We Resist: Day 908

One of the difficulties in resisting the Trump administration, the Republican Congressional majority, and Republican state legislatures (plus the occasional non-Republican who obliges us to resist their nonsense, too, like we don't have enough to worry about) is keeping on top of the sheer number of horrors, indignities, and normalization of the aggressively abnormal that they unleash every single day.

So here is a daily thread for all of us to share all the things that are going on, thus crowdsourcing a daily compendium of the onslaught of conservative erosion of our rights and our very democracy.

Stay engaged. Stay vigilant. Resist.

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Late yesterday and earlier today by me: Nancy Pelosi, Please Do Something Real and Feeling the Heat and Primarily Speaking.

Here are some more things in the news today...

The President of the United States tweeted this today: "'Billionaire Tech Investor Peter Thiel believes Google should be investigated for treason. He accuses Google of working with the Chinese Government.' @foxandfriends A great and brilliant guy who knows this subject better than anyone! The Trump Administration will take a look!" Trump has previously accused Google, among others, of news- and election-rigging against him, so now announcing his administration "will take a look" at investigating them for treason is extremely chilling.

Caitlyn Byrd at the Post and Courier: Mark Sanford, SC Republican, Former U.S. Rep, Considers Presidential Run Against Trump. "Mark Sanford, the former South Carolina congressman ousted from office after [Donald] Trump urged voters to reject him, is considering a run for president. Sanford, in an exclusive interview Tuesday with The Post and Courier, confirmed he will take the next month to formulate whether he will mount a potential run against Trump as a way of pushing a national debate about America's mounting debt, deficit, and government spending. He would run as a Republican." Oh for fuck's sake.

Danielle McLean at ThinkProgress: Democrats Sue over a Florida Law That Puts Trump's Name Ahead of Rivals on the 2020 Ballot. "The Democratic Party and civil rights groups in Florida are suing over a number of state laws meant to suppress the votes of people of color and give Republicans an edge in the state, which has had numerous whisker-close elections in its recent past. This latest legal challenge, filed by Florida voters and several Democratic groups last year at U.S. District Court in Tallahassee, seeks to end a nearly 70-year-old law mandating that candidates belonging to the governor's political party be listed first on the ballot. A four-day federal court trial began in the case on Monday."

[Content Note: Police brutality; death; racism] Matt Zapotosky and Devlin Barrett at the Washington Post: Justice Department Will Not Charge Police in Connection with Eric Garner's Death.

The Justice Department will not bring federal charges against any police officers involved in the death of Eric Garner, a 43-year-old Black man whose recorded takedown in New York in 2014 helped coin a rallying cry for those concerned about law enforcement's treatment of minorities, two people familiar with the matter said.

For Garner's supporters, the decision is a disappointing — albeit long expected — end to a case that had languished for years as various components of the Justice Department disagreed about what to do.

At a news conference Tuesday, Gwen Carr said the Justice Department had "failed us," and called on the New York City police commissioner to fire the officer who was caught on video wrapping his arm around Garner’s neck before he died.

"Five years ago, my son said, 'I can't breathe' 11 times, and today we can't breathe, because they have let us down," Carr said.

Rage. Seethe. Sob.

New York City officer in Eric Garner's chokehold death won't face federal charges

The Civil rights division thought charges could be filed but of course Barr decided not to. This is what happens with a corrupt AG installed by a corrupt regime https://t.co/6cGcx1uIEN

— Olga Lautman (@olgaNYC1211) July 16, 2019

[CN: War on agency; anti-choicery] AP at the Guardian: Trump Administration to Ban Abortion Referrals at Taxpayer-Funded Clinics. "Taxpayer-funded family planning clinics must stop referring women for abortions immediately, the Trump administration has announced, declaring it will begin enforcing a new regulation hailed by religious conservatives and denounced by medical organizations and women's rights groups. The head of a national umbrella group representing the clinics said the Republican administration is following 'an ideological agenda' that could disrupt basic health care for many low-income women." FUCKING GODDAMMIT.

* * *

[Content Note: Nativism; abuse. Covers entire section.]

Ginger Thompson at ProPublica: A Border Patrol Agent Reveals What It's Really Like to Guard Migrant Children. "Referring back to the grim conditions inside the Border Patrol holding centers, [the Border Patrol agent] said: 'Somewhere down the line people just accepted what's going on as normal. That includes the people responsible for fixing the problems.' ...Most of his colleagues, he said, fall into one of two camps. There are the 'law-and-order types' who see the immigrants in their custody, as, first and foremost, criminals. Then, he said, there are those who are 'just tired of all the chaos' of a broken immigration system and 'see no end in sight.'"

House report: the Trump admin stole at least 18 babies under the age of two—"including nine infants under the age of one"—from families at the border, separating some for as long as six months. https://t.co/vc2072udha #FamiliesBelongTogether

— Gabe Ortíz (@TUSK81) July 15, 2019

The government-inflicted trauma is undeniable: "Now more than a year and a half old, the baby still can’t walk on his own, and has not spoken." Another baby, just eight-months-old, was separated from his family for six months. #FamiliesBelongTogether

— Gabe Ortíz (@TUSK81) July 15, 2019

Kate Morrissey of the San Diego Union-Tribune at Stars and Stripes: Customs and Border Protection Denies Marine Corps Veteran Entry for Scheduled Citizenship Interview. "A deported Marine Corps veteran who has been unable to come back to the U.S. for more than a decade was denied entry to the country Monday morning when he asked to be let in for a scheduled citizenship interview. Roman Sabal, 58, originally from Belize, came to the San Ysidro Port of Entry around 7:30 on Monday morning with an attorney to ask for 'parole' to attend his naturalization interview scheduled for a little before noon in downtown San Diego. Border officials have the authority to temporarily allow people into the country on parole for 'humanitarian or significant public benefit' reasons." He was denied entry.

ICE told one trans woman that if she didn't participate in a photo op with media, she wouldn't receive food.

𝗧𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗶𝘀 𝗵𝗼𝗿𝗿𝗶𝗳𝘆𝗶𝗻𝗴.https://t.co/91z69k0u3I

— National Center for Transgender Equality (@TransEquality) July 15, 2019

This is hell on earth.

* * *

I'll wrap it up with some good news...

[CN: Death penalty] Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg at the Appeal: Philadelphia D.A. Asks Court to Declare Death Penalty System Unconstitutional.

Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner — who vowed as a candidate not to seek the death penalty — has asked the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to declare that the sentence, as applied, violates the state's Constitution.

"Because of the arbitrary manner in which it has been applied, the death penalty violates our state Constitution's prohibition against cruel punishments," states a brief filed by Krasner's office tonight in the case Jermont Cox v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

"It really is not about the worst offenders," Krasner told The Appeal. "It really is about poverty. It really is about race."

The new brief is part of a broader push that started last August, when lawyers representing Cox and another death row prisoner, Kevin Marinelli, asked the state Supreme Court to weigh in on Pennsylvania's use of the death penalty.

"Pennsylvania administers a system of capital punishment that is replete with error, a national outlier in its design, and a mirror for the inequities and prejudices that plague American society," lawyers for Cox and Marinelli wrote to the court in February.

Fingers crossed that another state will soon outlaw the death penalty.

What have you been reading that we need to resist today?

Open Wide...

Shut Up!

Migrant Children Allege Sexual Abuse and Retaliation

[Content Note: Sexual assault; harassment and abuse.]

Jacob Soboroff and Julia Ainsley at NBC News report:

The poor treatment of migrant children at the hands of U.S. border agents in recent months extends beyond Texas to include allegations of sexual assault and retaliation for protests, according to dozens of accounts by children held in Arizona collected by government case managers and obtained by NBC News.

A 16-year-old Guatemalan boy held in Yuma, Arizona, said he and others in his cell complained about the taste of the water and food they were given. The Customs and Border Protection agents took the mats out of their cell in retaliation, forcing them to sleep on hard concrete.

A 15-year-old girl from Honduras described a large, bearded officer putting his hands inside her bra, pulling down her underwear, and groping her as part of what was meant to be a routine pat down in front of other immigrants and officers.

The girl said "she felt embarrassed as the officer was speaking in English to other officers and laughing" during the entire process, according to a report of her account.

A 17-year-old boy from Honduras said officers would scold detained children when they would get close to a window, and would sometimes call them "puto," an offensive term in Spanish, while they were giving orders.

