Trump Thread

[Montmorency]

More grateful than if I never receive anything until I die of starvation. That doesn't mean however, that my gratefulness meter would be in the positive...



But aren't child camps just another form of detention? If I understand it correctly, the ruling says they can be held for up to 20 days and then they have to be released from detention. Putting them into a different detention is not a release, or is it? Does it count as some form of child care center? And in that case, wouldn't putting them there actually be required by the law since placing them in detention (with their parents) would be against the law?

God-cosplayer giveth, God-cosplayer taketh away.

You have to look at this bureaucratically.

First of all, the court standard is an ideal. After 20 days, it's not like the court sends officers to extract the kids and deliver them to Never Never Land. And the government isn't automatically punished AFAIK for any given violation. What it does, is theoretically create an opening for the conduct to be challenged in court by a victim with standing - which could itself take many weeks or months to resolve. This is how our system works more generally too, the relationship between the judicial process and subsequent action.

Then, consider that if, deliberately or otherwise, the government does not know who next-of-kin are, or is aggressive about putting and keeping those on trial - you can't just release children to roam around the country backroads alone. And it doesn't even appear that Mexico and other countries are cooperative or being cooperated with such that kids could be quickly released to their national custody. So they have to be placed with selected families somewhere in the US.

Add it up, and my prediction under Flores is:

1. For 20 days, full resort package for adult and child at government-sponsored Family Fun Kamp.
(It used to be, then, that after 20 days the families would be released with tracking. Not confirming it with sources, but IIRC fathers were heavily biased against here; mother-child was treated as a standard unit.)
2. Cases can't be resolved because there are thousands of them, so vacation is extended for extra fun times.
(So far, this will definitely happen because it already has and must given the operation of the government.)
3. Going out on a limb, I wonder if the admin, given it's publicly-stated desire to create a deterrent effect - by using children to punish adults, etc. - might not devise an argument to ""temporarily"" transfer long-detained children to all-child Survival Camps
4. They might also do this if they intensify their bizarre practice (so far only known in a few cases) of deporting the adult, but, uh, 'hanging on' to the child and keeping them in the US for distribution in the foster care system.
4.a. Many thousands of kids added to the foster system would probably overwhelm it, creating a massive backlog that again causes a situation where children will be held indefinitely. This also has the side effect of screwing a subclass of citizen children, who will have a much longer wait to be placed in a foster family after having been removed from their biological/original families for reasons of abuse, neglect, death or disability of caretaker... but those kids are almost always from poor and/or minority families, so call it a bonus.
5. Why stop at people detained at the border? Why not move on to raiding established unauthorized communities - over 10 million people in the US - and placing them in camps essentially forever until they can be 'processed'?

But everything after (2) is just my speculation on how they could make the process as nightmarish as possible. The bureaucratic default is just to keep all the captured immigrants in consolidated camps and leave 'em to rot in a slow-walked and underequipped apparatus.


EDIT: Of course if Flores is watered down or superseded, the only protections remaining may be the basic constitutional ones esp. according to 5th and 6th Amendments and habeas corpus - which the government will definitely violate with impunity.

Has been known for years, happens here as well tranquilisers and all that

USA has an ugly dillema, they could be aiding human traffickers if they don't seperate the children from those they have no idea are actually their parents, they could just as well be trafickers and organ harvisters

There is no dilemma in arbitrarily separating adults and children. This is totalitarian logic, a pure pretext, and it is exactly the backup used by Hitler and Stalin and every kind of mass murderer, that the target population is somehow contaminated and any hypothetical number of "bad elements" justifies its eradication.

Stop to think about what you are saying. If one believes there is a chance of trafficking, one should assign social workers and trained personnel to evaluate each case, erring on the side of non-separation. Your suggestion is even less wise than shutting down an airport and shipping the thousands of people therein to black sites on the possibility that one of them could be, or eventually could be, a terrorist bomber.

[Montmorency]

Further notes:


1. We've been referring to criminal process because under Trump's zero-tolerance policy, everyone crossing the border at unauthorized points is potentially being subjected to charges of misdemeanor illegal entry (usually treated as a civil infraction before), but somehow this should conflict with international and domestic law on asylum seekers given that by law it is not illegal for an asylum seeker to cross the border anywhere. I suppose it comes down again to bureaucratic tricks, and refusing to process asylum claims properly. As we know, in the last few months even asylum seekers at designated crossings were being separated from their children. It's indisputable that the objective of this government is mass internment of a whole class of people, even at great expense and great harm. At some point I wonder if "deterrence" will become a secondary motivation to the inertia of internment.

2. As far as Constitutional rights: If I'm reading this correctly, the SCOTUS decided a few months ago (indirectly, by avoiding the issue of constitutionality) that detained aliens of any category in effect do not have a constitutional or statutory right to due process or bail. This Supreme Court might seriously rule, if the government fed it the right cases or appeals, that aliens "apprehended at the border" can be detained literally forever. If the government can obtain this result (or Congress passes a bad law lol), the situation will get much worse than it is now. Think Guantanamo Bay x 1000. Then, think Abu Ghraib x 10. Pretty soon, we'll be blowing way past the Japanese-American camps...

3. The government (Jeff Sessions) has just raised the bar significantly for the asylum process, so many more people can be quickly rejected, or even facially dismissed on "credible fear" before they are even allowed to make their cases.

4. Here is a pretty good synopsis of what the standard standard detention/asylum process was up to the point of hearing the cases:

First, let’s talk about how border enforcement has operated since the Obama years. Since the so-called “migrant surge” in 2014, these were the possible things that might happen to you if you were apprehended at or near the border without papers.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

1. Unaccompanied minors from “non-contiguous countries” would be screened by the Department of Health and Human Services for possible trafficking, and placed in formal immigration court proceedings. At this point they would be placed into the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, who would usually find a relative or other sponsor inside the U.S. to release them to, pending their court date.

2. Unaccompanied minors from Mexico (and, uh, I guess theoretically Canada) would be screened by Border Patrol for trafficking and possible asylum claims. If CBP didn’t think they had a claim, they could be summarily deported.

3. Adults would be immediately deported without a hearing under a process known as “expedited removal.” If they had a child with them, the child would be deported with them. HOWEVER, they might manage to halt or pause this deportation process if they stated they were afraid to return to their country. At this point, one of several things might happen:

a. Border Patrol might pressure them to sign their own deportation order anyway. It’s pretty well-known that this occurred on a regular basis. People who survive to the later phrase of the asylum determination process have often had to be adamant about their claim.

b. Border Patrol might release them (with their child, if they had one) into the U.S. with a notice to appear in court on a particular day. Speaking from my own observation, this seems to have been done with some frequency for dads crossing alone with kids, because there weren’t facilities equipped to detain dads and kids together. There was some reluctance—partly logistical, perhaps partly moral—to split kids from their only parent, when there was reason to believe they were asylum-seekers. (That said, lots of dads were separated from their kids; it just depended what Border Patrol officer you got that day.)

c. Border Patrol might send the adult into immigration detention. If they were an adult without a child, they could be sent to any number of the many immigration prisons scattered along the border and interior of the U.S. If they had a child, however, things got more complicated.

i. Dads and other non-parent relatives would be split from kids, with the kids going to ORR custody and the adult going to an adult detention facility.

ii. Moms and kids would be sent together to so-called “family detention centers,” where they would be kept in custody preparatory to a “credible fear interview.”

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Now, group 3(c)(ii) on my list, asylum-seeking moms with kids, is the one that primarily interests us here. The practice of releasing people into the country from the border with notices to appear in court—what Trump has derisively called “catch and release”—has always been a totally discretionary policy on the part of the government, and all the Trump administration had to do was tell Border Patrol to stop doing it. But things were more complicated when it came to moms with kids.

Per a 1997 legal consent decree, the Flores Settlement, issued by a federal judge, the government is forbidden from keeping children in more restrictive custody than absolutely necessary. Specifically, if a child is placed in a detention center, the government must decide within 20 days whether they are going to deport the child or release them from detention. This provision was intended to prevent the government from keeping kids locked up for long stretches of time, which is known to be dangerous for their mental and emotional well-being. In 2016, the federal judge responsible for monitoring the government’s compliance with the decree, Judge Dolly Gee, issued a follow-up ruling stating that when children are detained alongside their parent, their parent must be released with them, if their cases are linked.

So, basically, if a mom passes her credible fear interview—which she does by demonstrating to an asylum officer that she has a “significant possibility” of being able to win an asylum case in a full hearing before a judge—she and her child are both legally required to be released into the country. (Usually, moms are released with GPS ankle monitors so that the government can track their movements and come after them if they try to flee.) If she fails her credible fear interview, she and her child would be deported immediately, unless the child has an independent claim that they opt to pursue separate from their mother’s.

I want to stress that this form of family detention, and the interview process that accompanies it, is profoundly cruel. It is a hostile and traumatizing process for the women and children who pass through it. Under a moral immigration regime, it would be done away with entirely. The only reason it has half-functioned up until now is because some lawyers devised a highly resource- and labor-intensive system for providing legal representation to detained mothers. Before that, women were rushed through the process and rapidly deported, despite having good asylum claims.

That said, the Trump administration has hated having to comply even with this minimally protective process, because the moms and kids who do pass their interviews are released at the end. And the overwhelming majority of them—in the 90 percent range, up until quite recently—do pass their interviews. (I can confirm, having seen hundreds of these cases, that this high success rate is not because asylum officers are lenient, but because the actual facts of the cases are pretty goddamn upsetting.) It’s the one form of “catch and release” that the administration—supposedly—can’t do away with by fiat, because the Flores Settlement blocks them from detaining children and their mothers for more than 20 days, and asylum-seekers can’t just be summarily deported until they’ve at least been granted an interview.

This left the Trump administration with two options to avoid releasing moms and kids:

1. Separate the moms from their kids and detain them separately; under this plan, kids would get released to sponsors or youth shelters, per Flores, but their moms could be kept in detention as long as the government wished, or

2. Get rid of the Flores Settlement so that the moms and kids could be detained together indefinitely.

With this executive order, Trump is apparently abandoning option 1 in favor of option 2, proposing to detain whole families together for the duration of their immigration proceedings. (Incidentally, the executive order authorizing this detention doesn’t distinguish at all between families who present themselves at ports of entry to ask for asylum and families who cross the border “illegally” to ask for asylum, so the administration is evidently done pretending this was a distinction that ever mattered to them.)

[Fragony]

God-cosplayer giveth, God-cosplayer taketh away.

You have to look at this bureaucratically.

First of all, the court standard is an ideal. After 20 days, it's not like the court sends officers to extract the kids and deliver them to Never Never Land. And the government isn't automatically punished AFAIK for any given violation. What it does, is theoretically create an opening for the conduct to be challenged in court by a victim with standing - which could itself take many weeks or months to resolve. This is how our system works more generally too, the relationship between the judicial process and subsequent action.

Then, consider that if, deliberately or otherwise, the government does not know who next-of-kin are, or is aggressive about putting and keeping those on trial - you can't just release children to roam around the country backroads alone. And it doesn't even appear that Mexico and other countries are cooperative or being cooperated with such that kids could be quickly released to their national custody. So they have to be placed with selected families somewhere in the US.

Add it up, and my prediction under Flores is:

1. For 20 days, full resort package for adult and child at government-sponsored Family Fun Kamp.
(It used to be, then, that after 20 days the families would be released with tracking. Not confirming it with sources, but IIRC fathers were heavily biased against here; mother-child was treated as a standard unit.)
2. Cases can't be resolved because there are thousands of them, so vacation is extended for extra fun times.
(So far, this will definitely happen because it already has and must given the operation of the government.)
3. Going out on a limb, I wonder if the admin, given it's publicly-stated desire to create a deterrent effect - by using children to punish adults, etc. - might not devise an argument to ""temporarily"" transfer long-detained children to all-child Survival Camps
4. They might also do this if they intensify their bizarre practice (so far only known in a few cases) of deporting the adult, but, uh, 'hanging on' to the child and keeping them in the US for distribution in the foster care system.
4.a. Many thousands of kids added to the foster system would probably overwhelm it, creating a massive backlog that again causes a situation where children will be held indefinitely. This also has the side effect of screwing a subclass of citizen children, who will have a much longer wait to be placed in a foster family after having been removed from their biological/original families for reasons of abuse, neglect, death or disability of caretaker... but those kids are almost always from poor and/or minority families, so call it a bonus.
5. Why stop at people detained at the border? Why not move on to raiding established unauthorized communities - over 10 million people in the US - and placing them in camps essentially forever until they can be 'processed'?

But everything after (2) is just my speculation on how they could make the process as nightmarish as possible. The bureaucratic default is just to keep all the captured immigrants in consolidated camps and leave 'em to rot in a slow-walked and underequipped apparatus.


EDIT: Of course if Flores is watered down or superseded, the only protections remaining may be the basic constitutional ones esp. according to 5th and 6th Amendments and habeas corpus - which the government will definitely violate with impunity.



There is no dilemma in arbitrarily separating adults and children. This is totalitarian logic, a pure pretext, and it is exactly the backup used by Hitler and Stalin and every kind of mass murderer, that the target population is somehow contaminated and any hypothetical number of "bad elements" justifies its eradication.

Stop to think about what you are saying. If one believes there is a chance of trafficking, one should assign social workers and trained personnel to evaluate each case, erring on the side of non-separation. Your suggestion is even less wise than shutting down an airport and shipping the thousands of people therein to black sites on the possibility that one of them could be, or eventually could be, a terrorist bomber.

I understand what I am saying, and what's wrong with it. It wouldn't surprise me if it aren't evil people asking for this though, if it is only a deterrant it's atrocious but there might be more to it.

No need to shut down airports by the way, too late they are already here