Tag: migrant detention
See Rep. Joaquin Castro’s Stunning Photos Of Detainee Conditions

See Rep. Joaquin Castro’s Stunning Photos Of Detainee Conditions

Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX), chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, posted Monday night to share some shocking photos and videos he took while inside Trump’s detention camps near the U.S.-Mexico border.

Castro, who led a delegation of members of Congress to visit the camps, was not supposed to have his phone — but he smuggled it in because he thought Americans needed to see what he saw.

“Our border patrol system is broken. And part of the reason it stays broken is because it’s kept secret,” Castro wrote Monday evening. “The American people must see what is being carried out in their name.”

At an El Paso border station on Monday, Castro witnessed women, including 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.”

“They asked us to take down their names and let everyone know they need help,” Castro added.

With the permission of the women, Castro took and shared this photo. It shows the women in tears and looking exhausted, sitting closely together in a cramped concrete cell.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) was part of the delegation, and Castro captured a photo of her comforting one of the women locked up. “This woman was telling me about her daughters who were taken from her — she doesn’t know where they’ve taken them,” Ocasio-Cortez said about the woman she is embracing.

The delegation reported witnessing deplorable conditions inside the detention camps. Ocasio-Cortez and Rep. Judy Chu (D-CA) reported that one woman said a border patrol agent told her to drink water out of a toilet bowl.

The cell only had one toilet-sink combination unit with the sink mounted directly on top of the toilet, Ocasio-Cortez explained on Twitter — and the sink part wasn’t working.

“This was in fact the type of toilet we saw in the cell,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote, referencing a photo of a similar toilet-sink unit taken by an immigration attorney. “Except there was just one, and the sink portion was not functioning.” She added that Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) tried to open the faucet, but “nothing came out.”

At a station near El Paso, Castro took a video of women sitting in a cramped cell and complaining that they have been denied both showers and life-saving medication.

At around the 55-second mark of the video, you can see a “potable water” sign similar to that in the photo Ocasio-Cortez referenced. That’s likely where the cell’s toilet-sink combination is — out in the open and separated only by a low partition from the rest of the cell.

“The conditions are far worse than we ever could have imagined,” Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-PA), who was part of the delegation, wrote on Twitter after visiting one of the detention camps. “This is a human rights crisis.”

Before the congressional delegation visited, doctors and lawyers visited Trump’s detention camps and came away horrified. One doctor compared the treatment of children in detention camps to “torture facilities,” describing children being denied showers, fed uncooked frozen meals, and forced to sleep on concrete floors with the lights on.

The new reports from these members of Congress make clear that adults as well as children are suffering mistreatment, and that family members are still being cruelly separated.

It’s clear why the Trump administration did not want members of Congress to be able to take photos in these facilities — and equally clear why Castro felt an obligation to show Americans what’s really going on there.

Published with permission of The American Independent. 

Visiting Migrant Facilities, Ocasio-Cortez And Pressley Face Down Trumpists

Visiting Migrant Facilities, Ocasio-Cortez And Pressley Face Down Trumpists

A group of Democratic members of Congress visited U.S. facilities detaining migrants on Monday, confirming reports that the detention centers exhibit abusive conditions and widespread mistreatment of the adults and children forced to live in them.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) detailed much of the abominable state of the facilities on Twitter, including the devastating discovery that agents were telling migrants to drink out of toilets. Children were quarantined when sick, families continued to be separated, and the migrants were overcrowded in cramped cells, the lawmakers reported.

Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), too, visited the camps and delivered a passionate speech along with the others denouncing the conditions outside of a Clint, Texas, location. Pro-Trump protesters showed up to scream at the Democratic women. When Pressley spoke, she was undeterred by their taunts.

“Keep yelling!” she said. “This is very appropriate! Vile rhetoric for vile actions!”

She continued: “This is about the preservation of our humanity. And this is about seeing every person there as a member of your own family. I am tired of the health and the safety, the humanity, and the full freedom of black and brown children being negotiated and compromised and moderated.”

Kelly Hired By Operator Of Detention Facilities For Migrant Children

Kelly Hired By Operator Of Detention Facilities For Migrant Children

Two leading members of Congress are demanding to know more about how John Kelly, who was first to push the Trump administration’s family separation policy as secretary of Homeland Security and who later saw it implemented as Trump’s chief of staff, is now making a six-figure salary from the company operating the nation’s largest jail for migrant children.

On June 6, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) sent a scathing letter to the head of Caliburn International demanding to know more about the firm’s arrangement with Kelly.

Kelly “was at the center of the inhumane and poorly planned immigration policies that put children in cages while separating thousands of families and that benefitted your company,” the congresswomen wrote to Caliburn.

“It is outrageous that he now appears to be cashing in on those same policies, as a board member for the company that benefitted from his actions as a government official,” they said.

Jayapal and Warren called out Caliburn, writing that the policies implemented and championed by Kelly are “allowing your company to rake in millions of dollars in taxpayer funds.”

After Kelly joined the board of directors of Caliburn International in April 2018, one of its subsidiaries received a $341 million no-bid contract to detain unaccompanied minor children. The company currently operates four shelters, with plans to open two more.

Under Kelly’s leadership, thousands of migrant children were ripped away from their families, even some who fled unthinkable circumstances to seek asylum in the United States. Kelly shrugged off the abject cruelty and risk of harm to children, saying offhandedly that “the children will be taken care of — put into foster care or whatever.”

A federal court has since ordered the Trump administration to reunite every kidnapped child with his or her family. Even though family separation is no longer the official policy, the Trump administration is still detaining thousands of children, meaning Caliburn can continue to collect taxpayer funds to jail them.

Warren and Jayapal introduced legislation in the summer of 2018 that would prevent high-level administration officials from immediately cashing in on policies they implemented, which would stop “actions like General Kelly’s rapid, cynical, and unethical shift from the government payroll to the contractor’s payroll.”

But since Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has pledged to make the Senate a legislative graveyard, the bill has little chance of becoming law any time soon. In the meantime, Warren and Jayapal are demanding answers from Caliburn about their arrangement with Kelly.

The two want to know when Caliburn began their negotiations with Kelly, if they had any discussion about the ethics of hiring Kelly, and how much money the company makes from each shelter that jails unaccompanied minors.

“It is disheartening that General Kelly, with his decades of public service, used his position to implement such cruel policies and then left the government to profit from them,” Warren and Jayapal concluded.

Published with permission of The American Independent.

IMAGE: John Kelly (R) listens to President Donald Trump during a meeting in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington January 31, 2017. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque