They're going to need help

The ACLU will be inundated with cases in support of all the people the GOP and its Christian Nationalists will be attacking.  Please help if you can.

Popular opinion matters - at least to Democrats

United States President Joe Biden says he has “not yet” decided if he will travel to Saudi Arabia, a week after he opened the door to a possible trip.

  alJazeera

Biden "hasn't yet decided. Read: cancelled plans after a brace of negative reporting.

Thirteen human rights groups sent a joint letter to Biden on Thursday, saying a meeting between the US president and the Saudi crown prince risks encouraging new abuses and further entrenching impunity in the kingdom.

[...]

A leading Democratic Party legislator, Adam Schiff, has also spoken out against the planned visit, saying Biden should not go and meet Prince Mohammed.

“This is someone who butchered an American resident, cut him up into pieces — and in the most terrible and premeditated way,” Schiff, who chairs the House of Representatives intelligence committee, told CBS’s Face the Nation programme last week.

[...]

In a subsequent letter, Schiff and five other prominent legislators said any engagement with Saudi Arabia must be aimed at “recalibrating the relationship to serve America’s national interests”.

The letter did not urge Biden to call off the trip but raised six areas for the US president to focus on with Saudis, including global oil markets, the war in Yemen, and the killing of Khashoggi.

[...]

Any potential visit to Saudi Arabia likely would be aimed at bolstering relations with the country at a time when Biden is trying to find ways to lower gasoline prices in the US.

[...]

A White House official said on Friday that the US would not overlook conduct that took place before Biden’s presidency, but that “it was also important to reorient – but not rupture – relations with Saudi Arabia”, noting the country’s role as a strategic partner of the US for eight decades.

Yeah, and a stronger violator of human rights.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE June 14:  NPR is reporting the visit as settled.

Meanwhile, our great friends the Saudis are making headlines

Perhaps Jared or Ivanka could say a word or two.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

What the hell have we become?

Lawyers and human rights advocates said there had been a significant acceleration of deportations in recent weeks, a trend they see as linked to the looming elections and the possibility that Ice could soon be under new management.

[...]

US immigration officers allegedly tortured Cameroonian asylum seekers to force them to sign their own deportation orders, in what lawyers and activists describe as a brutal scramble to fly African migrants out of the country in the run-up to the elections.

Many of the Cameroonian migrants in a Mississippi detention centre refused to sign, fearing death at the hands of Cameroonian government forces responsible for widespread civilian killings, and because they had asylum hearings pending.

According to multiple accounts, detainees were threatened, choked, beaten, pepper-sprayed and threatened with more violence to make them sign. Several were put in handcuffs by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officers, and their fingerprints were taken forcibly in place of a signature on documents called stipulated orders of removal, by which the asylum seekers waive their rights to further immigration hearings and accept deportation.

[...]

“The abuse we are witnessing, especially right now against black immigrants, isn’t new, but it is escalating,” said Christina Fialho, executive director of an advocacy group, Freedom for Immigrants (FFI).

[...]

A plane carrying 60 Cameroonian and 28 Congolese asylum seekers was quietly flown out of Fort Worth Alliance airport in Texas on 13 October to deliver them to their home countries. The charter plane did not release a flight plan, but it was tracked by immigration rights group Witness at the Border, which said it stopped in Senegal, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo and then Kenya before flying back to Texas.

[...]

“We know that the US government is deporting key witnesses in an effort to silence survivors and absolve Ice of legal liability.”

  The Guardian

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Can we use Hitler comparisons now?

Several legal advocacy groups on Monday filed a whistleblower complaint on behalf of a nurse at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center documenting “jarring medical neglect” within the facility, including a refusal to test detainees for the novel coronavirus and an exorbitant rate of hysterectomies being performed on immigrant women.

The nurse, Dawn Wooten, was employed at the Irwin County Detention Center (ICDC) in Georgia, which is operated by LaSalle Corrections, a private prison company.

[...]

Multiple women came forward to tell Project South about what they perceived to be the inordinate rate at which women in ICDC were subjected to hysterectomies – a surgical operation in which all or part of the uterus is removed. Additionally, many of the immigrant women who underwent the procedure were reportedly “confused” when asked to explain why they had the surgery, with one detainee likening their treatment to prisoners in concentration camps.

[...]

According to Wooten, ICDC consistently used a particular gynecologist – outside the facility – who almost always opted to remove all or part of the uterus of his female detainee patients.

[...]

Wooten – who is being represented in the matter by the Government Accountability Project – also confirmed that many of the detained women told her that they didn’t understand why they were being forced to have the procedure.

[...]

The complaint details several accounts from detainees, including one woman who was not properly anesthetized during the procedure and heard the aforementioned doctor tell the nurse he had mistakenly removed the wrong ovary, resulting in her losing all reproductive ability. Another said she was scheduled for the procedure but when she questioned why it was necessary, she was given at least three completely different answers.

[...]

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has responded to this story with a statement that said, generally speaking, “anonymous, unproven allegations, made without any fact-checkable specifics” should be treated with skepticism. The agency said it takes “all allegations seriously” and defers to the DHS Office of Inspector General.

  Las & Crime

Fascist dystopia, we greet you

The Trump administration on Friday issued a proposal to expand its DNA and other biometric data collection of immigrants to include citizens sponsoring them.

In a document published on the Federal Register, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) proposed that “any applicant, petitioner, sponsor, beneficiary, or individual filing or associated with an immigration benefit or request, including United States citizens, must appear for biometrics collection without regard to age unless DHS waives or exempts the biometrics requirement.”

[...]

Andrea Flores, deputy director of immigration policy for the American Civil Liberties Union, called the new expansion an “unprecedented” level of data collection.

"Collecting a massive database of genetic blueprints won't make us safer — it will simply make it easier for the government to surveil and target our communities and to bring us closer to a dystopian nightmare," Flores said in a statement on Sept. 2.

  The Hill

We're in one already, Andrea.  It's just the initial stages.

Hopefully the ACLU will file a lawsuit.

Hotel Rwanda hero "kidnapped" by Rwandan forces

Rwandan authorities have denied a lawyer access to Paul Rusesabagina nearly a week after the outspoken government critic was paraded in handcuffs and accused of terrorism.

[...]

Rusesabagina was awarded the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2005 for saving the lives of more than 1,200 people as a hotel manager during Rwanda's 1994 genocide in which some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed.

[...]

In a statement early Saturday, the Hotel Rwanda Rusesabagina Foundation said Rusesabagina, a U.S. permanent resident and Belgian citizen, has had no consular visits, and it rejected the Rwandan government's claim that it had talked to his sons about a potential visit as "not true."

[...]

The family has said they believe he was "kidnapped" during a visit to Dubai and that he would never knowingly have boarded a plane for Rwanda's capital, Kigali. He has lived outside the East African nation since 1996.

[...]

Rwandan authorities have not responded to questions about how and where Rusesabagina was apprehended, and have not publicly shared any international arrest warrant.

[...]

Rwandan authorities have granted what they called an "exclusive" interview with Rusesabagina to a Kenyan newspaper, The East African, in which he said he had been treated with "kindness" but did not discuss the accusations against him or how he was apprehended.

[...]

The Rwandan government has said it issued an arrest warrant for Rusesabagina to answer charges of serious crimes including terrorism, arson, kidnap, and murder perpetrated against unarmed civilians. Police called him the suspected "founder, leader, sponsor and member of violent, armed, extremist terror outfits including the Rwanda Movement for Democratic Change."

Rwanda points to a video posted online in 2018 in which Rusesabagina says "it is imperative that in 2019 we speed up the liberation struggle of the Rwandan people ... the time has come for us to use any means possible to bring about change in Rwanda, as all political means have been tried and failed."

[...]

Rusesabagina in the past has denied the charges that he financially supports Rwandan rebels, saying he is being targeted for criticizing the administration of President Paul Kagame over human rights abuses.

[...]

The U.S. government has said it expects the Rwandan government to provide "humane treatment, adhere to the rule of law and provide a fair and transparent legal process" for Rusesabagina.

  

Sure.

If you haven't seen the movie "Hotel Rwanda", I recommend it, and caution you that it has some very disturbing scenes.

Wow

The times they are a-changin'.

NBA Statement:

We had a candid, impassioned and productive conversation yesterday between NBA players, coaches and team governors regarding next steps to further our collective efforts and actions in support of social justice and racial equality. Among others, the attendees included player and team representatives of all 13 teams in Orlando. All parties agreed to resume NBA playoff games on Saturday, Aug. 29 with the understanding that the league together with the players will work to enact the following commitments:

1. The NBA and its players have agreed to immediately establish a social justice coalition, with representatives from players, coaches and governors, that will be focused on a broad range of issues, including increasing access to voting, promoting civic engagement, and advocating for meaningful police and criminal justice reform.