...All children who gave accounts to case managers had been held at the border station longer than the 72 hours permitted by law.

There is much more at the link.

This is not the first time that we have heard reports of migrant and refugee children in detention being sexually assaulted.

In February, Florida Democratic Rep. Ted Deutch disclosed Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) documents during a House hearing on the Trump Regime's "zero tolerance" policy that revealed HHS had "received more than 4,500 complaints of sexual abuse against unaccompanied minors from 2014-2018."

Last July, Rebekah Entralgo and Joshua Eaton at ThinkProgress reported that "a man with a history of serious sex crimes allegations" had been hired as the human resources manager for a shelter for unaccompanied immigrant children in Topeka, Kansas.

Last June, Aura Bogado, Patrick Michels, Vanessa Swales, and Edgar Walters at Reveal News reported that unaccompanied immigrant children were being sent to shelters with known abuse histories, including staff that had sexually abused minors and allowed older children to sexually abuse younger ones.

Children are being tortured by the U.S. government, in its citizens' names, and the U.S. government is justifying that endemic abuse with the utterly fabricated pretense that it's necessary to protect us.

Even if every reprehensible lie Donald Trump tells about the sinister threat posed by undocumented immigrants and asylum-seekers were true, and even if his vile nativist policies were actually effective, the cost would not be worth it to me.

I would take my chances with Trump's conjured monsters before I would support actual monsters being paid with my tax dollars sexually abusing children. The choice isn't even close.

But the fact is that the crisis at the southern border (and in detention facilities across the country) is one largely of Trump's invention. He didn't create the reasons for the mass migration toward the U.S., although he is exacerbating it by refusing to address climate change and threatening to withdraw critical support to Central America. But he did create the horrendous situation in concentration camps by fundamentally altering U.S. policy to require detentions, rather than letting people go with a court date in hand.

A change he justifies by asserting that immigrants don't show up for those court dates, which is a straight-up lie.

One of many lies he tells: There is no urgent crisis threatening the United States because of undocumented immigration — not an employment crisis, not a crime and violence crisis, not a health crisis. The opioid crisis is not attributable to migrant workers or asylum-seeking refugees. Terrorists are not entering the country over the southern border.

The administration's rationale for their obscene immigration policy continually shifts, but every new explanation is just as dishonest as the one before it.

This entire crisis has been build on a foundation of lies. And children are being tortured for those lies. Which is not a bug, but a feature. Because malice is the agenda.

This is intolerable. You know what to do: MAKE SOME NOISE.

Resist.

Open Wide...

Shut Up!

Malice Is the Agenda — and Here's What It Looks Like

[Content Note: Nativism; concentration camps.]

U.S. Border Patrol has insisted that the appalling conditions in which migrants and refugees are detained at the southern border "are necessary to stem the flow" of people seeking refuge in the United States. The Trump Regime asserts that their nativist malice is a "deterrent," which is abject dishonesty.

Desperate people are fleeing violence, climate change, unemployment, and/or hunger. Parents bringing their children on the terrifying, perilous journey to the U.S. are trying to save their children's lives. And their own. That Trump wants them to fucking die can't be a deterrent when death lies at the other end of their journey, too. Making torture and death possible outcomes of seeking asylum won't end asylum-seeking — it will just make it less safe.

The sadistic architects of the Trump Regime's immigration policy want it both ways: They claim they are harming migrants and refugees as an allegedly effective deterrent, while simultaneously asserting that they can't help but torture people in concentration camps because their numbers are overwhelming the U.S.'s resources.

So, not an effective deterrent then. But we aren't meant to scrutinize the inherent contradiction in their bullshit justifications for their institutional abuse, nor are we meant to talk about how the detentions are unnecessary, as people could (and should be) released with a notice to return for a later court date, nor are we meant to talk about anything else that exposes the Trump Regime's deadly cruelty for the rank fascism that it is.

But let's talk about it, anyway. Let's talk about it with anyone and everyone who will listen, because our silence will be deadly for increasing numbers of people detained in these hells.

Yesterday, the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General released its final report on overcrowding at several border facilities in the Rio Grande Valley, and it included in the report photographs that reveal the extent of the horror.

This is but one of the images. There are more. Some of them show people lying in cages or rooms packed in so tightly that there is no room to walk. Others show people stuffed into tiny rooms at double the capacity, so that none of them can sit or lie down. They are all forced to stand, packed in like sardines.

At BuzzFeed, Hamed Aleaziz notes of the above photo that "inspectors indicated that 82 men were held in a cell with a maximum capacity of 41."

This is horrific.

You know what to do: MAKE NOISE. Make it any way you can. Just don't be silent. Please.

RESIST.

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Shut Up!

Congressional Delegation Finds Appalling Conditions at Border; Another Death After Detention by ICE

[Content Note: Nativism; abuse; death.]

Yesterday, a Congressional delegation that included Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rep. Joaquin Castro (presidential candidate Julián's twin brother), traveled to Texas to visit two CBP facilities. Although they were told they were not allowed to bring in cameras, Castro managed to sneak one in, and then reported back on Twitter what they saw.

Our border patrol system is broken. And part of the reason it stays broken is because it's kept secret. The American people must see what is being carried out in their name. The Hispanic Caucus led a delegation of members of Congress to visit 2 border patrol facilities.

Here's what we found:

At the El Paso Border Patrol Station #1, women from Cuba, some grandmothers, crammed into a prison-like cell with one toilet, but no running water to drink from or wash their hands with. Concrete floors, cinder-block walls, steel toilets.

Many said they had not bathed for 15 days. Some had been separated from children, some had been held for more than 50 days. Several complained they had not received their medications, including one for epilepsy. Members of Congress comforted them when the women broke down.

They asked us to take down their names and let everyone know they need help. They also feared retribution. We then went to the Clint Border Patrol Station that warehouses children and some parents.

The tents outside, used during the surge recently, were dark and surrounded by chain link fences. The showers — mobile units — were dank, dirty, and only too small in number for the hundreds of people there just a few weeks ago.

And a boy, perhaps three years old, pressed his face against the dirty glass of a locked steel door. He smiled big and tried to talk to us through the thick glass. His family — or another — ate Ramen on the floor a few feet away.

There are many good agents — men and women working earnestly to care for the people in their custody. But they are overwhelmed in a system that is morally bankrupt and challenged by rogue agents whose culture was on full display in the Facebook group revealed by ProPublica today.

The showers at Clint Border Patrol Station. [video at link]

This moment captures what it's like for women in CBP custody to share a cramped cell — some held for 50 days — for them to be denied showers for up to 15 days and life-saving medication. For some, it also means being separated from their children. This is El Paso Border Station #1. [video at link]

All Americans must help to change this system. Thank you to the members who attended today: @RepEscobar, @RepJudyChu, @RepPeteAguilar, @NormaJTorres, @RepSylviaGarcia, @AOC, @RepLoriTrahan, @RepJoeKennedy, @RepVeasey, @RepPressley, @RepDean, @RepRashida, @gregstantonaz. pic.twitter.com/CZX0wBwWZZ

— Joaquin Castro (@JoaquinCastrotx) July 1, 2019

Ocasio-Cortez also tweeted about what she saw, including this chilling observation: "Officers were keeping women in cells with no water and had told them to drink out of the toilets. This was them on their GOOD behavior in front of members of Congress."

My representative, Rep. Madeleine Dean, tweeted after leaving the facility: "The conditions are far worse than we ever could have imagined. 15 women in their 50s-60s sleeping in a small concrete cell, no running water. Weeks without showers. All of them separated from their families. This is a human rights crisis."

And Rep. Joe Kennedy tweeted about how difficult it was for the Congressional delegation even to get as much information as they did: "CBP was very resistant to Congressional oversight. They tried to restrict what we saw, take our phones, block photos and video. Atmosphere was contentious and uncooperative."

Nevertheless, overhead Reuters photos of the McAllen Station taken in May show the extent of the horror at CBP's concentration camps:

America has no idea what’s happening at its borders. These pics made me shudder in my own skin. Now I can understand why @AOC referred to them as concentration camps.

This is not who we are as a nation! America is better than that, greater than that! #ClosetheCamps pic.twitter.com/2AjVnR3syz

— Dr.Debbie Almontaser (@DebbiAlmontaser) July 2, 2019

It is no wonder that people detained in the camps are becoming ill, and, in some cases, even dying.

