The Radical Kanji

Sailor went overboard from the USS Abraham Lincoln this month as conditions on the ship prompt lawmakers’ demand for answers

Anat Shenker-Osorio at Public Notice:

Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff, is making his dreams come true: accelerating the arrest and removal of thousands of unaccompanied immigrant kids. The man behind family separation in the first Trump term who once boasted that policy would “prove to be a migration deterrent” has now teamed up with another deadly threat, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to attack the most vulnerable kids in our country: those here on their own. By law, kids who cross the border alone are put into the care of the Office Of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). In recognition of children’s vulnerabilities and need for protection, this system exists outside the confines of the Department of Homeland Security and therefore the clutches of ICE and Border Patrol.

Thanks to the Constitution itself and federal law, these children have the right to legal counsel, age-appropriate living quarters usually in state-licensed settings with prompt release to vetted sponsors, and fair hearings with special allowances to protect them from trafficking or other abuse. But as The Guardian reported from immigration court in New York City, “the faces of migrant children — some as young as three — have been beamed onto a video screen throughout the summer as they faced deportation hearings.” These children did not have lawyers, in violation of aforementioned federal law, and thus faced interrogation by Trump appointee Judge Lisa Ling.

In the shadows

HHS refused to renew the contract for the legal services to represent these children after stiffing lawyers seven months of pay to the tune of $65 million. The nonprofits successfully sued for and have received back pay. Nevertheless, a $244 million contract went to Our Rescue, an NGO whose founder was accused of sex trafficking and abusing women and whose CEO had a tenure as a DHS agent lowlighted by setting up a fake university to entrap and then arrest foreign students.

As of June, legal experts report that around 1,800 unaccompanied kids are in so-called ORR “shelters.” These sites are intended to be child appropriate and focused on welfare, but spots in Texas, Florida, and South Carolina, for example, no longer have state licensing, exempting them from oversight and inspections. These kids are in captivity an average of 194 days, where the law demands a maximum of 20 and no more than 72 hours in DHS holds. Last August, the Trump administration attempted to send children alone to Guatemala in the middle of the night, before judges halted the flights. But if there are no real lawyers present such eleventh hour rescues become impossible. And that appears to be precisely the purpose of the let’s-first-eliminate-the-competent-lawyers scheme. Indeed, the regime has accelerated plans to build new or repurpose places to hold thousands more kids captive. They put out a bid for a 3,000 Texas child concentration camp — the legally designated term for a place where civilians are held without due process — and there are widely reported proposals to convert an ex-military base deemed toxic into a second site in Louisiana. At least for the time it takes to conduct the mass tribunals already underway, new beds are intended to be filled with kids who are then sent to other countries without adult supervision or loved ones to meet them upon arrival.

More people should be talking about this.

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