How Did We Get To This Point?
Reality is a helluva drug. Voters suffer massive normalcy bias, bi-partisan anti-immigrant propaganda, omissions and actions.
MeltingIce.Blog
1/20/202614 min read
Trump and MAGA are no doubt Nazi-like and are hardcore career criminals and racists.
Democrats MUST PROSECUTE Trump's gang of career criminals when a Democrat President is elected to office in 2029.
I'm here to tell you the problem of enforcing federal law on these GOP criminals, rescinding bad immigration law and passing a meaningful path to citizenship is worse than you may care to imagine.
The call is coming from inside the Democratic Party from establishment Democrats such as Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris whose actions and omissions indicate their disdain for undocumented immigrants.
Let's start with the fact that a federal judge had to issue her federal court order to the Obama administration, the Trump adminstration and Biden administration to RELEASE FAMILIES AND KIDS FROM FEDERAL CAGES/HOLDING CELLS/PRISONS.
I dare you to tell me I'm lying. Do you want to see the federal court orders?
My point is Democrat leaders should have and could have solved the issue of immigration long ago, but were more interested in detaining and deporting undocumented immigrants than codifying a meaningful path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.
For example, Democrat leaders failed to communicate to voters that any person crossing the U.S. border is NOT a de facto criminal by virtue of crossing the border without docummentation, but is a person entitled to U.S. Constitutional protections - a civil matter to be resolved by existing immigration laws.
That's why today Trump, Noem, MAGA and FOR-PROFIT legacy media get a lot of traction by falsely claiming that any undocumented immigrant is a de facto criminal because Trump and Stephen Miller repeat the old lie that crossing the U.S. border without documentation is a federal crime - NOT TRUE!
It is NOT a federal crime but is a civil matter to be resolved by existing immigration laws.
Democrats never sufficiently explained this pivotal legal fact and thus allowed Republicans and the media to cast undocumented immigrants as de facto criminals.
That's why Barack Obama put men, women, children and babies in cages.
That's why U.S. District Court judge Dolly Gee had to issue her federal court order to the Obama administration to immediately release undocumented families: men. women, children and babies from Obama cages. That's a fact, folks.
Democrats could have legislated a viable, meaningful path to citizenship long ago but simply did not want to do so, and here we are.
Obama Fights to Continue Detention of Migrant Families
August 18, 2015 - Lauren Carasik
Despite a withering ruling by federal court Judge Dolly Gee ordering the Obama administration to release detained migrant families locked in detention facilities, the U.S. Department of Justice is contesting the decision.
Judge Gee held that detaining children in secure facilities constitutes a material breach of the 1997 Flores settlement agreement, a class-action lawsuit governing the treatment of unaccompanied minors in the custody of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
The judge decried the “widespread and deplorable conditions in the holding cells of Border Patrol stations.”
She found that the conditions are causing “long-lasting psychological, developmental and physical harm” and gave the government 90 days to comply with the order.
But the Obama administration has made clear that it will fight to keep the centers open.
The Flores settlement bars the government from incarcerating immigrant children unless they pose a flight or security risk, prohibits facilities that house minors whose detention is justified from being prison-like, and requires them to possess the requisite child care licenses.
Gee ruled that the settlement applied not only to unaccompanied minors but also those in the custody of their parents.
Yet the family detention facilities are secure, and managed not by licensed child welfare professionals but instead for-profit contractors.
Whistleblowers, reporters and advocates have painted a disturbing picture of conditions there.
The Obama administration acted swiftly to defend its practice.
In a 60 page response filed on Aug. 6, the administration claimed that ending detention “would heighten the risk of another surge in illegal migration … by incentivizing adults to bring children with them on their dangerous journey as a means to avoid detention and gain access to the interior of the United States.”
But a federal court in Washington, D.C., issued an injunction in February barring the government holding families in detention solely “for the purpose of deterring future immigration.”
And Judge Gee found that the government had not presented persuasive evidence that family detention would have a measurable impact on migration flow.
Instead of a blanket policy of detention, immigration authorities must conduct an individualized determination of a family’s asylum claim and flight risk.
Obama ended family detention in 2009, but revived the practice in response to last summer’s surge of migrants crossing the border, most of whom fled violence and poverty in Central America’s Northern Triangle – Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.