2. In every city where the league franchise owns and controls the arena property, team governors will continue to work with local elections officials to convert the facility into a voting location for the 2020 general election to allow for a safe in-person voting option for communities vulnerable to COVID. If a deadline has passed, team governors will work with local elections officials to find another election-related use for the facility, including but not limited to voter registration and ballot receiving boards.

3. The league will work with the players and our network partners to create and include advertising spots in each NBA playoff game dedicated to promoting greater civic engagement in national and local elections and raising awareness around voter access and opportunity.

These commitments follow months of close collaboration around designing a safe and healthy environment to restart the NBA season, providing a platform to promote social justice, as well as creating an NBA Foundation focused on economic empowerment in the Black community. "We look forward to the resumption of the playoffs and continuing to work together – in Orlando and in all NBA team markets – to push for meaningful and sustainable change.

  Yahoo Sports

Amazing.

Let's do this

Actually, for US elites, that's not a positive thing.  They prefer ignorant citizens.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Big Brother is already here

We all know about the exten of domestic surveillance via metadata collection since Edward Snowden elightened us.  Now comes a complementary story.

Clearview AI, a facial recognition company that says it’s amassed a database of billions of photos, has a fantastic selling point it offers up to police departments nationwide: It cracked a case of alleged terrorism in a New York City subway station last August in a matter of seconds.

[...]

It’s a compelling pitch that has helped rocket Clearview to partnerships with police departments across the country. But there’s just one problem: The New York Police Department said that Clearview played no role in the case.

As revealed to the world in a startling story in the New York Times this weekend, Clearview AI has crossed a boundary that no other tech company seemed willing to breach: building a database of what it claims to be more than 3 billion photos that can be used to identify a person in almost any situation. It’s raised fears that a much-hyped moment, when universal facial recognition could be deployed at a mass scale, is finally at hand.

[...]

“In under a second it can find a match in our database of millions of photos,” read a now-deleted blurb about the company for a retail tech event. “It can be integrated in security cameras, iPhone/iPad apps, and with an API. Unlike other facial recognition companies, Clearview AI provides a curated database of millions (and soon billion) of faces from the open-web.”

[...]

But the company, founded by CEO Hoan Ton-That, has drawn a veil over itself and its operations, misrepresenting its work to police departments across the nation, hiding several key facts about its origins, and downplaying its founders' previous connections to white nationalists and the far right.

  Buzzfeed

Any number of police departments also have connections to white nationalists and the far right.

“The NYPD did not use Clearview technology to identify the suspect in the August 16th rice cooker incident,” a department spokesperson told BuzzFeed News. “The NYPD identified the suspect using the Department’s facial recognition practice where a still image from a surveillance video was compared to a pool of lawfully possessed arrest photos.”

Of course, the NYPD could be lying.

While Clearview has claimed associations with the country’s largest police department in at least two other cases, the spokesperson said “there is no institutional relationship” with the company. In response, Ton-That said the NYPD has been using Clearview on a demo basis for a number of months. He declined to provide any further details.

[...]

Clearview is attempting to convince law enforcement that its facial recognition tool, which has been trained on photos scraped from Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and other websites, is more accurate than any other on the market. However, emails, presentations, and flyers obtained by BuzzFeed News reveal that its claims to law enforcement agencies are impossible to verify — or flat-out wrong.

[...]

In the Times report and in documents obtained by BuzzFeed News, Clearview AI said that its facial recognition software had been used by more than 600 police departments and government groups, including the FBI. But in at least two cases, BuzzFeed News found that the company suggested it was working with a police department simply because it had submitted a lead to a tip line.

Neither of those facts make Clearview any less disturbing.

Originally known as Smartcheckr, Clearview was the result of an unlikely partnership between Ton-That, a small-time hacker turned serial app developer, and Richard Schwartz, a former adviser to then–New York mayor Rudy Giuliani.

What do you want to bet that Rudy - and all of Trump's inner circle - has stock in Clearview?

Clare Garvie, a senior associate at Georgetown Law's Center on Privacy and Technology, told BuzzFeed News it was unclear whether Clearview could do what it says it could.

