Never Again is Now. Protest the #TrumpCamps on July 12 - Plus Other Actions You Can Take
By now hopefully readers of this column have some sense of what our tax dollars are being used for when it comes to imprisoning those who (mostly) come to the United States seeking political asylum. Today I’m sharing some outtakes from media outlets should you feel the need for further outrage. And if you’re not outraged, you haven’t been paying attention. If you are ready to do something besides or in addition to demonstrating, there are additional steps listed below.
Organizing for a nationwide response to conditions in the #TrumpCamps is underway, and a location in San Diego, near the point of entry site from Tijuana, is listed as one of five key events for vigils and rallies on Friday, July 12.
Details of the local event, other than the times--speakers at 7pm, candlelight vigil at 9pm--are still being worked out. (The border locale is problematic due to physical constraints and the massive security apparatus in place.)
Facebook event page for local Lights for Liberty Event.
Other key locations include El Paso, Texas, where migrants are being housed in outdoor conditions under a bridge with no running water for months at a time, Homestead, FL, at a migrant child detention facility that has caused mass abuse and neglect; in New York City, at Foley Square, where hundreds of migrants are processed through detention a day; and in Washington, DC, in front of the Capitol building, to demand action from Congress to end human detention and impeach the President.
As of this writing there are an additional 70 locations where Lights for Liberty advocates, activists and impacted persons will speak on the issue of human detention camps. Participants will light candles in a “silent vigil for all those held in US detention camps to bring light to the darkness of the Trump administration’s horrific policies.”
“We shine a light on the inhumane treatment of migrants and refugees by the current administration. To be silent is to be complicit. To sit this out is to be complacent. Now is a time to stand for what is best in all of us, to stop the worst of us. We must stand for one another. At New Sanctuary Coalition, we hold in our hearts a vision of a world worth fighting for,” said Ravi Ragbir, Executive Director of New Sanctuary Coalition.
“People of color are targets of this administration’s deliberately cruel immigration enforcement policies,” said Nicole Lee, co-founder of the Black Movement Law Project. “We stand vigil with Lights for Liberty and in solidarity with all those in detention camps, and against this administration’s profound racism and xenophobia.”
“I’ve been inside these camps, and the conditions are beyond description. Twenty-four adults and six children that we know of have already died as a result,” said Toby Gialluca, lawyer, activist and member of the organizing team of Lights for Liberty. “The world must take a stand against this administration and stop these camps before more lives are lost.”
https://youtu.be/CTzglNHq6YI
According to the Department of Homeland Security as of last week 2300 children have been separated from their parents since the Trump administration began separating migrant children from their parents in May. That number is expected to grow more rapidly as the administration streams more resources to the border for apprehending, transporting and detaining immigrants.
HHS has said it is holding nearly 12,000 immigrant children, most of whom crossed without a parent or legal guardian. The agency says the children stay in HHS facilities for 57 days on average before they are sent to live with a relative or placed in foster care.
Locally, there is the Otay Mesa detention center holding adult migrants and three detention centers for children in the San Diego area. One for boys is in El Cajon. One for girls is in Lemon Grove and reportedly a second one for girls near Alpine.
(Local activists have honored requests not to protest at these sites because the children may be traumatized and because of the sad reality of local wingnuts showing up to harass workers and migrants.)
The Department of Justice dispatched an attorney to tell a panel of three judges in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit that the government shouldn’t be required to give detained migrant children toothbrushes, soap, towels, showers or even half a night’s sleep inside Border Patrol detention facilities.
At issue was an appeal of a 2017 ruling finding saying child migrants and their parents were detained in dirty, crowded, bitingly cold conditions inside U.S. Customs and Border Protection facilities along the southern border. Migrants are first taken to those facilities after they are apprehended at the border.
Watch the video below for a jaw dropping experience:
https://twitter.com/nowthisnews/status/1142261675095052288
The New Yorker interviewed an attorney, who as part of a larger group, visited with more than fifty children at a facility in Clint, Texas. Their access to this and other locations was mandated as part of monitoring compliance with the Flores settlement requiring children must be held in safe and sanitary conditions and moved out of Border Patrol custody without unnecessary delays.
The conditions the lawyers found were shocking: flu and lice outbreaks were going untreated, and children were filthy, sleeping on cold floors, and taking care of each other because of the lack of attention from guards. Some of them had been in the facility for weeks…
...Children described to us that they’ve been there for three weeks or longer. And so, immediately from that population that we were trying to triage, they were filthy dirty, there was mucus on their shirts, the shirts were dirty. We saw breast milk on the shirts. There was food on the shirts, and the pants as well. They told us that they were hungry. They told us that some of them had not showered or had not showered until the day or two days before we arrived. Many of them described that they only brushed their teeth once. This facility knew last week that we were coming. The government knew three weeks ago that we were coming…
...So, on Wednesday, we received reports from children of a lice outbreak in one of the cells where there were about twenty-five children, and what they told us is that six of the children were found to have lice. And so they were given a lice shampoo, and the other children were given two combs and told to share those two combs, two lice combs, and brush their hair with the same combs, which is something you never do with a lice outbreak. And then what happened was one of the combs was lost, and Border Patrol agents got so mad that they took away the children’s blankets and mats. They weren’t allowed to sleep on the beds, and they had to sleep on the floor on Wednesday night as punishment for losing the comb. So you had a whole cell full of kids who had beds and mats at one point, not for everybody but for most of them, who were forced to sleep on the cement.
The New York Times interviewed another lawyer involved in the inspections:
A chaotic scene of sickness and filth is unfolding in an overcrowded border station in Clint, Tex., where hundreds of young people who have recently crossed the border are being held, according to lawyers who visited the facility this week. Some of the children have been there for nearly a month.
Children as young as 7 and 8, many of them wearing clothes caked with snot and tears, are caring for infants they’ve just met, the lawyers said. Toddlers without diapers are relieving themselves in their pants. Teenage mothers are wearing clothes stained with breast milk.
Most of the young detainees have not been able to shower or wash their clothes since they arrived at the facility, those who visited said. They have no access to toothbrushes, toothpaste or soap.
“There is a stench,” said Elora Mukherjee, director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School, one of the lawyers who visited the facility. “The overwhelming majority of children have not bathed since they crossed the border.”
And, no, these conditions weren’t limited to just one location. Via ABC News:
"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.
Lucio Sevier, who works in private practice in the area, was granted access to the Ursula facility in McAllen, which is the largest CBP detention center in the country, after lawyers found out about a flu outbreak there that sent five infants to the neonatal intensive care unit.
After assessing 39 children under the age of 18, she described conditions for unaccompanied minors 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."
Kids taking care of other kids because there are no adults in the room, via an interview on PBS
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.
https://twitter.com/WmBrangham/status/1142397933968601088
Babies too sick to cry, via the Texas Tribune:
In late May, an El Paso processing center was the subject of a report from the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General, which detailed severe overcrowding in holding cells. In one photo, a migrant’s hand is pressed against the glass of a cell that was designed to hold 35 people — 155 people were crowded inside. In another, 76 women are crouched side-by-side on the floor in a cell designed for 12.
Gialluca said a 16-year-old mother that she met at the McAllen facility had an 8-month-old daughter who wore only a diaper and a pastel tank top covered in “filth.” The mother told the attorney that guards took away her backpack full of baby clothes and medicine, and sent them to sleep outside on the concrete.
Gialluca said the pair were both ill, congested and coughing, and described the baby as “lethargic.” All of the babies were lethargic, she said.
"Sick babies are [supposed to be] crying … and these kids were just … silent."
We need to recognize the foundation of racism inherent in the Trump administration fueling the horrors of these detention centers. It does us no good to fight this today while leaving the racist structure that allowed this to happen to remain in place.
Thanks to social justice blog YOPP! for these Useful Links & Articles
Before you read anything else, read Elizabeth C. McLaughlin’s twitter thread detailing the atrocities currently happening at the camps.
Jack Holmes wrote an excellent article on Esquire about the current situation at the camps as well as the historical significance of these developments.
From that article: “Many of the people housed in these facilities are not "illegal" immigrants. If you present yourself at the border seeking asylum, you have a legal right to a hearing under domestic and international law. They are, in another formulation, refugees—civilian non-combatants who have not committed a crime, and who say they are fleeing violence and persecution. Yet these human beings, who mostly hail from Central America's Northern Triangle of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador—a region ravaged by gang violence and poverty and corruption and what increasingly appears to be some of the first forced migrations due to climate change—are being detained on what increasingly seems to be an indefinite basis.”
And this piece by Jonathan M. Katz in the Los Angeles Times covers the slow escalation of Trump’s immigration policies that have lead to this moment.
This twitter thread by Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg goes over the predicted normalization process of the current conditions, how things will get worse, and why we need to act fast.
This single tweet by Representative Jerry Nadler is powerful enough to stand on its own:
“One of the lessons from the Holocaust is ‘Never Again’ - not only to mass murder, but also to the dehumanization of people, violations of basic rights, and assaults on our common morality. We fail to learn that lesson when we don’t call out such inhumanity right in front of us.”
Action Steps
Start with something simple—call and write your Congressional Representatives today, and tell them to put a stop to this or be put on notice for their jobs:
Find your Representatives quickly here: https://fastdemocracy.com/find-your-legislators/ Find your Senators & Contact them here: https://contactsenators.com/contact-my-senators
If your representative is already working to address these immigration issues, send them a thank you note so that they know you see and appreciate their actions.
Here is some deeper reading into the act of contacting your government officials to express your opinion and how it works
The San Diego Rapid Response Network is on the front lines of assisting migrants in San Diego. They need money, volunteers, and other donations. Find out more at this link.
Donate or volunteer for the ACLU.
The ACLU website has a particularly impressive action page organized by cause and amount of time you have to offer. You can pick a specific cause, such as halting the separation of immigrant families, and sign up for an email list that will send you calls to action for just that specific issue.
Donate or volunteer for RAICES
Founded in 1986 as the Refugee Aid Project by community activists in South Texas, RAICES has grown to be the largest immigration legal services provider in Texas. With offices in Austin, Corpus Christi, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston and San Antonio, RAICES is a frontline organization in the roiling debate about immigration and immigrants in the world.
Lawyers for Good Government created a list of three things people can do to help immigrants under attack:
Contribute to the Project Corazon Travel Fund so we can send more lawyers (particularly Spanish-speaking immigration lawyers) to the detention centers and refugee camps where help is desperately needed. We've already sent 37 and we can send dozens - even hundreds - more with your support. Click here to learn more & donate.
Pledge your frequent flier miles to help get more lawyers to the border. If you have unused airline miles, you can pledge your airline miles to help the cause thanks to L4GG's partnership with Lawyer Moms of America. We use these miles to help cover travel costs for pro bono attorneys. Click here to pledge your airline miles to the travel fund.
Volunteer your time and expertise. Below are a few ways you can do that.
If you're an immigration lawyer and would be willing to donate your time to help asylum seekers in remote locations (but can't afford the associated travel expenses), click here to apply for travel funding.
If you're bilingual (Spanish/English) and have a few hours a week to help conduct intake interviews with detained asylum-seekers remotely (by phone), click here to learn more about how you can help with our remote intake program.
If you're a lawyer at a large law firm, ask your pro bono coordinator whether your firm is part of Project Corazon. If your firm is already a Project Corazon partner, there may be immediate opportunities for you to volunteer for our remote CFI and/or remote bond projects. If your firm would like to learn more about partnering with us, please ask your pro bono coordinator to email us at corazon@L4GG.org.
If none of the above opportunities is applicable to you, but you'd still like to help, make sure you’re on our email list and check the websites of some of our organizational partners for other ways to volunteer - RAICES, Immigration Justice Campaign, and Al Otro Lado are good places to start.
The National Immigrant Justice Center has a particularly good set of resources for immigrants and people who want to help them.
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Meanwhile, over in the land of people lacking empathy or respect for facts:
https://twitter.com/mmfa/status/1143163257785585664
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Email me at DougPorter@WordsAndDeedsBlog.com