The Timely and Powerful Rise of New Democratic Party Progressives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar in the Fight For A Sane and Humane Immigration Reform Policy

https://truthout.org/…/ocasio-cortez-pressley-tlaib-and-om…/

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Ocasio-Cortez, Pressley, Tlaib and Omar Call for Cuts to ICE Funding
by Jake Johnson
February 1, 2019
Common Dreams

PHOTO: From left, Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib attend a House Oversight and Reform Committee business meeting in the Rayburn Building on Tuesday, January 29, 2019. Tom Williams / CQ Roll Call


As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) signaled on Thursday that Democrats are willing to offer President Donald Trump funding for border “technology” and “Normandy fencing” — but nothing for his wall — Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and three of her progressive colleagues sent a letter urging Democratic negotiators to take a harder line by slashing funding for the agencies at the center of Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda.
Condemning the Trump administration for putting “profits before people and rhetoric before the lives of immigrant children,” Ocasio-Cortez joined Reps. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) in demanding that Democrats cut funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

“These agencies have promulgated an agenda driven by hate — not strategy,” reads the letter, which was first published on Thursday by The Daily Beast. “With the world watching and the lives of families at stake, we should not compromise our values at the negotiating table.”

The letter from House progressives, which is expected to be read on the House floor next week, went public as Trump told reporters on Thursday that he “won’t waste [his] time reading” any funding agreement that doesn’t include wall money — an indication that he may be willing to shut down the government again when the current stopgap spending measure expires Feb. 15.

The president also suggested that he is still considering a national emergency declaration to build the wall without congressional funding.

But even as he repeatedly demanded wall money from Congress, Trump also bizarrely stated, “We have money, just so you understand. We have money, we’re building the wall right now. A lot of it. People don’t know that, and nobody reports it, but that’s ok.”

Trump is hopelessly incoherent: “We’re building the wall right now. It’s going up fairly rapidly,” he says (falsely), while at the same time urging Congress to give him money to build the wall. pic.twitter.com/venmu1WJoT

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 31, 2019

Bipartisan conference committee negotiations on a spending plan that would keep the government open beyond Feb. 15 kicked off this week, but no concrete proposals have yet emerged from the talks.

According to The Daily Beast, “Democratic lawmakers on the conference committee indicated that plenty of options were on the table in talks with Republican counterparts. But decreasing funding for DHS was not one of them. The Democrats’ opening bid offers a $589 million increase in the agency’s budget from the year before.”

With Trump standing firm in his demand for wall money and Democrats continuing to offer fencing and technology that rights groups have denounced as ineffective, immoral, and unconstitutional, progressives celebrated Tlaib, Ocasio-Cortez, Pressley, and Omar for taking a “principled position” beyond merely rejecting the president’s outlandish proposal.

“This is exactly the type of leadership we need in Congress,” said Gregory Cendana of United We Dream.

United We Dream

✔
@UNITEDWEDREAM

No more money for Trump’s mass deportation force!@AyannaPressley, @AOC, @Ilhan & @RashidaTlaib are calling on Congress to cut funding for ICE, CBP, and Trump’s border wall. ✊🏾

☎️ CALL Congress and demand they #DefundHate: 210-702-3059https://www.thedailybeast.com/progressive-democrats-to-shutdown-negotiators-not-another-dollar-in-dhs-funding …
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11:52 AM - Jan 31, 2019

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Progressive Democrats to Shutdown Negotiators: ‘Not Another Dollar’ In DHS Funding

In a letter sent to their colleagues, the freshmen lawmakers severely move the Overton Window of the border wall debate.

thedailybeast.com

RAICES ✔
@RAICESTEXAS

Thank you @AOC, @IlhanMN, @AyannaPressley and @RashidaTlaib for pushing the Democratic party on the right direction on this issue. DHS does not need more money and Trump can't continue to get away with his fear mongering tactics. 

#DecriminalizeMigration https://www.thedailybeast.com/progressive-democrats-to-shut… …

191
10:31 AM - Jan 31, 2019

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Progressive Democrats to Shutdown Negotiators: ‘Not Another Dollar’ In DHS Funding

In a letter sent to their colleagues, the freshmen lawmakers severely move the Overton Window of the border wall debate.

thedailybeast.com

As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) signaled on Thursday that Democrats are willing to offer President Donald Trump funding for border “technology” and “Normandy fencing” — but nothing for his wall — Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and three of her progressive colleagues sent a letter urging Democratic negotiators to take a harder line by slashing funding for the agencies at the center of Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda.

Condemning the Trump administration for putting “profits before people and rhetoric before the lives of immigrant children,” Ocasio-Cortez joined Reps. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) in demanding that Democrats cut funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

“These agencies have promulgated an agenda driven by hate — not strategy,” reads the letter, which was first published on Thursday by The Daily Beast. “With the world watching and the lives of families at stake, we should not compromise our values at the negotiating table.”

The letter from House progressives, which is expected to be read on the House floor next week, went public as Trump told reporters on Thursday that he “won’t waste [his] time reading” any funding agreement that doesn’t include wall money — an indication that he may be willing to shut down the government again when the current stopgap spending measure expires Feb. 15.

