"FACT CHECKING 4 CLEAIMS ABOUT DETAINING CHILDREN AT THE BORDER" - Fred Lucas / @FredLucasWH / June 18, 2018 / https://www.dailysignal.com/2018/06/18/the-truth-behind-4-wild-claims-about-detaining-children-at-the-borde [AS I SEE IT: So much of the negative response to this recent action on immigration is baseed on selective news pictures/reporting that clearly plays to emotions. This article makes clear that Americans need to step back and check out what is really going on and why. The mainstream media is so adept at presenting school shootings or other issues such as this through emotional lenses that clear-thinking Americans need to pause and take a deep breath before responding themselves. - Stan]
--------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------
The Trump administration is taking heat from Democrats and Republicans for separating parents and children after they illegally crossed the southern border.Over the six weeks from April 19 through May 31, federal officials separated about 2,000 children from their families at the U.S.-Mexican border, the Associated Press reported last week. President Donald Trump blamed the procedure on Democrats in Congress.
“They’re obstructing. They’re really obstructionists and they are obstructing,” Trump said Monday at the White House. “The United States will not be a migrant camp and it will not be a refugee holding facility. It won’t be.” “If you look at what’s happening in Europe, if you look at what’s happening in other places, we can’t allow that to happen to the United States—not on my watch,” he said.
During the White House press briefing Monday, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said: “This is a very serious issue that has resulted after years and years of Congress not taking action.” Here’s a look at four of the more questionable claims made about the enforcement action.
1. Democrats’ Law or Trump Policy?
“The Democrats forced that law upon our nation,” Trump asserted last week. Democrats, backed by some media commentators, counter that it’s not the law but a Trump administration policy. Actually, experts say, the situation is a combination of a bipartisan law and a Clinton administration policy.
In 1997, the Clinton administration entered into something called the Flores Settlement Agreement, which ended a class action lawsuit first brought in the 1980s. The settlement established a policy that the federal government would release unaccompanied minors from custody to their parents, relatives, or other caretakers after no more than 20 days, or, alternatively, determine the “least restrictive” setting for the child.
In a separate development, in 2008 the Democrat-controlled Congress approved bipartisan legislation to combat human trafficking and President George W. Bush, a Republican, signed it into law. Section 235 (g) in that law, the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, states that unaccompanied minors entering the United States must be transferred to the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement rather than to the Department of Homeland Security.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit expanded the Flores settlement in 2016 to include children brought to the country illegally by their parents. For consistency between the provision of the anti-trafficking law and the 9th Circuit’s interpretation of the Flores agreement, children who came into the country illegally with parents had to be taken into HHS custody, said Art Arthur, former general counsel for Immigration and Naturalization Services (now known as Immigration and Customs Enforcement) as well as a former federal immigration judge. “As soon as their parents are detained, the children are classified as unaccompanied,” Arthur, now a resident fellow for law and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies, told The Daily Signal.
2. Unprecedented Action by Trump Administration?
Some media outlets have called the practice of separating children from parents at the border “unprecedented” or a “new low” for the United States. What’s different under the Trump administration, though, is a “zero tolerance” approach to enforcing existing immigration laws and policy.
On May 7 in Scottsdale, Arizona, Attorney General Jeff Sessions directed federal prosecutors to prosecute all adults who illegally enter the country, including those accompanied by their children, under a provision of federal law (8 U.S.C. § 1325(a)) that covers illegal entry. “If you’re smuggling a child, then we’re going to prosecute you, and that child will be separated from you, probably, as required by law,” Sessions said. “If you don’t want your child separated, then don’t bring them across the border illegally. It’s not our fault that somebody does that.”
Since it takes more than 20 days to adjudicate an asylum claim, the 9th Circuit’s interpretation of the Flores Settlement Agreement essentially provides three options, said David Inserra, a homeland security policy analyst for The Heritage Foundation.
“The Trump administration currently faces two options: Either release every family that crosses the border and claims asylum and know that most of them will never show up at their immigration court hearing; or release the child as required by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals’ interpretation of the Flores settlement while holding the parents while awaiting trial,” Inserra told The Daily Signal.
“A third, better solution is to fix the loophole created by the 9th Circuit with regard to Flores and improve the asylum process to discourage frivolous asylum claims, while also better serving those with legitimate asylum cases,” Inserra added.
Proposed legislation by House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., would reverse the 9th Circuit’s interpretation. “This would mean only a brief period of separation while the parents are prosecuted,” Arthur said. Depending on the outcome, the family would be reunited and either be released or deported together.
3. ‘Concentration Camps’?
Much of the criticism of separating children from parents at the border has been from Democrats. However, former CIA Director Michael Hayden, who served under President George W. Bush, and former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele, who was once lieutenant governor of Maryland, both compared the practice to Nazi concentration camps.
The Department of Homeland Security rejected the comparison, noting that most children caught crossing the border illegally are not detained by federal officials. We have high standards,” Nielsen said during the White House press briefing Monday. “We give them meals and we give them education and we give them medical care. There are videos, there are TVs. I visited the detention centers myself.”
In the last fiscal year, 90 percent of apprehended children were released to a sponsor who was either a parent or close relative, according to the department.
Homeland security officials also say they work with HHS to improve and ease communication between detained parents and their children in HHS care.
Sponsors may be “a parent, adult sibling, relative, or appropriate home that meets criteria for the safety of the child and continuation of any immigration proceedings,” according to DHS. Also, a parent who is prosecuted and later released can be a sponsor and ask HHS to restore custody of the child.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement has dedicated a facility to operate primarily as a family reunification and removal center. ICE staff who interact with parents will receive training in trauma-informed care, and the agency will assign staff trained in mental health care to detained parents who have been separated from children, according to DHS.
4. Taking Babies From Nursing Mothers?
CNN reported last week on an illegal immigrant from Honduras who claimed her nursing daughter was pulled away from her before she was handcuffed. CNN cited a lawyer from a liberal legal group called the Texas Civil Rights Project.
In a conference call with reporters last week, a senior Department of Homeland Security official said this was not the case. “We do not separate breastfeeding children from their parents. That does not exist. That is not a policy. That is not something that DHS does,” an official told reporters Friday. “We believe that that is false.”
An estimated 14,500 to 17,500 individuals are smuggled into the United States each year. For perspective, that number constitutes about 5.7 percent of total apprehensions of illegal immigrants in 2017, though apprehensions don’t account for all border crossings.
[italics and colored emphasis mine]
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Left Is Spreading Misinformation About Our Border Crisis. Here’s What’s Really Happening." - Kirstjen Nielsen / @SecNielsen / June 19, 2018 / https://www.dailysignal.com/2018/06/19/dhs-secretary-critics-of-current-border-enforcement-are-those-whose-policies-created-this-crisis/
"Why The Left Always Lies About Children" - Kevin McCullough Kevin McCullough |Posted: Jun 17, 2018; https://townhall.com/columnists/kevinmccullough/2018/06/17/why-the-left-always-lies-about-children-n2491563
"...The faux indignant on this issue are correct on this point: the children did nothing to put themselves into these situations. You know who did?"
"Lots of adults around them. Parents in some of these situations have lost their children due to the inability to even prove they are the child’s parent. Couple that with the reality that you have had numerous cases of smugglers taking children from the band of people they are smuggling and in turn are using them as a supposed child of their own and now you’ve got really bad people—smugglers (truly evil)—mixed with more minimal law breakers (illegal border crossers)—and all of them are using the child in one way or another to advance their cause."
"This has nothing to do with legal immigration either. The establishment of such procedures is designed inherently to protect children from being pawned in such back-and-forths, by both the children’s guardians as well as ill-intended criminals and governmental authorities. Never mind that the purpose of the policy is to highly discourage people from making those dangerous treks across central America and Mexico in the first place. The genuine purpose even being to save lives that otherwise too often wind up lost."
"...children are being used to gain illegal entry into the country. Department of Homeland Security has noted the uptick in smuggling operations and the extent the use of children is being implemented. That is and should be considered criminal."
"We enforce the laws and even administer consequences for crime, because crime must not be allowed to flourish. Chaos is the outcome. Ask the people who live in the southern most thirty mile region of Arizona that has become uninhabitable by law-abiding citizens."
"But we also enforce laws because it deters additional crime. When we repeatedly deport without consequence, the dangerous activity of attempting to break back into the country is repeated. Under Sessions’ justice department enforcement (prosecution) is increasing—which is causing the “separation” crisis. But overall (even with a slight spike this spring) illegal entry into the US is on the decline. That’s good."
"Legal immigration is ordered. It is not oppressive (contrary to what the Facebooker was implying in posting the verse above) to ask people to enter the country in an orderly fashion. It isn’t even immoral to do so."
"We are blessed to live in a nation that has the opportunity that we have and I personally hope that we remain a beacon to people that seek that hope. If that means we need to increase the levels of legal immigration then thats a discussion also worth having."
"A couple of final thoughts. I know several of the commenters that weighed in on the Facebooker’s thread. These folks were fine with the networks pushing the shooting victims of Parkland Florida onto the national stage, but none wished to hear from the kids who disagreed. These ladies were all about the women’s march, and on some level were hostile to the March for Life. They have also gladly repeated this false meme that “children are being ripped” from families on the southern border, but care not a peep to mention that Planned Parenthood literally rips children from their mothers’ wombs before slicing them into sellable pieces."
"As Boorman points out we can enforce the law in humane ways. We can also do a better job of explaining the dangers and why stricter enforcement saves children’s lives. We can even admit that Sessions is goofy and has underwhelmed in his performance in public. But he isn’t wrong."
"Obeying the law, is good for everyone. Teaching children to obey the law is healthy. Being a nation where laws are observed and followed, has been key to why others have wished to come here...."
[italics and colored emphasis mine]
No comments:
Post a Comment