Before Hurricane, Trump Admin Diverted FEMA Money To ICE Baby Jails

This narrative is deceptive. These stories aren't really addressing the issue of how to care for unaccompanied minors. No one here is answering the question of how to pay for the care of refugee children, many of whom are coming without their parents.

This is what you call a true equivalency. Political liberals are playing fast and loose with the facts to gain politic advantage by generating outrage... just like the conservatives do. I would love to see the rational liberals have more of a voice.

Does anyone disagree with my contention that the US government has to provide care for these children? It is probably true that Trump is increasing this burden... but in any circumstance there is a real cost here no matter who is president. These propaganda articles aren't addressing these issues at all.

I'd like to see a realistic point of view, as hard is it seems.

If an unaccompanied minor seeks refuge into the United States without documentation, they are turned away at the border, same as adults. An American first agenda. This is what "we" elected.

So ******* do it already.

No apologies, no sympathy.

It's what Obama did with ACA, and people either got with the program or bitched about it for eight years.

Trump's a sissy because he can't pull the trigger like Obama did. ******* Trumpsters, can't do a damned thing right to save themselves, let alone any body else.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency is intended to deal with emergency situations, not to clean up after the messes that Plump's anti-Hispanic bigotry creates. To take money away from FEMA in hurricane season is even more irresponsible. I'd like to see some evidence that this is about unaccompanied minors, rather than just having it thrown in our collective face by a phony liberal. ICE has been taking children away from parents, and putting them out to private companies to deal with, including the cronies of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who were getting $700/day to care for these children. This administration is corrupt from sun-up to sun-down.

Cousin of DeVos' husband getting money for children separated from their parents.

Christian Non-Profit Faces Scrutiny Over Government Foster Care Contract for Separated Children

This is not about unaccompanied minors.

By Josh Israel
Published Mar 22, 2018

After backing $1.5 trillion tax cuts, these GOP lawmakers are suddenly concerned about the debt.

These legislators are blasting their party's omnibus spending bill for increasing the federal budget deficit.

Despite years of tough talk about balanced budgets, the Republican majority in the House and Senate rammed through a massive tax cut for the rich in December that their own analysis showed would increase the deficit by more than $1 trillion. Now, many of the lawmakers who voted for that are suddenly concerned about the debt again and say they will oppose their own party’s omnibus spending bill because it will increase the debt by a similar amount.


https://thinkprogress.org/after-backing-tax-republicans-concerned-about-omnibus-debt-79bec05f6c68/

Also, let's not forget that Trump's immigration family crisis was self imposed.
This self imposed crisis was deliberate. This was Trump's own doing.

Trump Wants to Cut FEMA Budget Before the Next Major Hurricane.

By Meghan Bartels
Published August 30, 2017

the response to the next Harvey could face even stricter financial constraints if President Donald Trump gets his budgetary wishes for the 2018 fiscal year, which begins October 1. The president's budget blueprint calls for FEMA's budget for state and local grants to be cut by $667 million, saying that these grants are unauthorized or ineffective.

The program it explicitly calls out as lacking congressional authorization is the Pre-Disaster Mitigation Grant Program, and a second proposed change would require all preparedness grants to be matched in part by non-federal funds. All of FEMA's pre-disaster grants are meant to reduce federal spending after disasters, and according to the agency's website, there's evidence that $1 in mitigation spending saves $4 in later damages.

Trump's budget proposal also calls for the elimination of the National Flood Insurance Program run by FEMA, which provides affordable flood insurance. According to the proposal, the program costs the government $190 million; it is also $25 billion in debt, a number expected to rise rapidly after Harvey. According to The Washington Post, even with the program in place, about 80 percent of people who own homes in the area affected by the storm don't have flood insurance.

During the same press conference where Long spoke, a reporter asked about the funding cuts. The acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security evaded the question, saying that the response team's focus right now was strictly on helping Harvey survivors recover.

Even last year, experts were raising concerns that Houston was unprepared for the ravages of a serious hurricane.

You know what might have helped the city prepare? Mitigation funding.

https://www.newsweek.com/harvey-trump-fema-budget-disaster-preparedness-hurricane-657237

What Trump's 'zero-tolerance' immigration policy means for children separated from families at border.

By Kaitlyn Schallhorn
Published June 19, 2018

Massive public outcry has built over children being separated from their parents as they attempt to cross into the U.S. illegally.

After Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a “zero-tolerance” policy in dealing with migrants who cross into the U.S. illegally, nearly 2,000 children were separated from their families during a six-week period in April and May.

Read on for a look at what’s happening to children at the border – and what the law actually says.

What does the law say?

There is no law that dictates children must be separated from their parents when caught crossing into the country illegally, and there was a time when ICE policy didn’t call for detaining all families.

There are, however, laws against entering the U.S. illegally, and a decree regarding how long children can be held in immigration detention. A 2008 anti-trafficking statute dictates that certain minors must be taken out of immigration detention within 72 hours.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018/06/19/what-trumps-zero-tolerance-immigration-policy-means-for-children-separated-from-families-at-border.html

Quote max:

Sorry, but 13% doesn't constitute "most".

You are guilty of pushing a Trump talking point on the message board. This kind of idiocy makes me ashamed to be a liberal.

The irony is immense, they imprison children, so the folks who stole all this land they now think is theirs from Native Americans, plus the genocide against Native Americans is, really, explain it to me, how is it different from the Nazis stealing the property of Jews and murdering them?

I really don't know why you would make such a claim or why you make that assertion. I'm a liberal. I don't see myself as playing fast and loose with the facts. I don't see my arguments as being irrational. I don't have any problem if you have disagreements. I don't see what the problem is. We are individuals with different points of view. We can all approach a discussion from different angles.

More money for baby jails means more lucrative contracts for the private sector to provide food, meds (ha ha ha), accommodations, laundry, everything that should be required.....hey, it’s money into the private sector, really really big money from the tax payers.

As the U.S. Shuts Its Doors, Migrants at the Mexican Border Continue to Hope

By Masha GessenJuly 23, 2018

Asylum policies and practices are in chaos, but immigrants at ports of entry in cities like Tijuana still believe that they can find safety in the U.S.

Becoming an émigré requires faith and trust—faith that life will get better, and trust in others who offer help: shelter, guidance, and assistance with byzantine procedures. Faith can turn out to be unjustified, and trust is often misplaced, for there is, it seems, a scam to fit every need. Becoming an émigré also requires an extremely high tolerance for uncertainty. An émigré can only see one step ahead, if that, but musters the courage to take that step anyway. So it is that, even as the Trump Administration goes about the business of closing America’s borders, both symbolically and in practice, people who are forced to flee their homes persist in believing that they can find safety here.

In central Tijuana, one of the city’s many shelters is a hangar built of corrugated metal, a bare cube with a concrete floor on which about forty tents—blue, green, and orange ones, some designed for two people and some for three—are set up in dense rows that leave hardly any floor surface exposed. At the front of the hangar, a dozen and a half white plastic chairs are lined up in front of a television set, so that kids can watch cartoons. Most of the people in this particular shelter are Mexican families who plan to ask for asylum at the border. Elsewhere in the city, there are shelters whose occupants are primarily refugees from other Latin American countries. Tijuana is one of several dozen so-called ports of entry, where people crossing the U.S.-Mexico border can declare their intention to seek asylum. It’s hard to tell whether the number of asylum seekers is growing: statistics show that more people have come through ports of entry this year than last, but this may be because the immigration crackdown has caused fewer people to cross the border without a visa between ports of entry in order to apply once they are in the country. In any case, there is a sense of sincere and stubborn hope in this shelter and in this town: people keep coming, and will probably continue to try to keep coming, even as the United States grows ever more hostile to asylum seekers.

An asylum claim begins with the assertion that a person, or a family, is afraid to go home. There is little doubt that the asylum seekers here have indeed been driven by fear. Claudio, a farm worker, and Mariana, a housewife, travelled with their fourteen-year-old son, Jairo, by bus nearly two thousand miles from the state of Veracruz. (The asylum seekers I interviewed asked to be identified only by their first names, citing fears of retaliation by U.S. immigration officials.) They told me, through a translator, that their troubles began ten years ago, when a local gang kidnapped Mariana’s brother, a used-car dealer. The family paid a ransom, and after five days the brother was freed. He had been badly beaten; his ribs were broken. This year, threats against Mariana’s brother and other relatives intensified, and the family had seen more and more kidnappings in the community. Even being willing to pay a ransom to kidnappers no longer seemed to work, they told me: people just disappeared. Two months ago, Mariana’s brother took his son across the U.S. border, and asked for asylum. At the end of June, Claudio and Mariana decided to follow them. “We don’t want to continue living in a state of fear,” Mariana told me, as she started to cry. When I met them, on Wednesday, July 11th, they had been in town for two weeks and were living in one of the tents in the shelter. Their number in the asylum seekers’ line at the border crossing was three hundred and seventy. No. 363 had crossed on the day we spoke, so it seemed that Claudio and Mariana might have their chance to present themselves at the border later that week.

A woman named Carmen took the bus to Tijuana from the state of Michoacán. She came with her three children, who are fourteen, ten, and seven. Her husband died five years ago, of a heart attack, and since then she has tried to balance working on farms and watching over her children. This spring, she concluded that this was impossible—she feared for her children’s safety too much to be able to work instead of walking them to and from school. There are many kidnappings and drug-related murders in Michoacán, she told me. Her own cousin’s son killed two of his uncles in a drug-related fight. The journey to Tijuana took two days and two nights. Carmen’s number was three hundred and sixty-nine.

Odelia came from Guerrero—another bus trip that lasted two days and two nights. Her three sons are eleven, eight, and six. Her husband was already in the United States: he had crossed through the desert in Arizona and was now living there without legal documents. Her story was similar: violence in Guerrero had become pervasive, and the fear was unbearable, especially after two of her relatives, including her husband’s uncle, had been killed. Odelia’s sister, too, was in the United States, applying for asylum. Her sister was married to a U.S. citizen, but the procedure for securing legal residency through him had become so time-consuming and complicated that she decided simply to ask for asylum. Odelia’s number was four hundred and thirty.

Local immigration activists told me that wait times for asylum seekers looking to cross the border in Tijuana have ranged from a couple of weeks to a month and a half. Carmen said that living in Tijuana is expensive, so some people just give up, which speeds the line along. She had been so terrified of running out of money that she couldn’t sleep during her first two nights in a hotel, where she was paying four hundred pesos—about twenty dollars—a night for a room. But then she found out about the government-funded, privately run shelter, which also provides three meals a day.

When individuals or a family arrives at the border, an officer checks that they have the documents required to cross: a U.S. passport or passport card, or, for citizens of Mexico and other nations, a valid visa. Those who lack these documents are deemed “inadmissible.” Between October 1, 2017, and the end of June, more than thirty-seven thousand “inadmissible” families had come to the border—an increase of sixty-one per cent from last year. (Immigration and Customs Enforcement keeps track of “family units” without indicating how many people are in each family.) The largest number of “inadmissibles” come from Mexico, followed by Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. The asylum seekers here are, on the face of it, “inadmissible.”

The temporary inhabitants of the shelter in Tijuana know that those who plan to seek asylum are denied entry to the regular crossing and will be taken to a different area at the border for processing. They had only the vaguest idea of what would happen after that. Everyone had, of course, heard that some children had been separated from their parents, but people in the shelter seemed remarkably unafraid of this—perhaps because to be an émigré one has to possess an endless supply of optimism. Odelia said that if she were separated from her children, other family members would come to get the kids. Mariana and Claudio had heard that adult males could be detained for as long as six months, but they believed that Mariana and Jairo would be released after three or four days.

It is, in fact, impossible to predict what will happen to these asylum seekers in the immediate future. Policies and practices seem to be in chaos. Almost certainly, they will face some time in detention—at the border, in holding cells reserved for “inadmissibles,” or perhaps in a hotel in San Diego where families have sometimes been housed.

Under the Trump Administration, ice has instituted a practice of blanket detention for new asylum seekers and others with pending cases (including people who had been granted asylum but have faced an appeal of that decision from the government). Earlier this month, the American Civil Liberties Union won an important judgment against that practice. That does not, however, mean that all or even a majority of asylum seekers will be released from detention.

And then there is the asylum claim itself. What none of the asylum seekers whom I spoke with seemed to realize—what they had very few ways of finding out—was just how quickly the U.S. government is shutting down the asylum system. Émigrés usually base their decisions on the information that they receive from those who have come before them—relatives or friends who have charted the path. But, even in the couple of months since Mariana’s brother and Odelia’s sister asked for asylum in the United States, there have been major changes.

Last month, the Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, announced that nongovernment violence—the sort of violence that the inhabitants of the Tijuana shelter were fleeing—would no longer be considered a type of persecution that entitles people to asylum. The people I interviewed stressed that they could not seek protection from their local police, who were often acting in concert with kidnappers—a claim that has, in the past, helped bridge the legal gap between the experience of violence and the concept of persecution. But, with his decision, Sessions explicitly rejected the idea that gang violence toward multiple cohorts in a community amounted to persecution.