“We have no idea how good it is,” Garvie said. “The idea that all information, all people's faces online are currently tagged with their own identity — it's a bit laughable.”

Garvie told BuzzFeed News that there’s also no single way to measure the so-called accuracy of facial recognition technology. Accuracy, in facial recognition, is generally measured as a combination of the correct-match rate, reject rate, non-match rate, false-match rate, and the ability to detect the face in the first instance.

“Whenever a company just lists one accuracy metric, that is necessarily an incomplete view of the accuracy of their system,” Garvie said. “Depending on what the system is designed to do, that may have little or no bearing on the actual accuracy of the system and operation.”

I'm not sure law enforcement on either the federal or local level in this country cares all that much about accuracy. Ask anyone with a Middle Eastern surname. Or black man in America, for that matter.

Ironically for a company that seeks to erode privacy, many key figures at Clearview have attempted to lower their public profiles. Some began to do so long before the attention from the press.

Since Ton-That and Schwartz started Clearview, their social media and internet presences have been scrubbed. Ton-That deleted his Twitter and Instagram accounts, while Schwartz's LinkedIn profile vanished and his past with Smartcheckr has been obscured across the web.

When asked about this, Ton-That said in an email, "Regarding myself and others at the company, some choose not to maintain social media accounts because they are time consuming."

Time consuming. Whatever.

But this isn't irony. This is understanding the risks.

Blowback - Part 2

Agnes Callamard is the UN Special Rapporteur on Extra-Judicial Executions.

Which is no doubt why Pompeo came out later with a statement that the assassination was carried out because Soleimani was planning imminent attacks.

Lucky for the United States law doesn't apply to us.

UPDATE:

Israel is an authoritarian state

In case you were unaware.

Israel’s highest court has upheld the government’s decision to deport the local director of Human Rights Watch (HRW) for his alleged support for a boycott movement, ending a long-running landmark case that questioned the country’s ability to expel its critics.

Omar Shakir, a US citizen, will now have 20 days to leave Israel and the Palestinian territories or face deportation, his lawyer said.

Shakir wrote on Twitter that if he was kicked out, Israel would join the ranks of Iran, North Korea and Egypt in blocking access to Human Rights Watch staff. “We won’t stop. And we won’t be the last,” he said.

  Guardian

Next step: Israeli citizens.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

But of course

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Pulling out all the stops

The Trump administration is in a hurry to tear down democracy and decency.

You don't need any rights, you're not even human.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced Monday the creation of a commission to review the role of human rights in U.S. foreign policy.

  The Hill

Christ, it's practically non-existent as it is.

The Commission on Unalienable Rights is meant to provide advice on human rights based on the nation’s founding principles and the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Pompeo said, arguing that there is confusion over what constitutes a human right.

No, there isn't.

“As human rights claims have proliferated, some claims have come into tension with one another, provoking questions and clashes about which rights are entitled to gain respect,” Pompeo said while delivering remarks to reporters but without taking any questions. “Nation-states and international institutions remain confused about their respective responsibilities concerning human rights.”

No they don't. And what "claims" are in "tension with one another?"

The commission drew swift scrutiny from critics who worry the panel will undermine protections for abortion rights and marginalized groups such as LGBT people.

Mexicans and Muslims, too...

Critics were first concerned in May when a notice for the commission, published in the Federal Register, said the group would provide “fresh thinking about human rights discourse where such discourse has departed from our nation’s founding principles of natural law and natural rights.”

...and blacks!

The commission will be headed by Mary Ann Glendon, a Harvard Law School professor and former U.S. ambassador to the Vatican during the George W. Bush administration.

In brief remarks alongside Pompeo, Glendon said the commission will “do our very best to carry out your marching orders and to do so in a way that will assist you in your difficult task of transmuting principle into policy.”

Wow.

“You’ve asked us to work at the level of principle, not policy, and you’ve asked us to take our bearings from the distinctive rights tradition of the United States of America, a tradition that is grounded in the institutions without which rights would not be possible: constitutional government and the rule of law.”

The rule of law has already covered human rights. No need to go back and redo it.

"Tradition." I think I know what that's code for. Make America Great Again. When blacks, women and dark-skinned foreigners were kept in their place.