At BuzzFeed, Hamed Aleaziz reports on a 30-year-old Honduran man who died in federal immigration custody:

The death of Yimi Alexis Balderramos-Torres, first reported by BuzzFeed News on Monday morning, is the sixth in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody since October. Hours after the report, congressional staffers were informed by ICE officials of the man's death. Six hours after the initial BuzzFeed News report, ICE officials confirmed the death in a press release.

Balderramos-Torres had previously been apprehended by immigration officials in El Paso, Texas, on May 17, according to a statement released by ICE. The man was accompanied by his son when he was encountered by Border Patrol on May 17, according to a source with knowledge of the matter.

Balderramos-Torres had been sent back to Mexico under a Trump administration program that requires Central American immigrants to wait outside the U.S. as their asylum cases make their way through the immigration courts. More than 15,000 individuals have been sent back to Mexico through the program, according to statistics released by the Mexican government. Last week, a group of asylum officers urged a federal appeals court to block the program, calling it "contrary to the moral fabric of our nation."

On May 27, Balderramos-Torres again crossed the border without authorization and was picked up by local police in the U.S. during a traffic stop. He was placed in ICE custody June 6, according to the authorities. Because he had previously been arrested by Border Patrol and deported in 2013, ICE officials "reinstated" his previous deportation order and kept him in custody pending his future removal to Honduras, they said.

Nearly two weeks later, on June 18, he was transferred to the Houston Contract Detention Facility in Houston.

On June 30, Balderramos-Torres was found "unresponsive," and medical officials at the facility were unable to revive him. He was taken to a local hospital where he was pronounced dead Sunday morning. A cause of death is pending as officials conduct an autopsy.

Note that ICE did not notify Congress, as required by law, or the public about Balderramos-Torres' death until BuzzFeed reported it. We have no idea how many deaths have actually happened in their custody, because we cannot trust that they are reporting them unless obliged by the press to do so.

You know what to do: MAKE LOTS OF NOISE. If you are in the U.S., contact your senators and reps. If you are outside the U.S., contact your government and ask them to put pressure on the Trump administration to close the camps and abide by international law governing refugees. Write letters to the editor. Share this piece and/or others on social media. Talk to anyone who will listen about what's happening. RESIST.

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Nativist Wreck Mark Morgan Appointed Acting Commissioner of Customs and Border Protection

[Content Note: Nativism; abuse.]

Following the announcement yesterday that at least 100 children who had been moved out of a concentration camp with "appalling" conditions were being moved back, Commissioner of Customs and Border Protection John Sanders resigned, or was forced out, and Trump has appointed Mark Morgan to be acting commissioner.

At the Washington Post, Nick Miroff and Josh Dawsey report: "A week after beginning his reelection campaign with promises of mass deportations, [Donald] Trump sent the agencies responsible for immigration enforcement deeper into disarray on Tuesday, replacing his interim border chief with a figure he plucked from cable news punditry last month."

A figure he plucked from cable news punditry.

[CN: Video may autoplay at link] At the Huffington Post, Roque Planas has more details on Morgan's tenure at Fox News as professional nativist wreck:

A week later, Morgan returned to the show for what was already his third appearance. This time, he took aim at child migrants ― a group generally viewed with sympathy by even the toughest voices on immigration.

"I've been to detention facilities where I've walked up to these individuals that are so-called minors, 17 or under," Morgan said. "I've looked at them and I've looked at their eyes, Tucker — and I've said that is a soon-to-be MS-13 gang member. It's unequivocal."

In the five months that followed, Morgan became Trump's most prolific media cheerleader on immigration. He racked up nearly 100 television and radio appearances following his debut on Tucker Carlson Tonight, running the gamut from CNN to conservative talk radio programs hosted by Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity.

No outlet embraced him more wholeheartedly than Fox News.

After saying on air that he has looked into the eyes of children and seen future gang members, Morgan, Planas notes, "will now head an agency that currently has thousands of migrant children in its care."

On Twitter, BuzzFeed's Hamed Aleaziz observes: "Per DHS official, Mark Morgan has been picked to take over CBP and Matt Albence is now back as acting director of ICE. White House allies are now in charge of the 3 immigration components: USCIS, ICE, CBP."

Donald Trump launched his political career engaging in nativism with his birther campaign against President Barack Obama. He launched his 2016 presidential campaign engaging in nativism by descending on an escalator to declare Mexican immigrants rapists. He has spent the first years of his term engaging in all manner of nativist malice against Muslim and Indian and Latinx people. He launched his reelection bid by declaring a purge of undocumented immigrant families and is consigning migrant children to concentration camps.

And now he has solidified control over every immigration arm in the federal government by appointing sycophantic minions who will execute his sadistic vision without question or compunction.

[CN: Image of death at link] People are already dying. Trump doesn't even have to establish death camps; he just has to instruct his ghouls at USCIS, ICE, and CBP to shut down access points to refugees, forcing them across deserts where they die of exposure or rivers where they drown. He just has to allow toxic conditions at "detainment facilities" to kill people by neglect or disease or just the goddamned heat.

It is urgent to impeach him. This must happen now.

Open Wide...

Shut Up!

"Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Huddled Masses Yearning to Breathe Free..."

[Content Note: Nativism; child abuse.]

One of the (many) things that is absolutely enraging me about the public discourse around the obscene mistreatment of migrant children is that it utterly lacks this notion: We can afford to welcome every last one of those children and their families into this country.

We have the resources. We have the space. We have need for workers who are looking for stable work, if we can muster the political will for infrastructure and green jobs. The only reason to pretend we don't have these things is because it's politically expedient to exploit fear.

Please, if you talk about this subject today and I hope you will, make sure to include in that conversation the fact that the crisis is a lack of empathy and welcome. We do not lack the ability to integrate migrants and refugees. We lack the compassion.

We have to change this conversation. We cannot keep talking about it using the dishonest frames of the nativist wrecks who are driving policy. There is no need to detain children and/or their parents indefinitely. NONE. That is a fact.

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In other news this morning...

A young Honduran boy was separated from his father at the border.

We represented him and he told us what it feels to be locked up in a cage.

This must stop.https://t.co/vF66DHS5HA

— RAICES (@RAICESTEXAS) June 25, 2019

[CN: Video may autoplay at link] Graham Kates at CBS News: John Kelly Joins Board of Company Operating Largest Shelter for Unaccompanied Migrant Children. "Friday, Caliburn International confirmed to CBS News that Kelly had joined its board of directors. Caliburn is the parent company of Comprehensive Health Services, which operates Homestead and three other shelters for unaccompanied migrant children in Texas. Prior to joining the Trump administration in January 2017, Kelly had been on the board of advisors of DC Capital Partners, an investment firm that now owns Caliburn." These fucking ghouls.

[CN: Video may autoplay at link] Clara Long and Nicole Austin-Hillery at CNN: We Went to a Border Detention Center for Children; What We Saw Was Awful.

Based on our interviews, officials at the border seem to be making no effort to release children to caregivers — many have parents in the U.S. — rather than holding them for weeks in overcrowded cells at the border, incommunicado from their desperate loved ones. By holding and then transferring them down the line to ORR facilities, the government is turning children into pawns for immigration enforcement.

A second-grader we interviewed entered the room silently but burst into tears when we asked who she traveled with to the U.S. "My aunt," she said, with a keening cry. A bracelet on her wrist had the words "U.S. parent" and a phone number written in permanent marker. We called the number on the spot and found out that no one had informed her desperate parents where she was being held.

Alex Samuels at the Texas Tribune: People Want to Donate Diapers and Toys to Children at Border Patrol Facilities in Texas; They're Being Turned Away. "A slew of other sympathetic people, advocacy groups, and lawmakers on both sides of the political aisle have expressed a desire to lend a hand to the kids housed in the facilities. But after purchasing items like toys, soap, toothbrushes, diapers, and medicine — especially as news reports circulate of facilities having drinking water that tastes like bleach and sick children without enough clothing — they've been met with a common message: No donations are being accepted."

The Washington Post Editors: America Should Be Horrified by This. "Children wearing clothes filthy with snot and tears and food. Children locked in cells nearly all day long, sleeping on cold concrete floors. No windows. Always hungry. No toothbrushes, toothpaste, or soap. Children alone, even the littlest among them. These are the conditions in which hundreds of immigrant children are being held at Customs and Border Protection facilities along the U.S. border. Most pets get better treatment."

The New York Times Editors: There's No Excuse for Mistreating Children at the Border; Here's What to Do About It. "By his divisive, incoherent, and barbaric policies, Mr. Trump has only made agreeing on an approach to immigration in the United States far more difficult. He has done so by systematically creating a false narrative of immigrants as job-stealing criminals, by insisting that there is a crisis of illegal immigration where there is none, and, most maliciously, by dreaming up schemes to torment these people in the perverse notion that this would deter others from trying to reach the United States. The most appalling of these has been the separation of children from their parents and detaining them in conditions no child anywhere should suffer, and certainly not children in the care of the American government."

There are a number of action items at the link. RESIST.

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Trump Reverses Course on Immigrant Purge — to Blame Democrats for His Malice

[Content Note: Nativism; child abuse.]

After announcing a massive sweep of undocumented immigrants last Monday, scheduled to begin yesterday, Donald Trump reversed course at the last minute, tweeting: "At the request of Democrats, I have delayed the Illegal Immigration Removal Process (Deportation) for two weeks to see if the Democrats and Republicans can get together and work out a solution to the Asylum and Loophole problems at the Southern Border. If not, Deportations start!"

[CN: Video may autoplay] According to a CNN source, Speaker Nancy Pelosi called Trump late Saturday asking him to call off the raids. They reportedly "spoke at 7:20 p.m. ET Friday night for about 12 minutes, according to the source." Now Trump is using Democrats' plaintive calls for decency to blame them for his malice.

The president is an extortionist and a terrorist. https://t.co/E79rUM5QWg

— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) June 22, 2019

Trump is demanding that House Democrats put their stamp on the cruel immigration policies Trump wants, or he'll be forced to torture undocumented immigrant families. This is sick beyond measure.

Meanwhile, following Friday's report about the Trump Regime's horrific abuse of immigrant children in their concentration camps, there have been additional first-hand accounts published about the horrors taking place in these facilities:

Isaac Chotiner at the New Yorker: Inside a Texas Building Where the Government Is Holding Immigrant Children. "We drove around afterward, and we discovered that there was a giant warehouse that they had put on the site. And it appears that that one warehouse has allegedly increased their capacity by an additional five hundred kids. When we talked to Border Patrol agents later that week, they confirmed that is the alleged expansion, and when we talked to children, one of the children described as many as three hundred children being in that room, in that warehouse, basically, at one point when he first arrived. There were no windows."

William Brangham at PBS: A Firsthand Report of 'Inhumane Conditions' at a Migrant Children's Detention Facility.

Basically, what we saw are dirty children who are malnourished, who are being severely neglected. They are being kept in inhumane conditions. They are essentially being warehoused, as many as 300 children in a cell, with almost no adult supervision.

We have children caring for other young children. For example, we saw a little boy in diapers — or he had no diapers on. He should have had a diaper on. He was 2 years old. And when I was asked why he didn't have diapers on, I was told he didn't need it.

He immediately urinated. And he was in the care of another child. Children cannot take care of children, and yet that's how they are trying to run this facility. The children are hardly being fed anything nutritious, and they are being medically neglected.

We're seeing a flu outbreak, and we're also seeing a lice infestation. It is — we have children sleeping on the floor. It's the worst conditions I have ever witnessed in several years of doing these inspections.

[CN: Video may autoplay at link] Serena Marshall, Lana Zak, and Jennifer Metz at ABC News: Doctor Compares Conditions for Unaccompanied Children at Immigrant Holding Centers to 'Torture Facilities'. "'The conditions within which they are held could be compared to torture facilities,' the physician, Dolly Lucio Sevier, wrote in a medical declaration obtained exclusively by ABC News. ...She described conditions for [children] at the McAllen facility as including 'extreme cold temperatures, lights on 24 hours a day, no adequate access to medical care, basic sanitation, water, or adequate food.' All the children who were seen showed evidence of trauma, Lucio Sevier reported, and the teens spoke of having no access to hand washing during their entire time in custody. She compared it to being 'tantamount to intentionally causing the spread of disease.'"

Asked about these reports over the weekend, Mike Pence pretended like he cares (as if the Trump Regime doesn't have control over these conditions) and made sure to introduce the regime's new talking point blaming the Democrats: "If Democrats in Congress will simply step up...we can solve the crisis."

Reminder that when Mike Pence was governor of Indiana, he went to court in order to try to legally deny access to social services to Syrian refugees resettling in the state. Do not believe for one second that he's not fully supportive of Trump's vile nativist malice. https://t.co/biuevmi6HX

— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) June 23, 2019

He is a despicable scoundrel. The Trump Regime could, at any time, reverse their vile nativist policy of separating and detaining families. They could certainly reverse their policies on climate change, which is driving much of the northward migration of refugees, and they could certainly reverse their decision to eliminate foreign aid for Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, whence come many of the refugees fleeing violence and/or joblessness and/or hunger.

This is hardly the fault of Democrats. Mike Pence knows that. So does Donald Trump.

It wasn't the Democrats who established concentration camps in order to torture thousands of migrant and refugee children.

On that note, I will end by recommending this blunt and necessary editorial at the Salt Lake Tribune by their editorial board: Yes, We Do Have Concentration Camps.

MAKE YOUR CALLS. Resist.

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Migrant Children Being Kept in Appalling Conditions

[Content Note: Nativism; child abuse.]

The Trump Regime is abusing children. And with every new report we get about the conditions in which migrant children are being detained, it becomes more urgent that we raise relentless hell about the state-sanctioned torture of children being done under the auspices of "protecting" us.

The AP reports:

A legal team that recently interviewed over 60 children at a Border Patrol station in Texas says a traumatic and dangerous situation is unfolding for some 250 infants, children and teens locked up for up to 27 days without adequate food, water and sanitation.

A team of attorneys who recently visited the facility near El Paso told The Associated Press that three girls, ages 10 to 15, said they had been taking turns keeping watch over a sick 2-year-old boy because there was no one else to look after him.

When the lawyers saw the 2-year-old boy, he wasn't wearing a diaper and had wet his pants, and his shirt was smeared in mucus. They said at least 15 children at the facility had the flu, and some were kept in medical quarantine. Children told lawyers that they were fed uncooked frozen food or rice and had gone weeks without bathing or a clean change of clothes at the facility in Clint, in the desert scrubland some 25 miles southeast of El Paso.

"In my 22 years of doing visits with children in detention I have never heard of this level of inhumanity," said Holly Cooper, an attorney who represents detained youth. "Seeing our country at this crucible moment where we have forsaken children and failed to see them as human is hopefully a wake up for this country to move toward change."

The Flores settlement stipulates that children can be held by Border Patrol for no more than 72 hours before being transferred to the custody of Health and Human Services, but "many children interviewed by the lawyers said they were kept inside the facility near El Paso beyond 72 hours."

The Trump Regime justifies this violation of the law by saying that Border Patrol is overwhelmed, but they could simply stop separating and detaining families. Instead: "The Trump administration has been scrambling to find new space to hold immigrants as it faces withering criticism from Democrats that it's violating the human rights of migrant children by keeping so many of them detained."

Just yesterday, Dallas/Fort Worth reporter Jason Whitely reported: "Feds are opening a new camp in Texas for unaccompanied minors who are crossing the U.S./Mexico border. This one, just outside Carrizo Springs, Texas, will house more than 1,000 captured children."

Captured children.

The government cannot provide proper care to the children already in its custody, and they want to add 1,000 more. Because the neglect, the cruelty, the malice is the agenda. Harm is the objective.

MAKE YOUR CALLS. Resist.

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Today in Trump's Vile Nativist Agenda

[Content Note: Nativism; child abuse.]

The Trump Regime is explicitly abusing children, and justifying it by claiming it's a strategy to try to deter migrants and refugees.

A former ICE official spoke to Hamed Aleaziz at Buzzfeed about an upcoming purge, saying: "They have begun utilizing every apparatus available to them to target, separate, and terrify small children in order to claim a 'win' on immigration."

The operation will "target and remove undocumented immigrant families who have received final orders of removal in an attempt to deter future families from making the trek across the border."

Mark Morgan, who was picked to lead Immigration and Customs Enforcement just weeks ago, did not reveal when an operation would occur or the scope of such an action. He maintained that the agency was still targeting its previous priorities, like removing those with criminal convictions, and that there was not a significant shift in operations.

In talking with reporters, however, Morgan focused on a group of 2,000 family units who recently arrived, were part of an expedited court process, ordered removed from the country, and given a notice earlier this year to work with ICE to leave voluntarily. Morgan said no undocumented immigrant was exempt from enforcement, including families.

"It's going to send a strong message to those individuals contemplating coming here illegally not to do so," he said. "Not only will we be enforcing the law, maintaining the integrity of the system, but we're also going to send a powerful message to individuals in the northern triangle countries: Do not come, do not risk it."

This, despite the fact that we know that people are traveling to the U.S. because they are in danger of violence and/or starvation, and at the same time that a U.N. report has found that there are currently 71 million refugees who "have been displaced worldwide by war, persecution, and other violence."

71 million.

That is "an increase of more than 2 million from a year earlier — and an overall total that would amount to the world's 20th most populous country."

It is a risk to stay. It is a risk to leave. There can be no effective "deterrence" when there are no good choices.

This is indefensible child abuse. Nothing more.

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Trump Announces Massive Sweep of Undocumented Immigrants

[Content Note: Nativism; nativist language; stochastic terrorism.]

Yesterday, the State Department announced it was ending foreign aid for Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador unless and until the countries take "concrete actions to reduce the number of [undocumented] migrants coming to the U.S. border."

Many of the people who arrive at the U.S. border from Guatemala, Hondorus, and El Salvador are asylum-seekers fleeing violence, starvation, and/or extreme poverty. Eliminating foreign aid will only increase the numbers of people who are obliged to leave in search of safety.

I cannot see this move as anything but an attempt by Donald Trump to worsen the refugee crisis so he can further justify his malice, as ever using migrants and refugees as the canaries in his authoritarian coalmine.

Also yesterday, Trump announced, on Twitter, a massive sweep of undocumented immigrants across the United States: "Next week ICE will begin the process of removing the millions of illegal aliens who have illicitly found their way into the United States. They will be removed as fast as they come in. Mexico, using their strong immigration laws, is doing a very good job of stopping people......."

At the Washington Post, Nick Miroff and Maria Sacchetti report that the round-up is happening at the urging of Trump and his "senior immigration advisor" Stephen Miller:

Trump and his senior immigration adviser, Stephen Miller, have been prodding Homeland Security officials to arrest and remove thousands of family members whose deportation orders were expedited by the Justice Department this year as part of a plan known as the "rocket docket."

In April, acting ICE director Ronald Vitiello and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen were ousted after they hesitated to go forward with the plan, expressing concerns about its preparation, effectiveness, and the risk of public outrage from images of migrant children being taken into custody or separated from their families.

Vitiello was replaced at ICE by former FBI and Border Patrol official Mark Morgan, who had impressed the president with statements on cable television in favor of harsh immigration enforcement measures.

In his first two weeks on the job at ICE, Morgan has said publicly that he plans to beef up interior enforcement and go after families with deportation orders, insisting that the rulings must be carried out to uphold the integrity of the country's legal system.

"Our next challenge is going to be interior enforcement," Morgan told reporters June 4 in Washington. "We will be going after individuals who have gone through due process and who have received final orders of deportation."

"That will include families," he said, adding that ICE agents will treat the parents and children they arrest "with compassion and humanity."

There is nothing compassionate nor humane about separating children from their parents, which causes lasting trauma to children. And there is a pervasive culture of dehumanization of immigrants among U.S. enforcers, which makes any promise of compassion or humanity a straight-up lie.

The sweep has the same inherent problem as Trump's plan to evict undocumented immigrants from public housing: There are countless families across the U.S. with mixed-immigration status. That is, the parents may be undocumented immigrants, while some or all of their children are U.S. citizens by virtue of having been born here:

The family arrest plan has been considered even more sensitive than a typical operation because children are involved, and Homeland Security officials retain significant concerns that families will be inadvertently separated by the operation, especially because parents in some households have deportation orders but their children — some of whom are U.S. citizens — might not. Should adults be arrested without their children because they are at school, day care, summer camp or a friend's house, it is possible parents could be deported while their children are left behind.

There are, of course, also no safeguards in place to ensure the rights of minor citizens are preserved.

(It's surely no coincidence that Trump announced this sickening removal plan the same week as the anniversary of DACA.)

ICE was reportedly stunned by Trump's public announcement, but they shouldn't be surprised. The announcement is firmly centered within Trump' ongoing campaign of stochastic terrorism. He was giving his rabidly nativist base a heads-up to invite their participation in the removal of people from the country.

Hate crimes against Latinx people has increased significantly since Trump was elected, with a 176% spike immediately following the election. His public announcement is a dogwhistle to his seething base that it's time to ramp up the harassment and hate crimes again, and he knows his most violent cultists don't care to make distinctions about someone's legal status before targeted them — which is why more Latinx people have reported being harassed and threatened just for speaking Spanish in public in the last several years, too.

The scope of the sweep — "millions" of people — is unfathomable. It's also impossible. ICE cannot remove "millions" of people from the population at once. But the exact number is hardly the point. Removing scores of people from their homes, all at once, all over the country, is sick. It will traumatize families, it will hurt communities, and it puts the U.S. in the company of nations whose purges of marginalized populations we once fought proudly to defeat.

Today, please share this information from RAICES, so that it is as widely available as possible:

Read more about your legal rights you have if ICE raid your work place in this helpful fact sheet @LegalAidAtWork put together: https://t.co/JZuRWsh7Oc

— RAICES (@RAICESTEXAS) June 18, 2019

And, if you are in the U.S., contact your representative and senators to let them know you strongly object to a nationwide purge of undocumented immigrants and urge them to support impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump immediately.

Other action items you can take:

1. Talk about this devilry to anyone who will listen. There's a lot of ignorance and indifference that those of us who care must urgently challenge.

2. Contact any local organizations who are providing social services and/or legal aid to undocumented immigrants. Ask them what they need.

3. Write a letter to the editor of your local paper and/or the closest big-city paper. A lot of folks still read those!

4. Support the work of individuals and/or advocacy organizations and/or news outlets who maintain focus on the crisis at the border in non-exploitative ways. That might mean financial support, or amplifying their work on social media, or volunteering your time (in the case of activist/legal orgs).

RESIST.

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Today in Trump's Vile Nativist Agenda

[Content Note: Nativism; white supremacy; child abuse; queer hatred.]

1. This is a must-read Twitter thread by Elizabeth C. McLaughlin, on the abysmal conditions inside CBP facilities. Both Shaker Karma Kaze and I linked this thread in comments yesterday, in two different posts, and I also tweeted it, but, in case you missed it, I wanted to include it on the main page, too. Please take the time to read and share it. It is imperative that we understand and raise awareness about what is happening at the southern border.

Toddlers in the "Dog Pound" who had been eating solid food are given only infant formula. Moms are trying to start breast feeding again so their children don't starve.

These moms are dehydrated, sick, & have walked miles through desert with no water. CBP gives them nothing.

7/

— Elizabeth C. McLaughlin (@ECMcLaughlin) June 13, 2019

I don't know how anyone reads witness accounts like this and doesn't understand these are things that happened at places like Dachau. We must raise our voices against this horror.

2. Also on Twitter, this important thread, with action items, care of RAICES, which is the largest immigration legal services non-profit in Texas, focusing on underserved immigrant children, families, and refugees. Additionally: If you are looking to direct financial support to the fight against Trump's human rights abuses against migrants, immigrants, and refugees, you can donate to RAICES here.

3. Eastsidekate rightly wonders why it is that the U.S. anticipates needing "two whole concentration camps for transgender asylum seekers."

4. Angelina Chapin at the Huffington Post: [CN: Video may autoplay at link] Teen Mom and Prematurely Born Baby Neglected at Border Patrol Facility for 7 Days.

A prematurely born infant and her 17-year-old mother spent seven days being almost entirely neglected in Border Patrol custody, according to lawyers who visited an immigrant processing station in McAllen, Texas, on Tuesday and Wednesday.

The baby, barely a month old, was wrapped in a dirty towel, wore a soiled onesie and looked listless, said one of the lawyers, Hope Frye. The mother was in a wheelchair due to complications from her emergency C-section and had barely slept ― the pain made it too uncomfortable for her to lie down, the immigration and human rights attorney said.

"I looked at that baby and said 'Who does this to babies?'" Frye said. "They were being sadistically ignored."

...Medical experts have previously told HuffPost that Border Patrol centers are not a safe place for kids, in part because no thorough medical assessments are provided by pediatricians and diseases can spread quickly in the environment. The McAllen processing center, the largest in the country, recently had to quarantine three dozen migrants with the flu, after a 16-year-old in the same facility died of the infectious disease.

"The baby infant and mother should never have been held in detention for five minutes," Frye said. "Any small sickness would kill her, period."

Which one imagines is entirely the point.

5. Patrick J. McDonnell at the L.A. Times: At Mexico's Southern Border, Migrants Feel the Pinch of a Crackdown Spurred by U.S. "Long lines of migrants, mostly Central Americans [fleeing poverty and violence in their homelands], line up daily outside the Tapachula offices of the refugee agencies of Mexico and the United Nations. ...Almost all those seeking help have a common destination — the United States — but they find themselves caught in an expanding Mexican immigration crackdown prompted by U.S. pressure and marooned in this sweltering city in southern Mexico. They cannot proceed north without risking arrest, so they remain in Tapachula seeking documentation allowing legal travel to the U.S.-Mexico border, more than 1,000 miles away."

The not-very-sub subtext of what Trump was always saying regarding "immigration negotiations" with Mexico was, "Let them die on your soil, not ours." He knows damn well that the international media pays less attention to Mexico than the U.S.

The official contempt for the lives of migrants and refugees is enraging and heartbreaking. I am just relentlessly angry and grief-stricken watching this unfold.

MAKE YOUR CALLS. Additional actions items here.

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Desperate and Ill Johana Medina León Asked to Be Deported; ICE Killed Her

[Content Note: Nativism; death.]

On June 3, I wrote about the death of Johana Medina León, a 25-year-old asylum seeker from El Salvador who died at a medical center after falling gravely ill following her stay in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody in New Mexico.

As I previously noted, she was paroled from custody the day she went to the hospital, which I suspected was because ICE was trying to skirt mandated reporting about deaths of people in their custody.

That they paroled her the day of her death is even more unfathomably cruel because, as Sam Levin reports at the Guardian, Medina León begged to be released from custody, even asking to be deported despite seeking asylum from harm in El Salvador, because she feared she was dying.

The family of Johana Medina León, a 25-year-old asylum seeker from El Salvador who died this month, filed a civil rights claim against the U.S. government this week, alleging that officials ignored her numerous requests for treatment as her health "rapidly deteriorated."

Medina León, who worked as a nurse in El Salvador, recognized that she needed IV fluids, but was denied. When she asked for water, sugar, and salt so she could make her own IV, ICE also refused, the claim said. The treatment in ICE custody was so bad that Medina León, who was fleeing violence in her home country, requested to be deported so she could get medical attention, lawyers said. That request was also denied.

"She came to the U.S. because she thought it was a great country and that she would be safe there," her 22-year-old sister, Gabriela León, said in an email to the Guardian, sent by her lawyer. "She did everything right but was treated as a criminal …She shouldn't have died. She went to the U.S. seeking protection and now she is coming home to us dead."

Christopher Dolan, an attorney who filed the claim, added: "She was desperate, because the government would not provide her with assistance of any kind for her medical needs."

Medina León died of pneumonia.

It must have been actual torture for Medina León to sit in detention, where she was housed with men, getting increasingly ill and knowing she needed urgent treatment, and being denied any medical care — then denied the opportunity to leave when she was willing to risk physical harm at home just to try to access the medical care she desperately needed.

I am so sad and so goddamn angry. My condolences to her family and friends.

Medina León is one of at least four adults who have died "shortly after being released from ICE custody" during the Trump administration, in addition to twenty-four adults who have died while still in ICE custody. And: "The tally does not include migrants, including five children, who have died in the custody of other federal agencies." Which doesn't include the still-unidentified 2-year-old boy who died in U.S. custody and was, like Medina León, released from custody immediately before he died.

We have no idea the actual number of people who have died in Trump's concentration camps. We only know as much as we do about Medina León and the circumstances of her death because she has a family who loves her and wants justice.

I can tell you this: Whatever the official number is, it is not the actual number. That number is higher. And any number higher than zero is intolerable.

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The Trump Regime's Concentration Camps

[Content Note: Nativism; abuse; human rights violations.]

Let me start by establishing that my use of the term "concentration camps" is not hyperbole.

Quoting dictionary definitions on the internet has become a punchline, but, in this case, it's informative. The Encyclopaedia Britannica defines concentration camps thus:

Concentration camp, internment centre for political prisoners and members of national or minority groups who are confined for reasons of state security, exploitation, or punishment, usually by executive decree or military order. Persons are placed in such camps often on the basis of identification with a particular ethnic or political group rather than as individuals and without benefit either of indictment or fair trial. Concentration camps are to be distinguished from prisons interning persons lawfully convicted of civil crimes and from prisoner-of-war camps in which captured military personnel are held under the laws of war. They are also to be distinguished from refugee camps or detention and relocation centres for the temporary accommodation of large numbers of displaced persons.

That is a very basic definition, but it is also an accurate one.

A crucial part of the context here is Donald Trump's own words. Much like his Islamophobic rhetoric was cited by a judge halting his "travel ban," his relentless nativist talking points — which include the routine demonization of migrants and refugees, and the casting of arrivals as a national security threat, to justify the militarization of the border — situate the detention of migrants and refugees within a framework of war.

It is Trump's position, and the nativist agenda of his regime, that renders U.S. detention facilities distinct from "refugee camps or detention and relocation centres for the temporary accommodation of large numbers of displaced persons."

Also rendering them distinct is the fact that detainees cannot come and go as they please. They are not residents of refugee camps, but detainees in U.S. custody. With fewer accommodations and increasingly unlivable circumstances every day. Conditions at some of the euphemistically deemed "detention centers" have been described as squalid, and at least six children and two women that we know of have died in or soon after being held in U.S. custody.

At the L.A. Times, Jonathan M. Katz makes an urgent plea: "Call Immigrant Detention Centers What They Really Are: Concentration Camps."

If we call them what they are — a growing system of American concentration camps — we will be more likely to give them the attention they deserve. We need to know their names: Port Isabel, Dilley, Adelanto, Hutto, and on and on. With constant, unrelenting attention, it is possible we might alleviate the plight of the people inside, and stop the crisis from getting worse. Maybe people won't be able to disappear so easily into the iceboxes. Maybe it will be harder for authorities to lie about children's deaths.

Maybe Trump's concentration camps will be the first thing we think of when we see him scowling on TV.

All of the the above is preface to the following two stories demanding our attention:

1. W.J. Hennigan at Time: Trump Administration to Hold Migrant Children at Base That Served as WWII Japanese Internment Camp.

Fort Sill, an 150-year-old installation once used as an internment camp for Japanese-Americans during World War II, has been selected to detain 1,400 children until they can be given to an adult relative, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

...The children would be held inside facilities that are separate from the general on-base population. HHS personnel, not American troops, will oversee them.

...Fort Sill, located southwest of Oklahoma City, was one of several internment camps where Japanese-Americans were held during World War II. Between 1942 and 1946, the U.S. government forcibly removed an estimated 120,000 men, women, and children from their homes and incarcerated them across the country. Fort Sill was later used to hold German prisoners of war.

As Brittanie Shey noted on Twitter: "Ft Sill is also where Geronimo is buried because he and 300+ other Apaches were brought there as POWs."

The Trump Regime wants us to believe that the children held at this former and current concentration camp will be there only "temporarily" until they can be reunited with an adult family member, and certainly hopes we've forgotten that they created no way to link separated children with their parents and will be detaining children in violation of the Flores settlement.

These things, too, are what makes the Fort Sill facility distinct from anything other than a concentration camp.

2. Robert Moore at Texas Monthly: In El Paso, Border Patrol Is Detaining Migrants in 'a Human Dog Pound'.

After New Mexico State University professor Neal Rosendorf read a government report exposing dangerous overcrowding of detained migrants at the Paso del Norte International Bridge in El Paso, he headed to the port of entry to see if he could find anyone protesting conditions there.

When he reached the west side of the bridge, he encountered an unmarked open gate, which he walked through in the hopes of asking Border Patrol agents whether they had seen any protesters.

Continuing underneath and then past the bridge about 100 yards or so, he was stunned by what he saw — migrants who said they'd been held outdoors for weeks as temperatures rose to nearly 100 degrees.

Rosendorf described it as "a human dog pound" — one hundred to 150 men behind a chain-link fence, huddled beneath makeshift shelters made from mylar blankets and whatever other scraps they could find to shield themselves from the heat of the sun.

"I was able to speak with detainees and take photos of them with their permission," Rosendorf said in an email. "They told me they've been incarcerated outside for a month, that they haven't washed or been able to change the clothes they were detained in the entire time, and that they're being poorly fed and treated in general."

U.S. Customs and Border Protection took eight days to respond to Texas Monthly's questions about Rosendorf's discovery. In a statement this week, a CBP official acknowledged that the agency was detaining migrants outdoors for extended periods.

I don't know what I could possibly say to convince someone who refuses to be convinced that the Trump Regime is interning undocumented immigrants and asylum-seekers in concentration camps if that description alone cannot.

In yesterday's Check-In thread, Shaker era4allNOW asked for advice on what actions to take in response to this depravity beyond contacting our representatives and senators. I made the following recommendations:

1. Talk about it to anyone who will listen. There's a lot of ignorance and indifference that those of us who care must urgently challenge.

2. Contact any local organizations who are doing refugee resettlement work, providing social services to migrants and/or refugees, or offering legal aid. Ask them what they need.

3. Write a letter to the editor of your local paper and/or the closest big-city paper. A lot of folks still read those!

4. Support the work of individuals and/or advocacy organizations and/or news outlets who maintain focus on the crisis at the border in non-exploitative ways. That might mean financial support, or amplifying their work on social media, or volunteering your time (in the case of activist/legal orgs).

Please feel welcome and encouraged to leave additional avenues of support and/or resistance in comments.

Let us all do something today. Make some noise. Do not be silent.

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Trump Administration to Open Mass Detention Facility for Migrant Children in Texas

[Content Note: Nativism; child abuse; carcerality.]

Days after the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) decided to stop funding education, recreation, and legal services for migrant children in their custody, the ORR has confirmed plans to open a new mass detention facility to hold migrant children in Texas and is "considering detaining hundreds more youths on three military bases around the country, adding up to 3,000 new beds."

Garance Burke at the AP reports:

The new emergency facility in Carrizo Springs, Texas, will hold as many as 1,600 teens in a complex that once housed oil field workers on government-leased land near the border, said Mark Weber, a spokesman for Office of Refugee Resettlement.

The agency is also weighing using Army and Air Force bases in Georgia, Montana, and Oklahoma to house an additional 1,400 kids in the coming weeks, amid the influx of children traveling to the U.S. alone. Most of the children crossed the border without their parents, escaping violence and corruption in Central America, and are held in government custody while authorities determine if they can be released to relatives or family friends.

All the new facilities will be considered temporary emergency shelters, so they won't be subject to state child welfare licensing requirements, Weber said.

..."It is our legal requirement to take care of these children so that they are not in Border Patrol facilities," Weber said. "They will have the services that ORR always provides, which is food, shelter, and water."

So, to be very clear: The ORR will be detaining children on a mass scale; will not be subject to child welfare licensing guidelines; will provide the detained children with no education, recreational services, or legal aid; and will give them nothing but food, shelter, and water.

Healthcare is not even mentioned. The ORR is required by federal law to provide healthcare to people in their custody, but the Flores settlement stipulates that the government is required to provide education and recreational activities to migrant children in its custody, among other things, and release them from custody within 20 days, and the Trump administration has decided to ignore that law.

Further, there is an emergent pattern of simply releasing compromised people from custody before they die, to skirt reporting mandates.

So we cannot trust that even emergency healthcare will be provided to the children who are being kept in mass detention facilities.

Understand: The Trump administration is breaking the law by declaring these "temporary emergency shelters" and saying they are not subject to either child welfare licensing guidelines or the provisions of the Flores settlement.

They are ignoring established federal law in order to detain children in prison camps en masse.

U.S. residents: Find your representative here. Find your senators here.

MAKE YOUR CALLS.

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A Second Migrant Woman Has Died in U.S. Custody

[Content Note: Nativism; death.]

There is a lot about Donald Trump and his filthy administration in the news this morning: Donald Trump insulting Meghan, Duchess of Sussex and London Mayor Sadiq Khan ahead of his state trip to the UK; Jared Kushner's soft spot for the murderous Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman; Secretary of State Mike Pompeo playing down expectations (which shouldn't even exist) of Trump's promised "deal of the century" for Middle East peace; Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao's breathtaking corruption; and Trump's threat to levy tariffs on Australia, just for a start.

All of it is terrible. And there are plenty of places where those items will be covered in detail. The story I want to talk about this morning is this one: One year after Roxsana Hernandez Rodriguez died in U.S. custody, a second transgender woman has died in U.S. custody at the southern border.

Robert Moore at the Washington Post reports:

A transgender woman from El Salvador died after falling ill at a private Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in New Mexico, officials said Sunday, drawing new scrutiny to a facility that has faced allegations of mistreatment of gay and transgender detainees.

Johana Medina Leon, 25, died on Saturday at Del Sol Medical Center in El Paso, ICE officials said. She had been taken to the hospital complaining of chest pains on Tuesday at the Otero County Processing Center. Earlier that day, she had requested an HIV test, which came back positive, officials said.

...In March, the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups sent a letter to ICE and the Department of Homeland Security complaining about the treatment of gay and transgender detainees at the Otero County Processing Center, the southern New Mexico facility where Leon was held.

"ICE's practices at Otero have created an unsafe environment for transgender women and gay men who are detained there," the letter said. One of the complaints in the letter was that requests for medical care often didn't get responses for days or weeks.

Leon was in custody for one month and one week, according to ICE officials, who say she was taken into custody "after presenting herself April 11 at the Paso del Norte Port of Entry in El Paso. On May 18, she passed an interview to determine whether she had a credible fear of persecution if returned to El Salvador. She was paroled from custody the day she went to the hospital, ICE officials said."

If that sounds familiar, perhaps it's because the still-unidentified 2-year-old boy who died in U.S. custody was also released from custody immediately before he died.

As I noted at the time: "It certainly appears that CBP quickly processed the family out of the system in order to avoid mandated reporting if the child died. Which he did. And now we must wonder how many other families are expedited out of detention because they have sick children for whom CBP doesn't want to be accountable, despite repeated reports of squalid conditions that may facilitate the spread of disease among detainees, a situation in which children are particularly vulnerable."

As are people with compromised immune systems, like people with HIV, which includes both Johana Medina Leon and Roxsana Hernandez Rodriguez.

Two women and six children have now died in U.S. custody that we know of. More will die if the Trump Regime is not disempowered. That is a certainty.

Impeach him now. Lives literally depend on it.

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We Resist: Day 860

One of the difficulties in resisting the Trump administration, the Republican Congressional majority, and Republican state legislatures (plus the occasional non-Republican who obliges us to resist their nonsense, too, like we don't have enough to worry about) is keeping on top of the sheer number of horrors, indignities, and normalization of the aggressively abnormal that they unleash every single day.

So here is a daily thread for all of us to share all the things that are going on, thus crowdsourcing a daily compendium of the onslaught of conservative erosion of our rights and our very democracy.

Stay engaged. Stay vigilant. Resist.

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Earlier today by me: McConnell Says He'd Fill a SCOTUS Vacancy Next Year and Mueller to Make Statement About Russian Interference and Primarily Speaking.

Of course most of the political news today is now focused on Special Counsel Bob Mueller's press statement earlier today — which, by the way, will be followed by a 2:00 pm ET news conference held by House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerry Nadler. And of course Donald Trump has responded, and it is bad:

Nothing changes from the Mueller Report. There was insufficient evidence and therefore, in our Country, a person is innocent. The case is closed! Thank you.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 29, 2019

Mueller had to have known Trump would declare his lowkey statement as an exoneration. So goddamned frustrating.