The president also suggested that he is still considering a national emergency declaration to build the wall without congressional funding.

But even as he repeatedly demanded wall money from Congress, Trump also bizarrely stated, “We have money, just so you understand. We have money, we’re building the wall right now. A lot of it. People don’t know that, and nobody reports it, but that’s ok.”

Trump is hopelessly incoherent: “We’re building the wall right now. It’s going up fairly rapidly,” he says (falsely), while at the same time urging Congress to give him money to build the wall. pic.twitter.com/venmu1WJoT

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 31, 2019

Bipartisan conference committee negotiations on a spending plan that would keep the government open beyond Feb. 15 kicked off this week, but no concrete proposals have yet emerged from the talks.

According to The Daily Beast, “Democratic lawmakers on the conference committee indicated that plenty of options were on the table in talks with Republican counterparts. But decreasing funding for DHS was not one of them. The Democrats’ opening bid offers a $589 million increase in the agency’s budget from the year before.”

With Trump standing firm in his demand for wall money and Democrats continuing to offer fencing and technology that rights groups have denounced as ineffective, immoral, and unconstitutional, progressives celebrated Tlaib, Ocasio-Cortez, Pressley, and Omar for taking a “principled position” beyond merely rejecting the president’s outlandish proposal.

“This is exactly the type of leadership we need in Congress,” said Gregory Cendana of United We Dream.

Read the House progressives’ full letter:

Dear Colleagues,

We write to you today seeking your solidarity and support to enter in to the DHS conference committee process with clear eyes. The next 3 weeks we are tasked with operationalizing our values and addressing the fall out caused by a reckless administration that has put profits before people and rhetoric before the lives of immigrant children.

The Department of Homeland Security is tasked with critical functions. However, under the auspice of the Trump administration, a number of agencies housed at DHS have abused their authority and the fidelity of public resources. There is a documented pattern of agencies including Immigration and Customs Enforcement as well as Customs and Border Patrol overspending and abusing the transfer authority to quietly move funds around. Funds are being reallocated internally not to make our nation safer, but to build desert camps to inhumanely house infants and to prosecute immigrants who are part of the fabric of our community. These agencies have promulgated an agenda driven by hate — not strategy. We call on our colleagues at the negotiating table to adhere to the following guidelines critical to protecting families and children and restoring Americans’ faith in government:

Cut, do not increase funding. A Republican controlled Congress has already sharply increased DHS spending without clear justification. We have seen rampant spending on detention facilities for young children — reports indicate DHS is paying for-profit prison companies upwards of $700 a day to house children in inhumane facilities. The deal reached by Conference Committee should not allocate any additional funding to this department or to the ICE and CBP agencies. The upcoming FY2020 budget process will be a critical opportunity to take up conversations about reforms to the agency. In the meantime, not another dollar.

No transfer authority. The Trump administration continues to use DHS funding as a slush fund (through transfers or reprogramming) to increase detention programs and invest in ineffective policies. The conference committee should prohibit transfers and reprogramming authorities.

Stronger accountability. Strong report language is critical to ensuring safeguards to rein in DHS. However, report language is not enough. The final budget package must be accompanied by stringent oversight mechanisms, and critical obligations should be in statutory text not just report language. DHS has a failed track record of missing congressional deadlines, including when recently required to report on deaths in custody. For those reasons, the DHS should be taken up as a separate appropriations bill and accompanied by strong statutory language that saves lives and increases accountability.

As a nation, we need comprehensive immigration reform driven by justice and data. Let us be clear that that process will not play out during the Conference Committee’s narrow DHS deliberations. The sole focus of this Conference Committee is to put forward a short term spending package for 7 months. But a budget is a statement of our values. With the world watching and the lives of families at stake, we should not compromise our values at the negotiating table.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Jake Johnson is a staff writer for Common Dreams. Follow him on Twitter: @johnsonjakep.

The Criminally Coercive Separation of migrant children from their parents as deadly white supremacist and neofascist government policy toward immigrant families under Donald Trump

https://www.nytimes.com/…/family-separation-trump-administr…

Family Separation May Have Hit Thousands More Migrant Children Than Reported

by Miriam Jordan
January 17, 2019
New York Times

 

PHOTO: Brenda Garcia reunited with her 7-year-old son, K.G.G., at Dulles Airport outside Washington in June, 34 days after they were separated by officials after crossing the border into the United States illegally. Credit: Ryan Christopher Jones for The New York Times

 

HOUSTON — The Trump administration most likely separated thousands more children from their parents at the Southern border than was previously believed, according to a report by government inspectors released on Thursday.

The federal government has reported that nearly 3,000 children were forcibly separated from their parents under last year’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy, under which nearly all adults entering the country illegally were prosecuted, and any children accompanying them were put into shelters or foster care.

But even before the administration officially unveiled the zero-tolerance policy in the spring of 2018, staff of the United States Department of Health and Human Services, the agency that oversees the care of children in federal custody, had noted a “sharp increase” in the number of children separated from a parent or guardian, according to the report from the agency’s Office of Inspector General.

