This is America

We torture. We abuse. We destroy families.

A blistering report released this week alleges that U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents neglected and abused more than 100 migrant children who were in their custody.

The report, from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the University of Chicago Law School International Human Rights Clinic, is based on thousands of pages of records detailing accusations from 116 unaccompanied minors, many of whom were asylum-seekers, while in temporary detention centers.“Migrant children long have reported varied mistreatment in CBP custody, including sexual, physical, and verbal abuse, and the deprivation of basic needs such as food, water, and emergency medical care,” the ACLU said in a summary of the report.

Some children accused officers of punching or kicking them and running them over with vehicles. Others described being tased and verbally abused by officers.

Children also described being deprived of edible food and water, held in freezing cells, touched inappropriately by officers and threatened with rape or death.

The report accuses the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) of violating federal law by not reporting the alleged abuses to the FBI.

  The Hill

Federal officials lost track of nearly 1,500 migrant children last year after a government agency placed the minors in the homes of adult sponsors in communities across the country, according to testimony before a Senate subcommittee Thursday.

[...]

From October to December 2017, HHS called 7,635 children the agency had placed with sponsors, and found 6,075 of the children were still living with their sponsors, 28 had run away, five had been deported and 52 were living with someone else. The rest were missing, said Steven Wagner, acting assistant secretary at HHS.

[...]

The Health and Human Services Department has a limited budget to track the welfare of vulnerable unaccompanied minors, and realized that 1,475 children could not be found after making follow-up calls to check on their safety, an agency official said.

  Time

And where do you imagine they might have ended up?

An AP investigation found in 2016 that more than two dozen unaccompanied children had been sent to homes where they were sexually assaulted, starved or forced to work for little or no pay. At the time, many adult sponsors didn’t undergo thorough background checks, government officials rarely visited homes and in some cases had no idea that sponsors had taken in several unrelated children, a possible sign of human trafficking.

[...]

The number of children seeking refuge in the U.S. has not returned to the height of the surge starting in 2013, but spiraling gang and drug violence in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador continue to push children, teens and families to migrate northward.

Where they are abused and lost.

Esteban Pastor hoped U.S. Border Patrol agents would free him and his 18-month-old son after they were arrested for crossing the southern border illegally last summer.

He had mortgaged his land in Guatemala to fund his sick toddler’s hospital stay, and needed to work in the United States to pay off the loan.

Instead agents imprisoned the 28-year-old in July for coming back into the country after having been deported, a felony. They placed the toddler in a federal shelter, though where, Pastor didn’t know. Three months later, in October, the father was deported — alone. His child, he said agents told him, was “somewhere in Texas.”

“I cried. I begged,” he said. “No one could tell me anything.”

[...]

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen has defended the practice, saying children are taken from any criminals imprisoned for breaking the law.

  Houston Chronicle

And this is the woman Trump doesn't like?

Previously most parents with children weren’t prosecuted for crossing the border illegally, a misdemeanor for first offenders, but deported or freed together to pursue their civil immigration cases under a practice called “catch and release.” The crime of illegal entry swamps federal dockets at the border and prosecutors typically prioritized serious offenders.

[...]

After they are removed from their parents, children are deemed "unaccompanied" and placed in the custody of Health and Human Services, which houses minors in federal shelters until it can release them to relatives or provide long-term foster care.

All this time I thought "unaccompanied" referred to children who crossed the border without a parent.    (It used to be.)  This is like Obama defining all males over a certain age present in an area where the US was "combatting terrorism" as enemy combattants.

Patrick Fisher, a spokesman for that agency’s Office of Refugee Resettlement in charge of migrant children, said in a statement that the agency works with Homeland Security and other authorities to find parents. He said it has done so in about 700 cases between October and April where parents were in DHS custody. The agency couldn’t say how many were reunified, saying that data is not “in a reportable format.” It didn’t track separations before that period.

[...]

Miguel "Andy" Nogueras, a federal public defender in McAllen, said he recently represented a woman who was prosecuted for illegal entry last fall and had her child removed. She was coming back to find her this month when she was imprisoned for returning.

Jesus wept.

The boy was crying as federal agents ordered him into the government vehicle. Tell your mother goodbye, they said.

It was late October, and Blanca Vasquez and her 12-year-old son, Luis, had only been in the United States for a few hours. They had crossed the Rio Grande near El Paso, giving themselves up to Border Patrol agents to ask for asylum. A gang in El Salvador had murdered her husband, a military sergeant, and she said they were now after Luis.

[...]

Vasquez figured she and Luis would be detained, or even released, while she fought for asylum. A 20-year-old federal settlement that bars the extended detention of migrant children would ensure they stayed together.

But that was then. This summer, the practice changed.

Under orders from President Donald Trump's administration, the federal government would begin broadly prosecuting parents who enter illegally, forcing the removal of their children. That enables the administration to detain parents until they are deported or win asylum, rather than freeing them with their children to wait for their cases in the backlogged civil immigration courts, a practice known as "catch and release" that Trump has vowed to end.

  Houston Chronicle

Catch and release. Already treated like animals.

Such a practice of family separation is "so fundamentally unconscionable it defies countless international and domestic laws on child welfare, human rights and refugees," according to a complaint advocacy groups, including the Women's Refugee Commission, filed with the Department of Homeland Security in December.

It defies laws of humanity. It is reminiscent of Nazi treatment of Jews.

These agents would be right at home in Hitler's Germany.

Here's Chris Hayes' report:



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UPDATE:

The nerve.



UPDATE: