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Monday, May 28, 2018

The American Conservative - 1,475 Disappeared Children


A shocking video, but look at the others here too? Immigrant women workers being raped on night shifts and in the fields at American farms. 

Trafficked in America, 1,475 Disappeared Children. Documentary

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/trafficked-in-america/

The American Conservative 

The Arizona Republic writer E.J. Montini has a story that is so horrible that it can’t be true … can it? Yes, it’s true. Excerpts:

The Trump administration recently announced a new, get-tough policy that will separate parents from their children if the family is caught crossing the border illegally.

It was a big news story. So big it overshadowed the fact that the federal government has lost – yes, lost – 1,475 migrant children in its custody.

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen told Congress that within 48 hours of being taken into custody the children are transferred to the Department of Health and Human Services, which finds places for them to stay.

More:

The Office of Refugee Resettlement reported at the end of 2017 that of the 7,000-plus children placed with sponsored individuals, the agency did not know where 1,475 of them were.

Read the whole thing.

Last month, PBS’s Frontline reported that some of these children were released by the feds into the hands of human traffickers:

In 2014, at least 10 trafficking victims, including eight minors, were discovered during a raid by federal and local law enforcement in Portman’s home state of Ohio. As FRONTLINE examined in the recent documentary Trafficked in America, HHS had released several minors to the traffickers. The committee said the case was due to policies and procedures that were “inadequate to protect the children in the agency’s care.”

After unaccompanied minors arrive in the United States, often to reunite with family members or to flee violence or poverty in their home countries, they are typically transferred from border patrol or customs officers to the custody of HHS, which often reunites the minors with a relative or another sponsor. The department is supposed to place check-in phone calls 30 days after a minor’s placement, but during the hearing, Wagner acknowledged gaps in that system.

More:

In an interview with FRONTLINE for Trafficked in America, Portman said that HHS cannot ignore its responsibility for unaccompanied minors.

“We’ve got these kids,” he said. “They’re here. They’re living on our soil. And for us to just, you know, assume someone else is going to take care of them and throw them to the wolves, which is what HHS was doing, is flat-out wrong. I don’t care what you think about immigration policy, it’s wrong.”

Here’s a link to watch the entire Frontline “Trafficked in America” episode online.

Nearly 1,500 kids, disappeared. I agree with Sen. Portman: no matter what you think of US immigration policy, this is horrifying.

Why is this not a massive scandal? We’re talking children here. I suppose that’s one way to guarantee that people don’t try to cross the border illegally with their children: tell them that the US government will take their kids away, and oops, might even lose them, or even hand them off to human traffickers.

We can’t stand for this, America.


The American Conservative - 1,475 Disappeared Children

1 comment:

  1. Here’s the deal…

    [1] U.S.-sponsored wars, coups, and neoliberalism have impoverished the world, creating mass inequality.

    [2] As a result, desperate humans seek to avoid death by famine. They come to the center of the Empire as refugees.

    [3] At the center of the Empire, the right-wingers and Trump-bots do not blame the wars, the coups, and neoliberalism. Instead, they blame the refugees, calling them rats.

    Central America, for example, is so bad that even women there can’t find jobs. In Guatemala, Claudia Gonzalez earned a degree in accounting two years ago, but she could find no work. Therefore she went 1,500 miles north to the USA. The journey took three weeks. She arrived at the border last Wednesday (23 May 2018). The instant Claudia, aged 20, crossed the border, a member of the U.S. Border Patrol drew his pistol and blew her brains out, telling other refugees, “See? This is what happens to you here!” This was in a residential area in the town of Rio Bravo, Texas, less than a mile from the border.

    Trump-bots applauded the murder.

    The rising level of hate and selfishness is causing the nightmare to spread. It will soon engulf the USA. (In many parts it already has.)

    The Trump-bots will blame Hillary for this. The Hillary-bots will blame Trump, Russia, and heterosexual males.

    ReplyDelete