You can't handle the truth

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has blocked the inclusion of Saudi Arabia on a U.S. list of countries that recruit child soldiers, dismissing his experts’ findings that a Saudi-led coalition has been using under-age fighters in Yemen’s civil war, according to four people familiar with the matter.

[...]

State Department experts recommended adding Saudi Arabia to the soon-to-be released list based in part on news reports and human rights groups’ assessments that the desert kingdom has hired child fighters from Sudan to fight for the U.S.-backed coalition in Yemen, the four sources said.

The experts’ recommendation faced resistance from some other State Department officials who, according to three of the sources, argued that it was not clear whether the Sudanese forces were under the control of Sudanese officers or directed by the Saudi-led coalition.

[...]

Since the end of 2016, the Saudi-led coalition has deployed as many as 14,000 Sudanese at any given time, including children as young as 14, to fight in Yemen, offering payments of up to $10,000 per recruit, according to the New York Times.

[...]

The Child Soldiers Prevention Act of 2008 requires the State Department to report annually on countries using child fighters, defined as “any person under 18 years of age who takes a direct part in hostilities as a member of governmental armed forces.”

[...]

A report by an independent group of experts to the U.N. Human Rights Council in August 2018 found that all sides in Yemen “conscripted or enlisted children into armed forces or groups and used them to participate actively in hostilities.”

The Trump administration has faced controversy in the past over its handling of the child soldier issue.

Reuters reported in 2017 that then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson opted to remove Iraq and Myanmar from the child soldiers list and rejected a recommendation to add Afghanistan to it, despite the department publicly acknowledging that children were still being conscripted in those countries.

[...]

Pompeo, who succeeded Tillerson, reinstated Iraq and Myanmar on the list last year.

[...]

Pompeo rejected the recommendation from the experts, who are from the State Department’s anti-human trafficking office, said the four sources who spoke on condition of anonymity. The office has a key role in investigating the use of child soldiers worldwide.”The United States condemns the unlawful recruitment and use of child soldiers. We place great importance on ending the practice wherever it occurs,” a State Department official said in response to Reuters’ questions.

  Reuters

Apparently not.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Living in metaphors instead of reality

Just like taking your shoes off and subjecting yourself to x-rays and pat-downs at the airport.  None of these things is keeping you safe.  They're just cementing the government's control over your person, shrinking your freedom.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Hope they don't get arrested

Another reason the base is okay with Trump's attitude toward Russia.

We don't need no steenkeen international law

The Mexican government’s human rights arm, along with its counterparts from Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala and Honduras, launched a formal complaint against the Trump administration at the Organization of American States.

[...]

In appealing to the OAS, the five agencies are invoking a little-known tool in international law. Since the 1948 launch of the OAS, the United States has been bound by the terms of the Inter-American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man, known as the Bogotá Declaration. The most significant human rights document up to that time (the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights came shortly thereafter), it obliged the states of the Americas to protect “the right to life, liberty and the security” of every human being, to give protection to families and to grant “all children … the right to special protection, care and aid.

[...]

After Wednesday’s executive order, the Mexican human rights agency reiterated its complaint, sent monitors to the northern border and called on governments around the world to “form a united front” against Trump’s migration policies and the ongoing detentions and separations.

  Politico

Good luck with that. No other country has yet managed to put the brakes on any US policy. Maybe the tariff situation will be different, but human rights? That's ours to abuse and has been ever since the first Brits set foot on the continent.  Hey, we even usurped the very name America from all other countries on both North and South American continents.

Mexico’s complaint now goes to the OAS’ Inter-American Commission of Human Rights. This is a panel of seven human rights experts (currently all non-U.S. nationals) empowered to ask member states to change their policies or make other types of reparations for human rights abuses.

Anybody can ask. The answer is always going to be: butt out. (See, eg, Nikki Haley's response to the UN report on poverty in America.)

In urgent situations in which there is a risk of irreversible damage, the commission can also order what are called “precautionary measures” to safeguard rights—something Mexico specifically asked for on the separation policy, which represented in its view a “total contempt for the rights of children” that posed “irreparable harm” to them.

If the commission orders precautionary measures or ultimately finds the U.S. in violation of the Bogotá Declaration, there’s an open question about what happens next.

Wait. I think I know. We tell them to butt out.

There’s no enforcement mechanism that applies to the United States; most Latin American countries signed up for the more enforceable obligations of a 1978 convention, which includes the ability to order monetary penalties against states that violate human rights, but the Carter administration was unable to persuade Congress to ratify it.

