to spend longer amounts of time inside CBP facilities, which would likely cause a deterioration of the already-appalling conditions.
According to former DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, it had been more than a decade since a child had died in CBP custody when Jakelin Caal Maquin died in December, which means that there were no deaths of children in CBP custody under Obama. Since Jakelin’s death late last year, at least four other children have died in CBP custody.
Criminal Charges for Illegal Entry or Reentry
Although being in the United States without documents is not a criminal offense, the act of entering the U.S. without proper authorization or entering outside of a designated port of entry can carry criminal penalties.
Prosecutions for illegal entry and reentry were relatively rare (under 25,000 per year) until the advent of a mass-trial program known as Operation Streamline during the George W. Bush administration in 2005. Operation Streamline has been roundly criticized from its inception for violating due process rights. During the last year of Bush’s presidency in 2008, and throughout Obama’s presidency, prosecutions jumped extensively, increasing from under 40,000 per year to almost 100,000 at the highest point in 2013.
In April 2018, the Trump administration issued a “zero tolerance” policy that directed U.S. attorney’s offices on the border to prosecute as many cases of illegal entry and reentry as possible. Then–Attorney General Jeff Sessions said the goal was to reach a 100 percent prosecution rate. After the administration pushed the zero tolerance policy, cases referred from CBP for prosecution rose 134 percent, and prosecutions rose by 74 percent.
Family Separation
o effectuate the ramped-up prosecutions for illegal entry and reentry, adult migrants were taken into criminal custody to face charges. When parents were taken into criminal custody, they were separated from their children, who were then turned over to the office of Health and Human Services and treated as unaccompanied minors. Under Bush and Obama, parents and children were not routinely separated to pursue criminal prosecutions for illegal entry and reentry.
Trump did rescind the zero tolerance policy after mass outcry, and a district court subsequently said family separation was a violation of the Constitution and ordered separated families reunited. But the administration has struggled to comply with court orders to reunite separated families, as the number of children separated was discovered to be thousands more than the administration had initially claimed in court. The government is still in the process of counting all the children who were separated over roughly the first two years of the Trump administration.
Family Detention Centers
The Obama administration initially slowed family detentions, using only a single family detention center in Berks County, Pennsylvania. In 2014, however, three more facilities at Karnes, Texas; Dilley, Texas; and Artesia, New Mexico, were opened to deter asylum-seekers from seeking refuge in the United States. (Asylum-seekers waiting a final decision and not kept in detention are often paroled into the United States to await asylum hearings.) The Artesia facility was so criticized that it was shut down in less than a year. The facilities at Berks, Karnes, and Dilley are still in use by the Trump administration.
During the Obama administration’s attempts to deter asylum-seekers, a settlement that controls how children in detention are handled was expanded to cover both unaccompanied and accompanied children, against the Obama administration’s wishes. The Trump administration has sought to dismantle these protections, which are known as the “Flores Settlement,” including recently arguing in court that allowing children to sleep on cement floors without access to soap or toothbrushes is within the scope of the protections required by the settlement. Judges in that case on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the seemed dumbstruck by the government’s argument that since the Flores Settlement didn’t specifically list products like soap and toothbrushes, they needn’t be provided for the government to meet the standard that children be kept in “safe and sanitary” conditions.
So far in fiscal year 2019, more than 33,613 people have been booked into family detention centers.