Trump's Executive Orders Could Drastically Expand Family Detention Centers

[riversedge]

I am so glad there are caring groups and people looking out for these refugees.




Trump's Executive Orders Could Drastically Expand Family Detention Centers
Sunday, February 05, 2017 By John Knefel, Truthout





Karla Rodriguez, an asylum seeker from El Salvador, with her 4-year-old daughter in San Antonio, Texas, Nov. 10, 2015. The two were traveling to Delaware to join her father and to fight for asylum there. President Trump's policy gives his deportation forces the power to detain larger numbers of women and children. (Photo: Ilana Panich-Linsman / The New York Times)Karla Rodriguez, an asylum seeker from El Salvador, with her 4-year-old daughter in San Antonio, Texas, November 10, 2015. The two were traveling to Delaware to join her father and to fight for asylum there. President Trump's policy gives his deportation forces the power to detain larger numbers of women and children. (Photo: Ilana Panich-Linsman / The New York Times)






To hear President Donald Trump and his advisors talk about the US southern border, a person would get the impression that the Obama administration had rolled out the red carpet to welcome anyone and everyone who wanted to enter the country. Echoing a statement Trump made often on the campaign trail, he promised to "bring back our borders," in an inauguration speech filled with sinister imagery and nationalistic bombast.

In reality, many of the people who show up at the southern border are women and children fleeing life-threatening circumstances and seeking asylum in the United States. Contrary to Trump's rhetoric, Obama's immigration policy involved deporting more people than any other president and resurrecting a program of family detention originally developed under President George W Bush. Now, Trump's executive orders may mean an increase in detention at the border and the building of new detention facilities -- including the notorious family jails that gained attention toward the end of the Obama administration.

For all the attention paid to Trump's brutal executive orders, the issue of family detention has gone almost completely ignored in the media. It's still unclear exactly how the women and children who are held will be impacted by the orders, or Trump's administration at large. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detains immigrants in "over 200 county jails and for-profit prisons," according to Community Initiatives for Visiting Immigrants in Confinement (CIVIC). Women and children are only held in three of those facilities, however -- two in Texas, at Karnes and Dilley, and one in Berks, Pennsylvania. The population at the three existing immigrant family jails fluctuates, but at capacity they can hold up to about 3,000 people.

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Still, lawyers are watching to make sure the family jails are in compliance with a federal judge's order limiting how long families can be held. At times, Obama's family detention policy kept some women and their children locked up for more than a year. Now, the average length of detainment is between two and four weeks, following an order by Judge Dolly Gee forcing the government to release families within 20 days of their capture...................................

[Girard442]

1. As Keith Olberman would say...

These are places where people can be brought in to ensure uniform treatment and provided for more efficiently. Gathered together in a few places. You know, concentrated. Can anyone think of a good name for such places?

[Igel]

2. Sure. "Concentration camps."

Or "prisons."

Or "day care centers."

Or "public schools."

Or "group homes."

Difference between them is really whether you're free to wander off or not.

Oops. "Senior living centers."

"Hospitals and hospices."

Of course, much of the difference is a question of rights, as well. Students are minors and have fewer rights; turn 16 or 18, and you can quit. Group homes, turn 18 or become declared fit and you're ousted. Mostly people are carried out of senior living centers and hospices. Hospitals, not so much.

Prisons you don't wander out of; by being on the wrong side of the law you're denied certain rights, just as those in group homes are denied certain rights by being on the wrong side of the age line or the mental competency line.

Immigrant detentions centers are for those who are on the wrong side of the legal residency line, which is "on the wrong side of the law." Works for me if I overstay in another country, except I'm more likely to be detained and then punished by incarceration instead of simply detained pending litigation of my claim to stay. For most, they have no claim, and the litigation is a dodge in hopes that something'll shake loose and allow them to stay. It sucks, but apparently the choice of just saying "no lo contendere" (or nolo contendere, with slightly different stress) is worse than staying in the centers.