In other words, the people in the Tijuana shelter, as well as their relatives in the United States who had already applied for asylum, would probably see their claims rejected. The rate of positive decisions in asylum cases has been falling for years—from fifty-six per cent in 2012 to forty-three per cent in 2016, according to Justice Department statistics. The department has not yet compiled statistics for the first year of the Trump Administration, but, in an interview with NPR in May, Kirstjen Nielsen, the Secretary of Homeland Security, said that only twenty per cent of asylum claims were granted. Seven hundred thousand people are currently awaiting decisions on their asylum applications.

Still, an asylum seeker’s status itself provides a modicum of protection in the United States. Asylum seekers cannot apply for public assistance (this Clinton-era policy sets the United States apart from other countries that grant asylum) and, for the first six months, do not have the right to work, but they are at least in the country legally while their claims are pending. That process takes months. After presenting themselves at the border, asylum seekers are interviewed by an immigration officer—often over the phone, while the asylum seekers are in a detention facility. The officer makes a determination about whether an applicant’s fear of persecution is credible. Only after that does the actual legal process of seeking asylum commence. The final decision on a claim is made by an immigration-court judge, part of a process that is likely to take years.

The Trump Administration wants to change this, too. Following Sessions’s announcement last month, President Trump sent out a tweet appearing to propose—or advocate, or announce, or whatever it is that a Presidential tweet actually does—scrapping due process for asylum seekers altogether. “No Judges or Court Cases, bring them back from where they came,” he wrote. In fact, U.S. and international law requires all asylum seekers to be allowed into the country to plead their case. Asylum seekers and immigration lawyers, though, have reported that border agents had been turning people away summarily since just before Trump took office, in January of 2017. Last week, the Times reported that a new proposal would abolish ports of entry altogether—literally closing the border to asylum seekers. It’s a two-pronged attack: on the one hand, the Administration is prosecuting asylum seekers whom it considers to have crossed the border illegally (though, again, U.S. law and international law allow them to do so in approved places); on the other, the Administration is making it impossible to enter in ways it sees as legal.

Most of the changes to asylum policies and practices have been barely noticed in the barrage of immigration news—though they probably affect many more people than the separation of families at the border. In the Tijuana shelter, no one seemed to have heard about the changes. Mariana knew that her brother had a pending asylum application and was working as a farmhand in California. Odelia’s sister was applying for asylum. Carmen’s sister, who crossed the desert into the country illegally, was cleaning houses in Atlanta and hoping to secure legal status, even though she had been scammed by someone who promised to help with documents. All of this seemed infinitely better than living in constant fear at home. Everyone had hope of making it in the United States.

The cousin of Betsy DeVos' husband was getting $700/per night for 81 children. To do the math for everyone here, that's $56,700 per night. GB is right, there is a great deal of money involved here.

DeVos Linked To Christian Adoption Agency Implicated In ‘State Sponsored Kidnapping’
JULY 9, 2018 BY MICHAEL STONE

Many of the immigrant children ruthlessly separated from their family by the Trump administration are being shipped to a Christian adoption agency with ties to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

Rewire News reports on the condition of some of those children separated from their family:

Migrant children in Michigan who have been separated from their parents by the Trump administration are attending “a special school” run by Bethany Christian Services, an anti-choice organization with a record of coercive adoption practices that has yet to receive instructions about how to reunify these children with their detained parents.

The Other 98%, a left leaning Facebook page, explains more about the controversial Bethany Christian Services and their relationship with Trump’s Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, noting:

Bethany Christian Services, an adoption center with financial ties to [Education Secretary] Betsy DeVos, has taken 81 immigrant children who were forcibly separated from their parents at the border. Most have had no contact with their families. They’re charging $700 per child per night. This isn’t foster care, this is state-sponsored kidnapping.

Fact checking website Snopes confirms the well established links between the DeVos family and Bethany Christian Services:

The links between the extended DeVos family and Bethany are undeniable. Tax filings archived by ProPublica show that between 2001 and 2015, the Dick and Betsy DeVos Foundation (the philanthropic organization run by DeVos and her husband) gave $343,000 in grants to Bethany Christian Services.

Between 2012 and 2015, Bethany received $750,000 in grants from the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation, which is run by the Education Secretary’s father-in-law, the billionaire founder of Amway Richard DeVos, and his wife Helen.

Furthermore, Brian DeVos — a cousin of Betsy DeVos’s husband Dick — was the Senior Vice President for Child and Family Services at Bethany as recently as 2015, and Maria DeVos — who is married to Dick DeVos’s brother Doug — has served on the board of Bethany.

Democratic Underground explains the nefarious methods of the “radical Christian adoption trafficking mill” being run by Bethany Christian Services:
Here’s the way Bethany Skirts the Laws:

In six months they’ll file abandonment petitions on John Doe and Jane Doe.