Some 38,000 children crossed the border with their mothers last fiscal year.
To supplement a small existing facility in Berks County, Pennsylvania, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security began detaining mothers and children in Dilley and Karnes City, both in Texas.
Some 1,400 women and children are now being held in the Texas facilities, down from more than 2,000 in June.
The increasingly controversial practice of detaining families came under fire after a flurry of reports exposing harrowing conditions in the facilities, a spate of lawsuits and mounting political pressure.
In May, 135 members of Congress wrote a letter to Johnson to alert him about strong evidence that immigration detention is detrimental to mothers and children, and is “not reflective of our Nation’s values.”
The legislators urged the DHS to end family detention.
After Judge Gee’s ruling, more than 170 members of Congress wrote to Johnson again, reiterating the prior concerns and imploring him to comply with Judge Gee’s ruling.
In a gambit to decrease its census and alleviate pressure, the DHS recently began releasing hundreds of detained mothers and children who had established a credible fear of returning to their home country on bond or electronic monitoring anklets.
But many remain in the detention centers.
And as Judge Gee noted, voluntary compliance leaves the government too much wiggle room, since they “could easily revert to the former challenged policy as abruptly as [it] adopted the new one.”
The administration say it is only holds families with credible asylum claims for a few weeks, and that the “addressed practices and policies that no longer exist.”
But in visiting the Dilley facility immediately following Judge Gee’s order, Human Rights First found a starkly different picture – most of the 40 families they interviewed had already been in custody for between one and two months, and some as long as six.
The rights group also found that although many of the women and children had family ties and the verifiable addresses of family sponsors with whom they would stay in the U.S., bonds were initially set at between US $7,000 to $9,500 - a figure far out of reach for impoverished migrants who likely spent whatever meager resources they had in reaching the border.
Bonds can be reduced later by an immigration judge, but even short detention can cause psychological and physical distress for families already traumatized by violence and persecution.
Though the administration claims to be implementing more humane practices, a few days after the Flores decision a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement attorney said he had been instructed to “vigorously contest” the conditional release of families and to seek high bonds amounts intended to impede their release.
And instead of moving toward closure, more than 350 people were reportedly sent to the Dilley facility after Judge Gee’s order to release the families.
Meanwhile, five migrant mothers filed court papers this month seeking millions in damages from the government for psychological and physical harms associated with their detention.
And last month, 10 mothers filed a complaint alleging they received substandard medical care while detained by DHS.
The mothers and children in family detention are vulnerable asylum seekers who fled violence and despair and pose no threat to the nation.
After the Obama administration’s recent filing, Zoe Lofgren, a Democratic Congresswoman from California and a staunch critic of detention, wrote, “The writing is on the wall — family detention is unacceptable, un-American, and will end.
Rather than fight the court’s ruling, the right and moral response is to swiftly take the necessary steps to bring our nation’s detention policy in line with the Flores settlement agreement.”
The Obama administration should concede that family detention is inhumane and unlawful, and cease the practice now, before more harm is done.
A federal judge in California has shot down an attempt by the Trump administration to scrub away the government's 28-year-old Flores Settlement Agreement which calls for court-mandated oversight on the treatment of immigrant children in federal custody.
U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee issued a 20-page order on Friday, keeping the 1997 agreement in place as Justice Department lawyers "fail to identify any new facts or law" that warrant its termination "at this time," according to the Barack Obama appointee.
The administration had previously tried terminating the Flores agreement in 2019 at the end of Donald Trump's first term, but was unsuccessful then, too. Gee reportedly called a hearing last week on the matter "deja vu" as the government tried propping up similar arguments.
"The court remains unconvinced," Gee wrote in Friday's order. "There is nothing new under the sun regarding the facts or the law."
Under the Flores Settlement Agreement, immigrant children must be held at "state-licensed" facilities — treated properly and humanely — before being released into the custody of family members or guardians "as expeditiously as possible," per Gee's order. The settlement is named after Jenny Lisette Flores, a 15-year-old detainee who sparked a class-action lawsuit to be filed in 1985.
The Trump administration recently argued that the Flores agreement was no longer needed because Congress had approved legislation to help deal with the issues the settlement addressed. It also claimed that government agencies had implemented practices and standards to ensure youths were being treated properly.
"The legal basis for the agreement has withered away," DOJ lawyers argued in a May 22 motion for relief. "Congress enacted legislation protecting UACs [unaccompanied alien children], and the agencies promulgated detailed standards and regulations implementing that legislation and the terms of the FSA," the lawyers said, blasting the agreement as an "intrusive regime" that has "ossified" federal immigration policy.
"The legal and policy landscape has also changed beyond recognition," they added.
Gee noted Friday how she had heard this all before.
"These improvements are direct evidence that the FSA is serving its intended purpose, but to suggest that the agreement should be abandoned because some progress has been made is nonsensical," the judge blasted.
"Incredulously, defendants posit that DHS need not promulgate regulations containing an expeditious release provision because 'this Court has interpreted [expeditious release] to apply to accompanied children,'" Gee explained. "But 'the FSA was intended to provide for prompt release of unaccompanied children.' This is plainly incorrect and ignores the rulings of at least three separate courts."
Gee concluded her order by saying it was ultimately the Trump administration that "continues to bind itself to the FSA by failing to fulfill its side of the parties' bargain."
Lawyers for immigrant children named in the class action complaint that spurred all this have said Trump's second term has seen similar violations of the Flores agreement that have been alleged in the past.
"In CBP facilities across the country, including in cases documented by class counsel in New York, Maine, Illinois, Ohio, Arizona, Texas, and California, plaintiffs report being held for days and sometimes weeks in restrictive, traumatic conditions," the lawyers said in a June 17 motion to enforce the FSA.
One parent, whose allegations were included in the motion, described how they and their child were held at a facility where "the rooms have hard walls, like cement, and there is a window facing the hall but you cannot go out or see the sun," per the motion.
Fact-checking Biden on use of cages for immigrants during Obama administration
Joe Biden claimed that a key difference between the administrations of Barack Obama and Donald Trump is that Obama didn’t "lock people up in cages."
During the Sept. 12 Democratic presidential debate in Houston, Univision anchor and debate co-moderator asked Biden why Latinos should trust him given the millions of deportations under Obama’s presidency, when Biden served as vice president.
"What Latinos should look at is, comparing this president to the president we have is outrageous, number one," Biden said. "We didn't lock people up in cages. We didn't separate families. We didn't do all of those things, number one."
We’ve noted that Obama did not have a policy to separate families arriving illegally at the border, and that separations under Trump happened systematically as a result of his administration’s policy to prosecute all adults crossing the border illegally.
But Biden mentioned "cages," specifically, and reporting from the time he was vice president described an enclosure for migrant children with that word.
Controversial use of ‘cages’ description
The term "cages" has continuously been used by Democrats in attacks against Trump and the detention of immigrants arriving at the border. The Trump administration says that the facilities it uses are not cages.
The description has been used to refer to chain-link enclosures holding immigrants at border processing facilities during both the Obama and Trump administrations.
Notably, critics of Trump’s "zero-tolerance" policy that resulted in family separations circulated a photo that purportedly showed children face down on the floor behind a chain-link enclosure during Trump’s tenure. However, the photo was from 2014 when Obama was president.
Our fact-check showed the Associated Press photo was taken in 2014 at a Customs and Border Protection facility in Nogales, Ariz. The photo was used in an Arizona Republic article centered on an influx of children arriving at the border unaccompanied by a parent or guardian.
The Arizona Republic article, in part, said:
"They are undocumented. They entered the country illegally. And when they were apprehended by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, they were shipped to Nogales from overwhelmed processing facilities in Texas.
"But they are still children in cages, not gangsters, not delinquents. Just children, 900 of them, in a makeshift border-town processing center that is larger than a football field."
The article adds that the children are "housed behind 18-foot-high chain-link fences topped with razor wire."
Additional description of the enclosure said: "Nylon tarps, tied to the fences, provide a modicum of privacy between the groups. They share the kind of portable toilets used at fairs and construction sites, placed inside the cages and vented with clothes-dryer hoses."
Reporting from the Los Angeles Times in 2014 referred to enclosures keeping immigrant children as "makeshift cages."
Here are other 2014 photos, from Getty Images, of children kept within chain-link enclosures. For comparison, here’s a 2018 photo provided by Customs and Border Protection, of immigrants in a similar chain-link enclosure.
Jeh Johnson, a former Homeland Security secretary during the Obama administration, in media interviews and at other forums has been asked about the use of cages during the Obama administration.
During a June 2019 interview at an event by The Aspen Institute, Johnson was asked to speak about a photo that depicts him "walking past what appears to be children in cages."
"Very clearly, chain link, barriers, partitions, fences, cages, whatever you want to call them, were not invented on Jan. 20, 2017, okay," Johnson said, adding that the photo was taken during a spike in the arrival of migrant children, and that under the law, children have to be transferred within 72 hours to the Health and Human Services department.
"But during that 72-hour period, when you have something that is a multiple, like four times, of what you’re accustomed to in the existing infrastructure, you’ve got to find places quickly to put kids. You can’t just dump 7-year-old kids on the streets of McAllen or El Paso. And so these facilities were erected, that one I think was a large warehouse, and they put those chain-link partitions up so you could segregate young women from young men from, you know, kids from adults, until they are either released or transferred to HHS. Is it ideal? Of course not."
Johnson addressed the photo from 2014 again the next month on CBS’ Face the Nation.
Johnson said in part, "the partitions you see, some call them cages, are meant to separate the women from the men, the girls from the boys. But these were temporary."
Our ruling
Biden said the Obama administration "didn't lock people up in cages."
Immigration policies of Obama and Trump are very different.
Trump’s administration implemented a policy that led to the separation of thousands of children from their parents.
Obama did not have that separation policy because Obama locked up THE WHOLE FAMILY IN CAGES!!
But for Biden to say that Obama’s administration did not put people in cages is inaccurate.
Obama and Biden in 2014 saw an influx of children arriving at the border without a parent or guardian, and reporting from 2014 by the Arizona Republic referred to a chain-link enclosure holding children as "cages."
A former Homeland Security secretary under the Obama administration in interviews has acknowledged that some have described as "cages" the enclosures used during Obama’s tenure.
There’s a debate on whether a chain-link enclosure is a "cage" and whether applying that term to those structures is subjective.
But the term certainly was used in 2014 to describe enclosures used by Obama’ administration.
We rate Biden’s claim False.
The Obama administration doubled down on one of its worst immigration legacies: the return and expansion of family detention.
Responding to a court order holding that its family detention camps violated the 1997 Flores settlement agreement, the Obama administration Friday again defended family detention as necessary to send a message to Central American families that they are not welcome here—even though it concedes that most of them are fleeing persecution.
The Obama administration now argues that it needs to detain families in order to speedily deport those who are initially found ineligible for relief.
But as the ACLU has documented, such fast-track deportation procedures are fraught with error, routinely resulting in the expulsion of people to places where they face persecution and torture.
And nothing in our immigration laws requires the government to subject families to fast-track deportation, much less to detain them during the process.
The Obama administration’s filing represents but its latest failure to respect due process and human rights.
Since last summer, when families and children fleeing violence in Central America came to the Southwest border, the Administration has refused to treat the situation for what it is—a humanitarian crisis.
Instead, it has chosen to paint mothers and their children as threats to border security.
Family detention is the cruelest expression of this approach—a deliberate choice to lock up families in order to deter others from seeking refuge in the United States.
But as courts have found (here and here), and experts confirmed (here and here), there is no evidence that President Obama’s family detention camps have deterred migrant families from fleeing violence in Central America.
More importantly, it’s unclear how the administration can legally and properly deter people from seeking protection in the first place.
As the judge in RILR v. Johnson—a case brought by the ACLU—observed, these families aren’t “wrongdoers, but rather individuals who may have legitimate claims to asylum.”
Indeed, the government itself admits that nearly 87 percent of detained families have been found to have legitimate asylum claims that they should be allowed to pursue in immigration court.
It is long past time for President Obama to recognize these families for who they are: moms and kids fleeing persecution who have a right to apply for refugee status in the United States.
Some families will win their claims; others will lose and be deported.
But either way, they shouldn’t be detained and denied a full hearing before an immigration judge.
If the Obama administration truly respects due process and human rights, it must end family detention now.
Obama DHS head Jeh Johnson said the Obama administration must send a stronger message to foreign parents to not send your children here because of the inherent danger posed by smugglers/criminals AND that the Obama administration will lock them up in cages.
True American Hero, U.S. District Court Judge Dolly Gee
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