Oooh, color me surprised.

The most the other signatories to the Bogatá conventions can do is kick us out. Pretty sure we don't care.

In a landmark 2011 decision, the first of its kind, the commission ruled that the United States had failed to protect the human rights of Jessica Gonzales. In that case, Castle Rock, Colorado, police had failed to enforce a restraining order against her estranged husband, who then abducted and killed her three kids. The U.S. Supreme Court heard her case, and found her constitutional rights had not been violated as a matter of U.S. law. Undeterred, Gonzales then took her case to the commission, which sided with her and confirmed U.S. obligations to fight gender bias in law enforcement. Far from objecting to these proceedings, the George W. Bush administration, and then the Obama administration acknowledged the gravity of the situation, showed up and argued their case—moves that gave the process the implicit if not explicit U.S. seal of approval. The commission’s decision gave Gonzales a tool to push for domestic policy change, which ultimately culminated in a new Justice Department policy on gender bias in 2015.

And how's that going?

This legally binding quality sets the OAS’ decisions apart from interventions in other multinational venues. The various trade and investment tribunals around the world lack subject matter jurisdiction over migrants. The U.S. has opted out of compulsory jurisdiction of the global International Court of Justice, and the Trump administration withdrew from the U.N. Human Rights Council on Tuesday—echoing an earlier decision by George W. Bush not to join during his term. The U.S. can leave the council without leaving the U.N., whereas the U.S. would have to leave the OAS entirely to avoid being bound by commission decisions.

In the words of Dick Cheney, "So what?"

Trump actually does need the OAS. The OAS is the main organ through which the United States puts pressure on Venezuela and Cuba—a major priority among Florida voters Trump needs to keep in his column heading into the next election. The OAS has regional legitimacy that the administration lacks, and to give this up would be geopolitically and electorally risky.

Has there been any indication at all in Trump's presidency that he cares about geopolitical risk? Electoral risk, perhaps, but the people he's counting on voting for him don't give any more fucks than he does about human rights.

While most of the isolationists and hawks at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. may not care about such signals, members of Congress may care more if a body with legitimacy throughout the Americas weighs in—not just on an individual rights violation like Gonzales’, but against an overall policy stance of the U.S. government.

Not the Republicans. Time to join the reality based world and recognize that none of the past moral - or, indeed, legal - restraints on this country are functional.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The Kennedy clan is joining a hunger strike

In all sincerety, I'm surprised - and impressed. I know the Kennedys are known for their civic mindedness - modern day noblesse oblige - but a 24-day hunger strike - that's pretty radical. And Ethel - this could be her last act on earth.

Ethel Kennedy, the widow of Robert Kennedy, has announced that she is joining a hunger strike in protest against President Trump's "zero tolerance" immigration policy.

The 90-year-old human rights advocate will participate in the "Break Bread Not Families" hunger strike. The protest was organized by several activist groups, including the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights nonprofit, and a number of prominent people are participating in the strike.

Nearly 40 other Kennedys have joined the strike as well.

The fast started on Sunday and is set to go on for 24 days — symbolizing the approximately 2,400 migrant children that have been separated from their parents. In place of the meals participants would have eaten, organizers ask that protesters instead donate money to help migrant families.

  The Hill

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Internment camps on military bases

According to a Friday report by TIME magazine, the U.S. Navy may be planning to detain tens of thousands of immigrants (accused of illegally entering the country) in Concord, despite the fact that the Environmental Protection Agency [EPA] still lists the Concord Naval Weapons Station as a Superfund site, a designation reserved for some of the most toxic places in the country.

  SF Curbed

Despite or because of?

TIME cited a Navy draft memo that singled out potential detention locales in three states, including the Concord base, which could hold up to 47,000 people in what the publication describes as a proposed “tent city.”

I guess we haven't noticed how the large refugee camps in Europe, like the one in Calais, have turned out.

Or maybe that's why they're putting it on the Superfund site.

Potentially hazardous elements in the soil include lead, mercury, arsenic, and “unexploded ordinance.”

[...]

[T]he Concord site’s report card also cautions about “expected groundwater contamination” and that “actions are still needed to address contamination.”

[...]

The proposal calls for immigration camps that are “temporary and austere.”

That should help.

 ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.