As of December, the department had identified 2,737 children who were separated from their parents under the policy and required to be reunified by a federal court order issued in June 2018.

But that number does not represent the full scope of family separations. Thousands of children may have been separated during an influx that began in 2017, before the accounting required by the court, the report said.

Thus, the total number of children separated from a parent or guardian by immigration authorities is “unknown,” because of the lack of a coordinated formal tracking system between the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the arm of Health and Human Services that takes in the children, and the Department of Homeland Security, which separated them from their parents.

“This report confirms what we suspected: This cruel family separation practice was way bigger than the administration let on,” said Lee Gelernt, who challenged the policy in court on behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union. “We will be back in court and ask the judge to order the government to explain these numbers,” he said.

The family separations were a key part of the Trump administration’s effort to deter migrant families from trying to enter the country at the Southwest border, where they have been arriving in large numbers, most of them fleeing violence and deep poverty in Central America.

While the policy was framed as a decision to prosecute those who entered the United States illegally, it resulted in thousands of migrant parents spending months in agonized uncertainty, unable to communicate with their children and in many cases not knowing even where the children were.

Infants and toddlers were among the children who were put into foster homes or migrant children shelters, often hundreds or thousands of miles away from where their parents were detained. Under separate policies, the administration also made it difficult for relatives other than the children’s parents to take the children into their own homes.

After a review of internal government tallies, The New York Times found last year that more than 700 migrant children had been separated from their families in the months before the government officially announced the zero-tolerance policy.

On June 26, 2018, a federal judge in San Diego, in response to the A.C.L.U. lawsuit, directed the federal government to halt the separations at the border and to reunite children with their parents. President Trump rescinded the policy that same month.

However, the federal inspectors found that separations have continued to occur: As of November, the report found, Health and Human Services had received at least 118 children who had been separated from their families since the court order.

Officials at the Department of Homeland Security, which oversaw the family separations at the border, have said they have separated families only when necessary, such as when a parent is facing a serious criminal prosecution, or when authorities have reason to believe that the adult accompanying the child is not an appropriate guardian.

“The report vindicates what D.H.S. has long been saying,” said Katie Waldman, a spokeswoman for the department. “For more than a decade it was, and continues to be, standard for apprehended minors to be separated when the adult is not the parent or legal guardian, the child’s safety is at risk, or serious criminal activity by the adult. We are required under the law that Congress passed to send all unaccompanied alien children to H.H.S.”

Ann Maxwell, the Health and Human Services Department’s assistant inspector general for evaluation and inspections, said the separations appeared to have been occurring for a full year before the court issued its order.

“Thousands of children were separated from parents and guardians, referred to H.H.S. and released from H.H.S. care before the court order,” Ms. Maxwell said in a conference call with reporters.

“The total number is unknown,” she said. “It is certainly more than 2,737, but how many more, precisely, is unknown.” Moreover, that number may never be known: Department officials, she said, had told her office that there were “no efforts underway to identify that. It would take away resources from children already in care.”

In an email after the call, Ms. Maxwell’s spokesman confirmed that inspectors believed the number of separated children may be “thousands” more than the 2,737 reported to the court.

The inspectors provided no precise data to support that estimate, though Ms. Maxwell said that Health and Human Services had noted a “spike” in the frequency of children being separated from their families, from 0.3 percent of all apprehended families in 2016 to 3.8 percent in 2017.

Family separations have occurred for years, but they had previously been “fairly rare,” Ms. Maxwell said, occurring only in cases where there were concerns about child welfare. That changed in 2017, she said.

Ms. Maxwell said that most of the families on the list of separated families had been reunited, pursuant to the court order. But she said the figures continued to evolve, for several reasons. The absence of an integrated data system to track separated families through the two federal agencies that oversee them was one problem, she said.

Also complicating the issue, she said, was the complex problem of determining which children should be considered officially “separated” from their families. That meant that the list of families entitled to reunification was still being revised as late as December 2018, more than five months after the court order took effect.

The Department of Health and Human Services, in its official response, said it had accounted publicly for all children separated from relatives at the border and then delivered to the agency for care.

“H.H.S. faced challenges in identifying separated children,” the agency said. “The effort undertaken by H.H.S. was complex, fast-moving and resource-intensive.”

The inspector general’s report, the department said, “provides a window into the herculean work of the H.H.S. career staff to rapidly identify children in O.R.R. care who had been separated from their parents and reunify them.” O.R.R. refers to the resettlement office.

The department emphasized that the inspector general found “no evidence whatsoever” that it had lost track of children in its care. Though there were delays in linking children to parents, partly as a result of the Department of Homeland Security’s tracking system. When immigration agents separated families at the border, records that could have been used to connect parents and children were automatically deleted because the computer system had not been modified to account for separated families.

In its response on Thursday, the Department of Health and Human Services said that the inspector general’s report “corroborates what H.H.S. has said all along: H.H.S. can determine the location and status of any child in O.R.R. care at any time by accessing the case management records for the child, or the O.R.R. online portal.”

Glenn Thrush contributed reporting from Washington.

A version of this article appears in print on Jan. 17, 2019, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Many Families Split at Border Went Untallied. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper