June 21, 2018

USA: Liberal Media Admitting President Obama Prosecuted Mothers For Coming To The US illegally. Texas Shelter Operator Says It Knows The Locations Of The Parents Of Separated Children In Its Care

McClatchy DC Bureau
written by Franco Ordonez and Anita Kumar
Thursday June 21, 2018

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama separated parents from their children at the border.

Obama prosecuted mothers for coming to the United States illegally. He fast tracked deportations. And yes, he housed unaccompanied children in tent cities.

For much of the country — and President Donald Trump — the prevailing belief is that Obama was the president who went easier on immigrants.

Neither Obama nor Democrats created Trump's zero-tolerance policy, which calls for every illegal border crosser to be prosecuted and leads to their children being detained in separate facilities before being shipped to a shelter and eventually a sponsor family.

But Obama's policy helped create the road map of enforcement that Trump has been following — and building on.

“It's been going on for many, many decades and many years,” Trump said this week. “Whether it was President Bush, President Obama, President Clinton — same policies. They can't get them changed because both sides are always fighting. ...This is maybe a great chance to have a change.”

Trump has made tough immigration policy a forefront of his presidency. He wants to build a wall on the southern border. He is trying to impose a ban on travel several majority-Muslim countries. He has targeted sanctuary cities that protect immigrants who are in the country illegally. And he began enforcing the new zero tolerance policy.
I added this picture message above to this article to make a point. (emphasis mine)
He took it even further by separating more than 2,000 children from their parents as a way to deter future migration, which has caused national bipartisan outrage. On Wednesday, he signed an executive order designed to end the family separations, but children would still be detained with their parents.

Obama took several actions that led to an outcry of fear and distrust, though his actions failed to get the attention the Trump administration has.

The White House declined to comment on specific actions of previous presidents. But a DHS official said it’s frustrating to be blamed for conditions at facilities that predate Trump and for creating new policies that were already in action.

“We’re enforcing the rule of the law,” said the DHS official, who is not authorized to speak publicly. “This is something that the previous administration didn’t do. ... The decades of ignoring this is what has led to today’s crisis.”

No numbers on children separated from their parents under Obama is available because the Obama administration didn’t keep them, according to Trump DHS officials.

Leon Fresco, a deputy assistant attorney general under Obama, who defended that administration's use of family detention in court, acknowledged that some fathers were separated from children.

Most fathers and children were released together, often times with an ankle bracelet. Fresco said there were cases where the administration held fathers who were carrying drugs or caught with other contraband who had to be separated from their children.

“ICE could not devise a safe way where men and children could be in detention together in one facility,” Fresco said. “It was deemed too much of a security risk.”

One of the most controversial measures that Obama took was to resurrect the almost-abandoned practice of detaining mothers and children to deter future illegal immigration.

The government had one lightly used 100-bed facility in central Pennsylvania and added three larger facilities in Texas and New Mexico holding thousands.

The New Mexico facility would later close and Obama would face legal challenges that stopped him from detaining mothers and children indefinitely.

A federal judge in California ruled that the Obama administration was violating a 20-year old case, known as Flores when it kept families detained for longer than 20 days. The Trump administration has used the Flores settlement as the backbone for the separation practice and Wednesday's order will likely cause more court challenges to Flores.

Chris Chmielenski, Numbers USA's director of content and activism, said the Obama administration was put "under incredible pressure" not to hold families. Chmielenski argued the administration didn’t fight hard enough. "It's part of the reason we're in the position we are in," he said.

Obama took other controversial steps as well, including fighting to block efforts to require unaccompanied children to have legal representation and barring detained mothers with their children from being released on bond.

The administration also deported a teenage mother and her son back to Honduras soon after she attempted suicide at Texas family detention center.

I added this video above to the article: “It was kept very quiet under the Obama Administration. There were large numbers of people coming in. The Obama administration was trying to keep this quiet,” Cuellar told CNN’s Fredricka Whitfield
Her lawyer, Bryan Johnson, finds its difficult making comparisons saying they were both tough on enforcement. But he worries comparing what Trump did to Obama makes the crisis today look less significant.

“Obama was bad. ... I think the main difference is scale here with Trump."

While Obama downplayed his enforcement, Trump has embraced and made it a signature issue of his presidency.

Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, an advocacy organization, said the difference between Trump and previous presidents is in his language.

"No previous administration has referred to immigration as an infestation," he said, referring to a tweet by Trump on Tuesday.. "No president has ever spoken of immigrants and refugees in the awful way that President Trump has."
President Trump is angry about the Democrats in Congress not caring about MS-13 infesting our nation not referring to the regular undocumented immigrant folks wanting a better life in America. But, leave it to the Left to twist a statement to portray him as a racist. I'm glad to see this left leaning news source tell the truth about Obama and his immigration policy for 8 years. However, I noticed they threw in several jabs at President Trump, emphasizing his zero-tolerance policy. Well, it just dawned on me after reading this information, it's clear that Obama ALSO HAD a zero-tolerance policy but he and the media kept this information from the public. Obama was worse than Trump or any other President in U.S. history regarding mass deportations.(emphasis mine)
Steve Cortes, a Trump ally who served on his Hispanic Advisory Council during the 2016 campaign, said president is being unfairly criticized because the mainstream media views his policies as coming from someone they have been portraying as a "racist and anti-Latino bigot" since 2015.

Cortes acknowledges that Trump speaks in ways that some might misinterpret as racist because he speaks forcefully and not "lawyerly or in a measured way" people might be used to from politicians.

"The authenticity is big part of the attraction," he said. "He's blunt and bold but people will assign nefarious interpretation."
The Texas Tribune
written by Paul Cobler and Emma Platoff
Thursday June 21, 2018

Confusion over the fate of families that were separated by the federal government at the U.S-Mexico border continues to reign, but the Texas-based company that houses nearly half of all undocumented children in federal custody said Thursday that it knows where the parents of all its separated children are located.

The children are allowed to be in contact with those parents, as long as the separate federal facility where the parents are being held allows it, according to Alexia Rodriguez, vice president of immigrant children's services for Southwest Key Programs, the nonprofit company that shelters the children.

Separated children housed at all other shelters should be in the same situation, since facilities are required to follow the same federal procedures, Rodriguez said. Her comments came during a meeting with Texas lawmakers and state officials about the ongoing crisis at the border.

Though those lines of communication still fall short of reuniting families, they represent a significant point of contact. More than 2,3000 children have been split from their parents at the border under a new Trump administration policy of “zero tolerance” for illegal border crossings. While their parents were sent to jail to be criminally prosecuted for the illegal crossing, the children were sent to private shelters like those run by Southwest Key, which are overseen by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order he says will keep families together at the border. But it’s still not clear how the children who have already been separated will be reunited. Rodriguez said shelters like Southwest Key are working on placing children with relatives who already legally live in the United States — a longstanding policy that precedes the Trump administration’s recent changes.

“That is a process that has been put in place by [HHS] for all providers,” Rodriguez said. “We all follow the same process.”

While Southwest Key facilities keep track of the parents of all the children in its care, Rodriguez said she is not aware of any children who have already been reunited with their parents since the executive order. An official with the federal Department of Health and Human Services told The New York Times on Wednesday that migrant children will not immediately be reunited with their parents.

Attorneys working to reunite immigrant families have described a hectic, case-by-case system in which families depend on flukes — the whims of a deportation agent or the luck of finding a good lawyer — for reunification. The government assigns every undocumented migrant an "alien number," but it's not clear that all parents and children know each other's, or even their own.

Rodriguez said she expects children who were separated from their parents at the border will be sent to immigration detention centers that can house full families. But she wasn’t sure when — if ever — those transfers would take place.

Trump’s order said families should be housed together at detention centers run through the Department of Homeland Security. But those facilities are likely strapped for resources, and it’s not clear how many families they can house.
Miami Herald reports 5/10/16: Hillary Clinton, presidential candidate, is a bitter pill for some Cuban Americans to swallow — and there’s a fundamental reason for the dislike.

It’s all in a name: Elián González.

Her husband’s administration (Bill Clinton) — more specifically, his Attorney General, Janet Reno, a Miamian — blew it big in 2000 when she ordered the 6-year-old boy removed in a middle-of-the-night raid on the Little Havana home of relatives who wanted him to live in a free country.

Authorities didn’t just pick up Elián or deliver him to his father after a courtroom hearing. They plucked him at machine gun-point in a swift operation more apt for the Middle East than emotional Miami. The Pulitzer-Prize winning picture of a terrified Elián by AP photographer Alan Diaz is hard to forget.

The saga hangs in history like a dark cloud — even if you believe that this boy, miraculously rescued at sea after a shipwreck on Thanksgiving, belonged with his father, who wanted him back in Cuba. Sixteen years later, all that the Cuban community feared has come to pass: His father, a faithful servant in Communist Cuba, turned Elián over to be paraded like a puppet, used as a Cold War tool, and allowed him to be indoctrinated into Fidel Castro idolatry.

Still, the boy belonged with his father; we get that now.

But the violent seizure was too much and carried out without exhausting other avenues — an affront to the freedom-loving, loyal Cuban-American community.
The National Review
written by Rich Lowry
Monday May 28, 2018

Some economic migrants are using children as chits, but the problem is fixable — if Congress acts.

he latest furor over Trump immigration policy involves the separation of children from parents at the border.

As usual, the outrage obscures more than it illuminates, so it’s worth walking through what’s happening here.

For the longest time, illegal immigration was driven by single males from Mexico. Over the last decade, the flow has shifted to women, children, and family units from Central America. This poses challenges we haven’t confronted before and has made what once were relatively minor wrinkles in the law loom very large.

The Trump administration isn’t changing the rules that pertain to separating an adult from the child. Those remain the same. Separation happens only if officials find that the adult is falsely claiming to be the child’s parent, or is a threat to the child, or is put into criminal proceedings.

It’s the last that is operative here. The past practice had been to give a free pass to an adult who is part of a family unit. The new Trump policy is to prosecute all adults. The idea is to send a signal that we are serious about our laws and to create a deterrent against re-entry. (Illegal entry is a misdemeanor, illegal re-entry a felony.)

When a migrant is prosecuted for illegal entry, he or she is taken into custody by the U.S. Marshals. In no circumstance anywhere in the U.S. do the marshals care for the children of people they take into custody. The child is taken into the custody of HHS, who cares for them at temporary shelters.

The criminal proceedings are exceptionally short, assuming there is no aggravating factor such as a prior illegal entity or another crime. The migrants generally plead guilty, and they are then sentenced to time served, typically all in the same day, although practices vary along the border. After this, they are returned to the custody of ICE.

If the adult then wants to go home, in keeping with the expedited order of removal that is issued as a matter of course, it’s relatively simple. The adult should be reunited quickly with his or her child, and the family returned home as a unit. In this scenario, there’s only a very brief separation.

Where it becomes much more of an issue is if the adult files an asylum claim. In that scenario, the adults are almost certainly going to be detained longer than the government is allowed to hold their children.

That’s because of something called the Flores Consent Decree from 1997. It says that unaccompanied children can be held only 20 days. A ruling by the Ninth Circuit extended this 20-day limit to children who come as part of family units. So even if we want to hold a family unit together, we are forbidden from doing so.

The clock ticking on the time the government can hold a child will almost always run out before an asylum claim is settled. The migrant is allowed ten days to seek an attorney, and there may be continuances or other complications.

This creates the choice of either releasing the adults and children together into the country pending the ajudication of the asylum claim, or holding the adults and releasing the children. If the adult is held, HHS places the child with a responsible party in the U.S., ideally a relative (migrants are likely to have family and friends here).

Even if Flores didn’t exist, the government would be very constrained in how many family units it can accommodate. ICE has only about 3,000 family spaces in shelters. It is also limited in its overall space at the border, which is overwhelmed by the ongoing influx. This means that — whatever the Trump administration would prefer to do — many adults are still swiftly released.

Why try to hold adults at all? First of all, if an asylum-seeker is detained, it means that the claim goes through the process much more quickly, a couple of months or less rather than years. Second, if an adult is released while the claim is pending, the chances of ever finding that person again once he or she is in the country are dicey, to say the least. It is tantamount to allowing the migrant to live here, no matter what the merits of the case.

A few points about all this:

1) Family units can go home quickly. The option that both honors our laws and keeps family units together is a swift return home after prosecution. But immigrant advocates hate it because they want the migrants to stay in the United States. How you view this question will depend a lot on how you view the motivation of the migrants (and how seriously you take our laws and our border).

2) There’s a better way to claim asylum. Every indication is that the migrant flow to the United States is discretionary. It nearly dried up at the beginning of the Trump administration when migrants believed that they had no chance of getting into the United States. Now, it is going in earnest again because the message got out that, despite the rhetoric, the policy at the border hasn’t changed. This strongly suggests that the flow overwhelmingly consists of economic migrants who would prefer to live in the United States, rather than victims of persecution in their home country who have no option but to get out.

Even if a migrant does have a credible fear of persecution, there is a legitimate way to pursue that claim, and it does not involve entering the United States illegally. First, such people should make their asylum claim in the first country where they feel safe, i.e., Mexico or some other country they are traversing to get here. Second, if for some reason they are threatened everywhere but the United States, they should show up at a port of entry and make their claim there rather than crossing the border illegally.

3) There is a significant moral cost to not enforcing the border. There is obviously a moral cost to separating a parent from a child and almost everyone would prefer not to do it. But, under current policy and with the current resources, the only practical alternative is letting family units who show up at the border live in the country for the duration. Not only does this make a mockery of our laws, it creates an incentive for people to keep bringing children with them.

Needless to say, children should not be making this journey that is fraught with peril. But there is now a premium on bringing children because of how we have handled these cases. They are considered chits.

In April, the New York Times reported:
Some migrants have admitted they brought their children not only to remove them from danger in such places as Central America and Africa, but because they believed it would cause the authorities to release them from custody sooner.

Others have admitted to posing falsely with children who are not their own, and Border Patrol officials say that such instances of fraud are increasing.
According to azcentral.com, it is “common to have parents entrust their children to a smuggler as a favor or for profit.”

If someone is determined to come here illegally, the decent and safest thing would be to leave the child at home with a relative and send money back home. Because we favor family units over single adults, we are creating an incentive to do the opposite and use children to cut deals with smugglers.

4) Congress can fix this. Congress can change the rules so the Flores consent decree will no longer apply, and it can appropriate more money for family shelters at the border. This is an obvious thing to do that would eliminate the tension between enforcing our laws and keeping family units together. The Trump administration is throwing as many resources as it can at the border to expedite the process, and it desperately wants the Flores consent decree reversed. Despite some mixed messages, if the administration had its druthers, family units would be kept together and their cases settled quickly.

The missing piece here is Congress, but little outrage will be directed at it, and probably nothing will be done. And so our perverse system will remain in place and the crisis at the border will rumble on.
Law & Crime
written by Colin Kalmbacher
Wednesday June 20th, 2018

The “tender age” euphemism for referring to detained migrant children under the age of 13 originated in documents prepared by immigration authorities operating under the administration of President Barack Obama, Law&Crime has learned.

On Tuesday, the Associated Press published a report citing Steven Wagner, whose Health and Human Services profile identifies him as “the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary and Acting Assistant Secretary at HHS’ Administration for Children and Families.” The AP quotes Wagner as saying [emphasis added]:
We have specialized facilities that are devoted to providing care to children with special needs and tender age children as we define as under 13 would fall into that category. They’re not government facilities per se, and they have very well-trained clinicians, and those facilities meet state licensing standards for child welfare agencies, and they’re staffed by people who know how to deal with the needs — particularly of the younger children.
Wagner’s use of the term “tender age” to refer to pre-adolescent migrant children under administrative detention set off alarm bells across the country after the AP ran with this terminology as their lede. MSNBC host Rachel Maddow was unable to hold back tears while reading through the opening lines of the AP report near the end of her eponymous program Tuesday night.

But this terminology actually appears to have originated sometime in 2010.

On June 3, 2010, the Department of Health and Human Services, by way of the Administration for Children and Families, published a 41-page federal grant announcement titled, “Residential Services for Unaccompanied Alien Children” with the funding opportunity number HHS-2010-ACF-ORR-ZU-0074. The application deadline for grant applications was July 19, 2010.

The first apparent use of the term “tender age” in reference to detained migrant children appears in the context of discussing potential group homes for unaccompanied minors under the supervision of the Office of Refugee Resettlement. Page 9 of the document reads, in relevant part [emphasis in original]:
Group Homes: The Applicant operates licensed group homes designed to serve the majority of UAC, with an emphasis on the ability to serve specific subsets of the population, including but not limited to children of a tender age, pregnant and parenting teens, and UAC with other special needs. Group homes typically house between 6 to 18 children, depending on State licensing requirements.
The above-cited language is the only instance where the “tender age” term is used in the document. The announcement also specifies various minimal requirements for applicants interested in applying for grant funding.

In the same section, under “Basic Shelter Care and/or Group Home-General,” the announcement stipulates, “The Applicant shall operate a licensed shelter care/group home facility designed to serve the majority of [Unaccompanied Alien Children] for an average of 55 days.” The announcement also notes, “Basic shelter care facilities typically house between 16 to 80 children, depending on State licensing requirements.”

A summary announcement of the same grant on federalgrants.com pegged the maximum funding for the project at $45 million total. Individual grant awards maxed out at $7.5 million, with minimum grants beginning at $500,000.

The document which initially announced these federal grants appears to be the first internal use of the “tender age” term, and underlines the idea–cited by longtime immigrants’ rights activists and immigration attorneys–that while current family separation practices may be more prevalent than in the past, the immigration, detention and deportation infrastructure currently being used to full effect by the Trump administration was in large part put into place under President Obama.

VOA News Published on Apr 23, 2014: The United States has deported about 2 million illegal immigrants in the five years since President Barack Obama took office. As VOA's Kent Klein reports, some Americans say the administration is too aggressive in enforcing immigration law, while others say it's not aggressive enough.
ABC News
written by Serena Marshall
August 29, 2016

How many people have been deported under Obama?

President Barack Obama has often been referred to by immigration groups as the "Deporter in Chief."

Between 2009 and 2015 his administration has removed more than 2.5 million people through immigration orders, which doesn’t include the number of people who "self-deported" or were turned away and/or returned to their home country at the border by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

How does he compare to other presidents?

According to governmental data, the Obama administration has deported more people than any other president's administration in history.

In fact, they have deported more than the sum of all the presidents of the 20th century.

President George W. Bush's administration deported just over two million during his time in office; and Obama’s numbers don’t reflect his last year in office, for which data is not yet available.
Who is being deported?

President Obama directed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to focus on criminals, not families, during his November 2014 executive action on immigration.
President Trump is doing the same thing as President Obama and you are making him out to be an animal racist who hates immigrants. The immigrants are most likely treated much better under President Trump than under President Obama since Obama refused to listen to whistleblowers as I show proof in tweet below and locked immigrant children in cages as is evident in 2014 pictures that the Democrats used to malign President Trump. (emphasis mine)
According to their website, "ICE has continued to increase its focus on identifying, arresting, and removing convicted criminals in prisons and jails, and also at-large arrests in the interior."

In fiscal year 2015, 91 percent of people removed from inside the U.S. were previously convicted of a crime.

The administration made the first priority "threats to national security, border security, and public safety." That includes gang members, convicted felons or charged with "aggravated felony" and anyone apprehended at the border trying to enter the country illegally.

In 2015, 81 percent, or 113,385, of the removals were the priority one removals.

Priority two includes "misdemeanants and new immigration violators."

That includes "aliens convicted of three or more misdemeanor offenses, other than minor traffic" violations, as well as those convicted of domestic violence, sexual abuse, burglary, DUIs or drug trafficking.

Who is not being deported?

With the focus on criminals and not families, the administration has moved away from those living and working in the U.S. without a criminal history.

"Felons, not families. Criminals, not children. Gang members, not a mom who’s working hard to provide for her kids. We’ll prioritize, just like law enforcement does every day," Obama said in November 2014 when announcing his executive action on immigration.

And while he tried to provide relief and a way "out of the shadows" for those without criminal histories with his immigration action, that was eventually stricken down by the Supreme Court not issuing a decision on the case, thereby upholding the lower courts action.

But by refocusing on criminals most families who are living and following the law are not targets for deportations.

What about raids against mothers and children?

Priority three for the administration is focused on those who have arrived after January 1, 2014. The administration has focused on preventing families from sending their children unaccompanied on a dangerous trek by emphasizing they will be returned.

Many of these unaccompanied children and mothers with children are fleeing violence in central America—coming from the northern triangle of Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, some of the most dangerous countries in the world.

Many of the people migrating from that area to the U.S. claim refugee status and, if they can prove real harm will result in their being returned, they are allowed to remain until their case is heard.

There are critics, however, who state that many are not getting a fair shot at claiming refugee status and are being returned too hastily.
I can't thank these celebrities enough for making sure President Trump gets reelected in 2020. (emphasis mine)

Posted by Princess Mononoke at 7:21 PM

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