Anyway. Here are a few other things in the news today...

Audrey McNamara at the Daily Beast: Russia Likely Conducting Low-Yield Nuke Tests. "Russia has been secretly conducting low-yield nuclear tests in an effort to upgrade its nuclear arsenal, U.S. intelligence agencies believe. According to a Wall Street Journal report out Wednesday, a new U.S. intelligence assessment states this is the first time Moscow has failed in its compliance with the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and challenges the Putin government's claims to have adhered to the arms-control accord. 'The United States believes that Russia probably is not adhering to its nuclear testing moratorium in a manner consistent with the 'zero-yield' standard,' Lt. Gen. Robert Ashley, the director of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, plans to say in a Wednesday speech, according to his prepared remarks."

Hey, remember when Trump officially pulled out of the treaty and I wrote that he was doing it "so that Russia can resume expansion of its nuclear arsenal," because the U.S. president is a puppet of the Kremlin? Welp.

The Editorial Board at the Washington Post: Trump Chooses to Give a Gift to MBS and Set a Dangerous New Precedent.

Last month, a bipartisan congressional majority voted against further U.S. support for Saudi Arabia's disastrous intervention in Yemen, which has failed to achieve its aims while helping to produce the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. [Donald] Trump vetoed the resolution, and now he has doubled down on offering unqualified support to the Saudi regime and its allies. On Friday, the State Department notified Congress that it was invoking emergency authority to bypass opposition and complete 22 arms deals to Saudi Arabia and several other countries — including more of the munitions that have been killing civilians in Yemen.

The action was another violation by Mr. Trump of established norms, if not law. The administration's notification did not explain what "emergency" allowed it to use a loophole in the Arms Export Control Act, which gives Congress authority to review weapons sales. Though Secretary of State Mike Pompeo cited the need for Arab nations "to deter and defend themselves" against Iran, some of the arms being provided will not be available for years, which means they are not relevant to the civil war in Yemen or rising tensions elsewhere in the region.

...To permanently stop the sales, Congress would have had to pass legislation; Mr. Trump could have and should have allowed the review process to play out.

Instead, he has once again ignored congressional authority in order to favor Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who launched the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen and who, according to the CIA, probably ordered the murder of [Washington Post journalist Jamal] Khashoggi.

...If the new gift to the crown prince is allowed to stand, Mr. Trump will have established a new precedent: Presidents may sell arms anywhere in the world without congressional review simply by claiming an unspecified emergency.

Jamie Ross at the Daily Beast: Bolton Claims Iran Used Naval Mines to Sabotage Saudi Ships. "John Bolton has claimed the alleged sabotage of Saudi oil tankers this month came from naval mines placed 'almost certainly by Iran.' The claim, which was presented without evidence, was one of three allegations Donald Trump's national security adviser made against Iran when speaking to journalists in Abu Dhabi on Wednesday. ...He refused to offer any evidence in blaming Iran for the string of alleged attacks, only offering the sarcastic response: 'Who else would you think is doing it? Somebody from Nepal?'"

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And now for some GOOD news!

Elham Khatami at ThinkProgress: Illinois House Passes One of the Nation's Most Liberal Reproductive Health Bills. "Illinois set itself apart from the slew of states that recently passed anti-choice laws, instead opting to pass a progressive measure that would rescind state abortion restrictions. ...'[The bill] treats abortion care just like any other health care because, quite frankly, that's what it is,' bill sponsor, state Rep. Kelly Cassidy (D), said on the House floor prior to the final passage vote. 'Reproductive health is about the full spectrum of care… This is not just about abortion.' The measure now moves to the Democratic-controlled Senate, where it is expected to pass. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) has also indicated that he will sign the measure into law should it reach his desk." Yay!

Astead W. Herndon at the New York Times: Can Jaime Harrison End the Democrats' Drought in South Carolina? "Let's begin with the obvious: No Democrat has won a statewide race in South Carolina since 2006. ...Enter Jaime Harrison. Mr. Harrison, the first Black chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party and a former Washington lobbyist, declared his candidacy on Wednesday morning for the U.S. Senate seat held by Lindsey Graham, a Republican who has served three terms." Go get him!

Rebekah Entralgo at ThinkProgress: Colorado Governor Signs Bill Expanding Drivers' License Access to Undocumented Immigrants. "Colorado Governor Jared Polis (D) signed a bill on Tuesday that would give all state residents access to driver's licenses and identification cards, regardless of their immigration status. Under the Colorado Road and Community Safety Act, also known as SB 139, driver's licenses will be made available to all state residents at ten Department of Motor Vehicles offices by July 2020. ...Expanding licenses to nearly a dozen more DMV offices would allow thousands of undocumented immigrants who work and raise families in Colorado to live out of the shadows. 'No matter where you come from, you should be able to drive to work and take your kids to school without fear,' state Sen. Dominick Moreno (D) said Tuesday." Yes!

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[Content Note: White supremacy; gun threat; video including images of gun may autoplay at link] Antonia Noori Farzan at the Washington Post: A Black Couple Were Having a Picnic, Then a White Campground Manager Pulled Out Her Gun. "Franklin and Jessica Richardson had planned for a relaxing Memorial Day weekend. They would spend Sunday picnicking on the sandy shores of Oktibbeha County Lake, a popular fishing destination on the outskirts of Starkville, Miss., and maybe even rent a cabin for the night. Instead, within minutes of their arrival, the young Black couple were facing down a white campground manager who pulled out a gun and told them to leave. ...Franklin, a sergeant in the Army National Guard, had recently returned from a nine-month deployment in the Middle East, according to WCBI. 'It's kind of crazy,' he told the station. 'You go over there and don't have a gun pointed at you, and you come back home and the first thing that happens is you have a gun pointed at you.'" Rage seethe boil.

[CN: Racism] catherine lizette gonzalez at Colorlines: Black Census Project Reveals Electorate's Concerns — and Power. "Black Futures Lab just released the results of the largest survey of Black people in the United States since Reconstruction. The Black Census Project, developed in partnership with Color of Change, Demos, Socioanalítica Research, and 30 grassroots organizations, surveyed more than 30,000 Black people across the country to delve deep into their political ideas and realities. Among the sampled group, there are communities who are often missing or underrepresented in traditional surveys: people experiencing homelessness, LGBTQ+ people, Black immigrants, and Black conservatives and Republicans. Black women made up 60 percent of respondents due to the critical role they play in political and electoral organizing. ...Although the respondents reported a high level of electoral participation, more than half of them said that politicians do not care about them or their interests."

[CN: Racism; climate change] Yessenia Funes at Earther: The First Tribal Climate Emergency Declaration Is Here — and It Won't Be the Last.

In the Arctic, people don't have time to wait around for others to take action to stop climate change. This region of the world is warming faster than everywhere else, so they're feeling the impacts of the global fever our planet is running much quicker than the rest of us. That's, in part, why an indigenous community in Canada's Yukon territory recently declared a climate emergency. In fact, they are the first indigenous peoples to do so — and that's major.

Members of the Vuntut Gwichin First Nation live in the village of Old Crow, where Chief Dana Tizya-Tramm declared the emergency May 19. The UK became the first country to declare a climate emergency earlier this month, and local governments from Australia to the Czech Republic have followed suit. These declarations don't carry the same weight that an official emergency declaration after a disaster would — those actually come with governmental funding. These are largely symbolic, but they send a key message: The time to act is now.

"This is a declaration that should permeate the spheres of industry, political leadership, and the people," Tizya-Tramm told Earther.

The declaration, titled "Yeendoo Diinehdoo Ji'heezrit Nits'oo Ts'o' Nan He'aa," translates directly to "After Our Time, How Will the World Be," in the native Gwichin language. It recognizes the role traditional indigenous knowledge can play in the effort to curb climate change. It also notes the Gwichin people's concern that their voices are going largely unheard in the governmental response to this crisis. The declaration reads:

"Affirming the right of Indigenous peoples to self-determination, including Indigenous rights related to lands, waters, and resources, and the imperative that Indigenous peoples be central to every effort for mitigating and adapting to climate change at local to international scales."

To Tizya-Tramm's knowledge, no other tribal nations have declared such an emergency. But he's hoping more will now.

The time to act has been now for 20 years. Now now now.

What have you been reading that we need to resist today?

Open Wide...

Shut Up!