That’s the plan. They have no intention of trying to find, much less uniting parents with their children. It’s a radical Christian adoption trafficking mill.

In fact, there is already in place a huge and thriving business in the trafficking of children via Christian adoption agencies like the DeVos connected Bethany.

In her 2013 book, The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption, Kathryn Joyce documents this alarming trend of conservative Christians adopting children removed from their natural parents via nefarious means to feed the business of Christian adoption and serve the agenda of Christian theocracy.

Indeed, a growing concern is that many of the immigrant children separated from their parents at the border will be “lost” in the system and eventually trafficked via Christian adoption agencies like Bethany.

In short, for many of the immigrant children separated from their parents at the border, their nightmare is only beginning. Many of these children will never see their parents again. Many are already being shipped out to a Christian adoption agency like Bethany where they will be be trafficked, and placed with conservative Christian parents eager to brainwash the innocent children in the grotesque attempt to create “warriors for Christ” – soldiers in the never-ending culture wars.

Bottom line: Many of the immigrant children separated from their parents at the border will be “lost” in the system, and eventually they will be trafficked by a Christian adoption agency like the DeVos connected Bethany Christian Services.

This Crisis pre-existed the Trump administration. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-immigration-children/waves-of-immigrant-minors-present-crisis-for-obama-congress-idUSKBN0E814T20140528

And as far as the numbers.

- There were 2,600 children separated from their parents in the first year of the Trump administration.
- There are currently 12,800 children in custody.
- The Border Patrol reports that there are some 24,000 unaccompanied minors entering the "Southwest border" each year.

I think that it is safe to say that most children in custody were not separated from their parents.

.


That 12,800 number which skyrocketed from 2,400 in May happened not because that many children crossed the border but because the jailed children are not being released to either their parents or a sponsor/relative or back to their own country. A large number of them are unaccompanied children but they still are supposed to be released as soon as possible. Instead they are being held in crowded detention centers to 100 percent compacity where as before the capacity was 30 percent at this time last year.


All that information was written in the NYT article yesterday. You are wrong in your assertions on this topic. Trump has changed the immigration system for the absolute worst.

The policy you are suggesting (or maybe you aren't)... that we take kids who are smuggled to the border and send them to relatives already in the US is illogical. Why not say that anyone already in the US (documented or undocumented) can just send for their kids, and avoid the dangerous trek to the border?

The problem is that we don't have a sane policy. The policy suggested by the Democrats is just as ludicrous as the policy as the one suggested by the Republicans. The difference is that the Democratic policy pretends to be compassionate by hiding the amount these kids suffer.

If the Democrats really care, have them suggest a real policy to address the problem that will stop unaccompanied minors from showing up at the border.

Liberals aren't suggesting that we stop the cruel economic/political reality that drives families to make this dangerous trip. They just want to sweep it under the rug at the very end of the process.

I don't know why you would say it would be illogical to for children who come to border without adults be sent to a relative or sent back to their own country is illogical. It beats them being held in detention for long months or a year or even longer in horrible conditions. These children are not hardened terrorist or criminals. You act as though I was suggesting something new.

We are not the world's problem solver, we can't cure the all the world's ills. We do well to run our own country decently. I am not saying we can't take steps with other countries to address the violence and poverty, but we can hardly solve the world's problems. In the meantime, we have to deal with this problem of children being held in detention center for months on end. This administration is even wanting to make legal for them to keep children locked up longer and ICE is wanting more money for more detention centers on top of all the money they have already diverted from other programs.

Under this system children come on their own, unannounced and with no documentation to the US border.

How is that not illogical?

Quote max:


No, it is not safe to say that, because it was blatently untrue. In a clear display of FAKE NEWS, the Trump Administration is counting children who were separated at the border from their family as "unaccompanied" and then claiming these children made the trek from Guatamala and Venezuela alone. And then you loudly perpetrate this atrocity and try to put yourself up as someone who can lecture others about truth.

The Customs and Border Patrol keeps track of whether children come unaccompanied or in family units. The official statistics for Financial Year 2018 show in August 2018, (encircled), a total of 37, 544 people arrived at the Southwest Border-4,396 were UAC, (unaccompanied children), and the rest of the 37,544 immigrants, both adults and children were in Family Units. That's only 12% of the immigrants who were Unaccompanied Children. Check the chart:


Source

You have taken this typical Trump lie and are posting it all over the place. Then declaring yourself a liberal who is so ashamed at the behavior of liberals who are puncturing Trump's lie. Shame on you.