This is the story that Chris Hayes told this week about what Border Patrol is now doing with women and their children who voluntarily surrender themselves at the border seeking asylum.
Via Rawstory.
“What’s happeneing right now is really unprecedented,” she explained. “What we’ve seen here in Arizona is actually, since January, over 200 cases of parents being separated from their children. And some of these children are extremely young, as you mentioed. We’ve actually seen children who are 2 years old, regularly, and just last week we saw a 53-week-old infant in court without a parent.”
Hayes paused and gulped, betraying his inner emotions as he continued: “I’m sorry, I’m having a really hard time thinking about this.”
He went on: “At some point, someone from the government in a uniform comes and physically takes a 53-week-old baby away from the mother?”
“That’s correct, yeah,” she said. “What happens oftentimes at the border is that the parents are separated and taken into separate custody, and the children are brought into the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, and brought into shelters run by the government.”
And it actually gets worse from here.
This is an issue that Sen Kamala Harris has blasted Sec. Kirstjen Nielsen over.
On Tuesday, US Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen appeared in front of the Senate Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Committee to talk about a range of issues, from the alleged use of drones by ISIS to the department’s deployment of more K-9s to intercede deadly fentanyl (even though there’s evidence that police dogs are not an effective method for finding drugs).
When it was US Senator Kamala Harris’ turn, she grilled Nielsen on one of the department’s most controversial policies: separating young children from their parents and putting them under state supervision.
“The President directed you to separate parents from their children as a deterrent. Is that correct?” Harris asked.
Nielsen sharply denied that. “Anyone who breaks the law, you’ll be prosecuted. We will refer you to a prosecution if you have broken a US law,” she said.
“Your agency will be separating children from their parents” Harris insisted.
“We’ll be prosecuting people who have broken law,” Nielson shot back. When Harris demanded to know what protocols they had in place to make sure the separations cause as little trauma as possible, Nielson said she’d provide the committee with the information at a later date.
And if you’re wondering exactly what is happening to these children while their in Federal custody, it’s not that good since apparently they lost 1,500 of them in the last few years.
Yes, Lost.
WASHINGTON — A top official with the Department of Health and Human Services told members of Congress on Thursday that the agency had lost track of nearly 1,500 migrant children it placed with sponsors in the United States, raising concerns they could end up in the hands of human traffickers or be used as laborers by people posing as relatives.
The official, Steven Wagner, the acting assistant secretary of the agency’s Administration for Children and Families, disclosed during testimony before a Senate homeland security subcommittee that the agency had learned of the missing children after placing calls to the people who took responsibility for them when they were released from government custody.
The children were taken into government care after they showed up alone at the Southwest border. Most of the children are from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, and were fleeing drug cartels, gang violence and domestic abuse, government data shows.
From last October to the end of the year, officials at the agency’s Office of Refugee Resettlement tried to reach 7,635 children and their sponsors, Mr. Wagner testified. From these calls, officials learned that 6,075 children remained with their sponsors. Twenty-eight had run away, five had been removed from the United States and 52 had relocated to live with a nonsponsor.
But officials at the agency were unable to determine with certainty the whereabouts of 1,475 children, Mr. Wagner said.
But it isn’t all bad, since — as Chris Hayes mentions — a lawsuit by human rights advocates has been filed.
Human rights advocates launched the lawsuit against the prolonged detention of immigrant children in the US district court in Los Angeles in February. It said that under the 1997 settlement of Flores v Johnson, children were entitled to be released on bond while their immigration petitions were being considered, while government officials had to treat under-18s in their care “with dignity, respect and special concern for their particular vulnerability as minors.”
The judge hearing the case, Judge Dolly Gee, last month issued a 22-page tentative ruling that indicated her thinking without committing to a firm decision. She gave the government 30 days to reach a settlement with the plaintiffs, or face an imposed court order.
The tentative ruling has been kept sealed at the judge’s bidding, though an account of it has been seen by the Guardian. First reported by McClatchy, it states that all children in custody are entitled to the protections set out in Flores – meaning that they should be released along with their mothers except where doing so would create a safety problem or a risk of flight.
“This is like a nightmare,” said Bridget Cambria, a Reading, Pennsylvania-based lawyer who represents several families in Berks. “Some of these children are being held for more than a year and the impact on them is frightening. Detaining kids with no possibility of release cannot sit easily with our interest in protecting them.”
So perhaps this policy can be reversed by Judge Dolly Gee once she reaches a ruling, we’ll have to see.