torturing latin immigrant children: a growth industry [Grisly updates]

(Or: how many sadistic sociopaths can dance on the head of a pin?)

From Patrick Martin at wsws.org June 22: ‘US court documents reveal Immigrant children tied down, hooded, beaten, stripped and drugged’

“Court documents made public in Virginia and Texas give a glimpse of the systematic brutality being meted out to immigrant children in both public and private jails. Children are strapped down, hooded and beaten, or drugged by force, as part of the everyday procedure in what can only be called the American Gulag.

An Associated Press report published Thursday gave details of the abuses committed last year against young Latino migrants at the Shenandoah Valley Juvenile Center near Staunton, Virginia. Lawyers for the teenage victims sued the prison—a state facility run by a consortium of seven towns and cities in the Shenandoah Valley—and a court hearing is set for July.

According to a half-dozen sworn statements, given by the victims in Spanish and then translated for filing with the federal court for the Western District of Virginia, children as young as 14 were beaten while handcuffed, tied down to chairs while stripped naked and hooded, and held for long periods in solitary confinement, sometimes naked and cold.”

Patrick rightfully notes that these forms of torture are practiced at CIA torture prisons and Guantanamo Bay, and have boomeranged back to amerika to be unleashed on immigrant children, no less, as Trump further demonizes Latino immigrants with his and Beauregard’s ‘Zero Tolerance’ policies .  The lawsuit is being brought by nonprofit Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs which declares that “they are subjected to unconstitutional conditions that shock the conscience, including violence by staff, abusive and excessive use of seclusion and restraints, and the denial of necessary mental health care.” As a result of “malicious and sadistic applications of force,” the youth have “sustained significant injuries, both physical and psychological.”

A 15-year-old Honduran youth said in his statement that he was handcuffed, put in a restraint chair, strapped down from his chest to his feet, a suffocating bag with eye holes put over his head…he said they had full control over him.

A 15-year-old from Mexico who’d spent time there reported similar treatment, except that he was stripped naked, his hands strapped to the chair instead, and was left for two days and nights like that.  A 14-year-old Guatemalan kid reported he’d often been stuck in a tiny cell for 23 hours a day, and that he and other kids were strapped into restraint chairs ‘when the guards couldn’t get them to calm down’

”A 17-year-old who fled Mexico to escape an abusive father and drug cartel violence was arrested at the US border and passed through several detention centers before arriving at Shenandoah, one of three facilities in the United States with contracts from the Office of Refugee Resettlement, part of the Department of Health and Human Services, to provide “secure facilities” for young immigrants. The boy was frequently shackled, usually with cloth bindings, and reported at least one violent strip search and several beatings. He was driven to attempt suicide several times.

Other allegations include that the Latino youth received worse food and facilities than local juvenile prisoners, mostly white, and that meals were frequently cold and inadequate, leaving the children hungry.”

The unaccompanied minors at Shenandoah were not gang members, and had been screened for such connections, and that their mental health issues were a result of the traumas from their home countries.

This particular Dept. of Health and Human Services’ ‘Office of Refugee Resettlement’ gulag was run by a regional board, but under the watch of Democrat Gov. Terry McCauliffe.  His successor, Democrat Gov. Ralph Northam, ordered an investigation after he’d read the AP report.

Governor orders probe of abuse claims by immigrant children’, AP yesterday

“Gov. Ralph Northam announced the probe in a tweet hours after The Associated Press reported the allegations. They were included in a federal civil rights lawsuit with a half-dozen sworn statements from Latino youths held for months or years at the Shenandoah Valley Juvenile Center. The AP report also cited an adult who saw bruises and broken bones the children said were caused by guards.

Northam, a Democrat, said the allegations were disturbing and directed the state’s secretary of public safety and homeland security and the Department of Juvenile Justice to report back to him “to ensure the safety of every child being held there.”

In court filings, lawyers for the detention facility have denied all the allegations of physical abuse. The incidents described in the lawsuit occurred from 2015 to 2018, during both the Obama and Trump administrations.

“Robert Carey, who served as director of Refugee Resettlement under the Obama administration, said Tuesday he only heard about the complaints at the Shenandoah center after he left office in January 2017. Had he known, Carey said, he “would have been all over that trying to figure out what needed to be done, including termination of contracts.””

Yeah, yeah, yeah…Mark Warner, Tim Kaine, even R House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte all said they were ‘deeply troubled by the report’ and by gum, they’d get to the bottom of it!

The AP report had noted that some of the youth had been screened as having multiple mental health issues, but weren’t given meds that might have helped alleviate their depressions, anxieties, fears, and acting out.

On the other end of the spectrum, in Texas: ‘Immigrant children forcibly injected with drugs, lawsuit claims’, revealnews.org June 20, 2018

“Children held at Shiloh Treatment Center, a government contractor south of Houston that houses immigrant minors, have described being held down and injected, according to the federal court filings. The lawsuit alleges that children were told they would not be released or see their parents unless they took medication and that they only were receiving vitamins.

Parents and the children themselves told attorneys the drugs rendered them unable to walk, afraid of people and wanting to sleep constantly, according to affidavits filed April 23 in U.S. District Court in California.”

Shiloh is among 71 companies that receive funds from the federal government to house and supervise immigrant children deemed unaccompanied minors. These are the places set up to receive the more than 2,000 children separated from their parents in the past six weeks under the new Trump administration policy as they leave temporary way stations at the border.

“An investigation by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting found that nearly half of the $3.4 billion paid to those companies in the last four years went to homes with serious allegations of mistreating children. In nearly all cases reviewed by Reveal, the federal government continued contracts with the companies after serious allegations were raised.

At Reveal’s request, forensic psychiatrist Mark. J. Mills assessed materials from 420 pages of children’s medical records and statements filed in California federal court this April.

“You don’t have to be a rocket scientist here; it looks like they’re trying to control agitation and aggressive behavior with antipsychotic drugs,” said Mills, who practices in the Washington, D.C., area and was an expert witness for a lawsuit that in 2008 stopped the federal government from forcibly administering antipsychotic drugs to deportees.

“You don’t need to administer these kinds of drugs unless someone is plucking out their eyeball or some such. The facility should not use these drugs to control behavior. That’s not what antipsychotics should be used for. That’s like the old Soviet Union used to do.”

One child was prescribed 10 different shots and pills, including the antipsychotic drugs Latuda, Geodon and Olanzapine, the Parkinson’s medication Benztropine, the seizure medications Clonazepam and Divalproex, the nerve pain medication and antidepressant Duloxetine, and the cognition enhancer Guanfacine.”

Red Kahina on Twitter had posited that it was Joseph Mengele experimentation; I take her meaning, even if they didn’t keep proper ‘notes’.

“Shiloh already had a reputation for mistreating children. In December 2014, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Houston, called for Shiloh to be shut down, citing reports from the Houston Chronicle of “physical violence, unreasonable and excessive use of physical restraints, administering emergency medications without notice to governmental authorities, and several deaths of minor children while in custody,” she said in a statement.

But the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services continued sending children and funds to Shiloh – a total of more than $19 million after the congresswoman called for its closure, according to federal payment records.”

Shiloh has contracted to house immigrant children since 2013. Last year, the most lucrative yet under its agreement, Shiloh collected $5.6 million.”

Seventy other companies receive federal funds to ‘supervise’ unaccompanied minors, and are set up to receive another 2,000 children separated from their parents over the past six weeks once they leave the temporary way stations at the border.

“An investigation by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting found that nearly half of the $3.4 billion paid to those companies in the last four years went to homes with serious allegations of mistreating children. In nearly all cases reviewed by Reveal, the federal government continued contracts with the companies after serious allegations were raised.”

But wait!  Hadn’t Boss Tweet rescinded his order to separate children from their parents?  Not according to Patrick Martin quoting the Wall Street Urinal (that link I hadn’t bothered searching for):

“According to a report in the Wall Street Journal Thursday, the Trump administration awarded multiple contracts involving tens of millions of dollars earlier this year to build detention facilities for children. This confirms that the mass separation of children from their parents, which followed the announcement of the “zero tolerance” policy by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, was not an unexpected byproduct of the new policy, but was planned and deliberate. It is a premeditated crime, the state kidnapping of more than 2,400 children, for which Trump, Sessions, Stephen Miller, Kirstjen Nielsen and other top officials should be prosecuted and jailed.”

Far from abandoning this policy—as media reports on the executive order issued by Trump Wednesday suggested—the White House is preparing to accelerate the mass detention of immigrants, including children. A Pentagon spokesman said Thursday that military bases in Texas and Arkansas had been reviewed as possible locations for housing as many as 20,000 immigrant children, double the number currently in custody.”

A bonus of sorts: ‘Philip May and family profit from Trump’s caging of children in detention centers’, RT 22 Jun, 2018

“Capital Group, the company of UK PM’s husband Philip May, profited from Donald Trump’s caging of children in immigration detention centers. The centers are run by General Dynamics, which is partly owned by May’s investment firm.

General Dynamics has been assisting the US Office of Refugee Resettlement in processing immigrant-children cases during President Trump’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy. As many as 2,000 children are reported to have been separated from their parents in just six weeks under the controversial policy. A distressing audio clip of children sobbing went viral on social media.”

Read the rest for other ‘defense’ contracting corporations in which he owns controlling shares. Ptui, you Profiteering Masters of War.  ‘Do you think that your money can buy back your $ouls?’

(cross-posted from Café Babylon)

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detroitmechworks's picture

Yes, I will absolutely Go there. If there is ANY prosecution about this, you know for a fact that shit is going to fall on the bottom of the totem pole. They'll probably prosecute some poor enlisted who were following orders, and they'll hang. And we'll forget all about this...

And the next time it happens, Nobody will remember the last time this exact same shit happened.

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I do not pretend I know what I do not know.

wendy davis's picture

@detroitmechworks

female janis karpinski. dunno about what history will record about her. but sure, it will be forgotten as has always and ever been. 'down the rabbit hole of memory'. but i was so sickened bringing this evil sthat i'm gonna take a break, free my 3 loaves of sourdough bread from their pans, and watch a david tennant film set in 1938 berlin and warsaw...to (kinda) lol, wash this outta my brain.

thank you for reading and witnessing.

on edit: we'll never know the truth, but she'd claimed she was trying to be a bit of a whistleblower:

"The U.S. general who was in charge of running prisons in Iraq told Army investigators earlier this year that she had resisted decisions by superior officers to hand over control of the prisons to military intelligence officials and to authorize the use of lethal force as a first step in keeping order -- command decisions that have come in for heavy criticism in the Iraq prison abuse scandal.

Brig. Gen. Janis L. Karpinski, head of the 800th Military Police Brigade, spoke of her resistance to the decisions in a detailed account of her tenure furnished to Army investigators. It places two of the highest-ranking Army officers now in Iraq, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller [from Gitmo] and Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, at the heart of decision-making on both matters."

and of course none of that stands as an excuse for what she might have done, or in fact did, while she was there. but that's the only relevant piece i could find in a quick search. egad, i just went to see if she has a twit account, she does, and ran into her own explanation at the guardian 2005, an extract from her book.

'I was a woman in a warrior's world'; General Janis Karpinski was commander of Abu Ghraib prison when the abuse scandal erupted. In a memoir out this week she reveals her fury at being made the scapegoat'

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The Aspie Corner's picture

Angel Families: People whose loved ones were 'victims' of E-leegul Immigintz. Meanwhile, the Repigs are now slashing 5.4 TRILLION dollars from domestic programs to fatten their donors and continue the world-wide asset stripping led by the bloated military.

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Modern education is little more than toeing the line for the capitalist pigs.

Guerrilla Liberalism won't liberate the US or the world from the iron fist of capital.

wendy davis's picture

@The Aspie Corner

'police lives matter'. someone on twitter had tweeted taibbi's 'all eyes on the border, congress just quietly passed the extra billions that D's awarded Trump in the defense budget (or close). got to wonderin' where so i went a-hunting: wikileaks, aye gawd.

i'm shutting down for the night; sleep well if you're able.

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wendy davis's picture

@wendy davis

While the world continues to be transfixed over the gruesome images coming from the border, business went on as usual in Washington. Earlier this week, the Senate quietly passed the $716 billion "John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019."

The bill, which passed 85-10 in a massive show of bipartisan support, represents a considerable boost in defense spending across the board – roughly $82 billion just for next year.

The annual increase by itself is bigger than the annual defense budget of Russia ($61 billion) and the two-year jump of over $165 billion eclipses the entire defense budget of China ($150 billion).”

the roll call vote is here.

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Big Al's picture

Thanks for the essay Wendy. That's bombshell type news there, unless you're a conservative libertarian asshole.

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wendy davis's picture

@Big Al

but i don't think many of the Ds involved essentially give a fuck, either. oh, yes, now they'll pretend smoke's comin' out of their ears: 'so troubling!'. this is war on the already oppressed and terrified, mainly by way of amerikan policy in 'our backyard'.

also from patrick martin: "Obama’s Department of Homeland Security chief Jeh Johnson declared that the jailing of Central American refugees seeking asylum, and the separation of parents and children, would have a positive effect in reducing the sudden influx of refugees in 2014. It was Terry McAuliffe, the longtime crony of Hillary Clinton, who presided over the torture of immigrant teenagers at Shenandoah from 2014 to 2017.".

equal opportunity sociopathic (but oh, so pragmatic!) racialists, but the labels kinda get lost in the shuffle, don't they?

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@wendy davis what has been going on has been going on for decades.

After all, business interests love them some cheap labor.

Some business owners have even decided not to open their production this cycle (crab places in Maine, wine places in Colorado) because they can't possibly operate without the cheap labor.

Yet they have so much financial strength, that they can forgo a couple of years of revenues from production. Yeah, they are hurting, all right.

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dfarrah

wendy davis's picture

@dfarrah

but as always, i've forgotten the extent and details. just found a politifact hit saying 'no he did not specify breaking up families 'experts told us', lol (what a dodge), but:

"The biggest change the legislation brought about for families was deporting immigrants who were once legally in the United States but now subject to deportation because of a criminal conviction.

"The 1996 reforms made it easier to remove previously legal immigrants (many of whom had married, settled down, and had kids in the United States) for criminal conviction that had previously not made them eligible for removal," said Rick Su, an immigration law professor at University of Buffalo."

and as w/ O, that might mean some misdemeanor or other. now under reagan, iran-contra and all, i have no idea. but good point, dfarrah. and of course under O, businesses using the undocumented could have been made to bust them, but of course, that would have been, as you say, 'bad for the bottom line: bidness'.

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cash-munching beast logo, stellar example of what this system is about: they got theirs.

Stop These Fucking Wars

peace

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Ya got to be a Spirit, cain't be no Ghost. . .

Explain Bldg #7. . . still waiting. . .

If you’ve ever wondered whether you would have complied in 1930’s Germany,
Now you know. . .
sign at protest march

wendy davis's picture

@Tall Bald and Ugly @Tall Bald and Ugly

dada-esque artist. he use to send me all his new work, and i'd...work with them. i did write that one up in some venue or other, and oh...it was ghastly, considering it's mainly a digestive and elimination system they share. fancy the belches as farts sharing, lol! freda ate it w/ a spoon, of course. but now he puts all his stuff a 'creative resistance' for all the world to share, and good him.

gonna update this diary below, TB&U.

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wendy davis's picture

UPDATES:

from wsws.org today: ‘The American gulag: US Navy planning to build military camps to jail 120,000 immigrants’, wsws.org

"A draft memo leaked to Time magazine Friday reveals preparations by the United States Navy to build sprawling internment camps to house over 120,000 undocumented immigrants. Massive camps housing nearly 50,000 each are being proposed in Northern and Southern California, close to the country’s largest immigration populations, with an initial 25,000 to be housed on military bases in Alabama.

The capacity of the new facilities would match the total number of Japanese and Japanese-Americans detained during World War Two. This follows a separate Department of Defense announcement Thursday that the military will erect detention camps on four Army bases in Texas and Arkansas that will hold another 20,000 migrant children.

The establishment of military prison camps on American soil marks an ominous milestone in US history. These are being erected to detain not only immigrants, but also striking workers, protesters against police violence, and all who resist conditions of deepening exploitation, war and dictatorship. This police state policy is aimed at the entire working class.

Indicative of the complicity of the corporate media in these dictatorial moves, neither NBC, ABC nor CBS mentioned the proposal for the Navy to set up concentration camps on their Friday evening news broadcasts.

The internal memo details plans to construct “temporary and austere” tent camps to house 25,000 undocumented migrants immediately, with massive facilities to come later. Under the proposal, 25,000 beds would be built within weeks at two Navy airfields near Mobile, Alabama—Navy Outlying Field Wolf in Orange Beach and Navy Outlying Field Silverhill—at an estimated cost of $233 million for six months of operation.

The document also proposes construction of two internment camps in California that would each house up to 47,000 detained immigrants. One would be located on the former site of Naval Weapons Station Concord, near San Francisco, and the other would be built at Camp Pendleton, the nation’s largest Marine Corps base on the coast of California between San Diego and Los Angeles.

The memo also calls for further study of a proposal to detain an unspecified number of undocumented workers at the Marine Corps Air Station outside of Yuma, Arizona."

here's the Time mag coverage.

via the popular resistance newsletter: ‘Immigration lawyer recounts a conversation with Obama about the border crisis that he says 'shook me to my core', businessinsider, june 20

"R. Andrew Free argued on Twitter that the fallout from the sounds and images from locations along the southern US border and detention centers where migrants are being held were an extension of practices that began under President Barack Obama.

The lawyer recounted a 2015 exchange with Obama, during which Free said he implored the president to close two detention centers in southern Texas out of concern for the women and children being held there.

Those detention centers, in Dilley and Karnes City, were opened as part of the Obama administration's effort to house the migrants who had reached the US seeking asylum from the ongoing violence in Central America.

Free recalled the conditions he witnessed at the detention centers where some of the women and children were held.

"I remember hearing the constant, violent coughing and sickness of small children, and the worry of their mothers who stood in the sun outside the clinic all day only to be told their kids should 'drink water,'" Free tweeted. "I remember nearly doubling over when I saw the line of strollers."

and more on Obomba's uber-hypocrisy (DACA) and free's knowledge of what they're fleeing from.

will rachel maddow report that? did she report on the torturing of immigrant chirren under her darling Obomba? did any teevee news? on edit: just checked, but most coverage blames trump for it, including veterans today. good gawd all-friday.

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@wendy davis it already has.

I wonder who is behind this migration? Is Soros funding these people?

I'm laying this at the feet of the open borders wackos. Who is convincing these people to migrate to the US so that they end up imprisoned? Who is financing their necessities and keeping them safe while they travel? I'll paraphrase Laura Ingraham - who has supposedly spent a lot of time in those So American countries - it would be better to provide aid to the people in their home country, not through the governments, but through non-corrupt entities.

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dfarrah

TheOtherMaven's picture

@dfarrah
Be sure TPTB will cloak their Total Slave State under such a humane-sounding figleaf.

I'm sure FM Busby never wanted to be a prophet, and would be appalled to see his dystopic visions coming true.

See especially:

* Rissa Kerguelen (aka Young Rissa) (1976)
* Rissa and Tregare (1979)
* The Long View (1976)

Also available as a three-in-one under the first title - there's also a two-in-one that does NOT include the third book, so make sure what you're getting!

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There is no justice. There can be no peace.

wendy davis's picture

@TheOtherMaven

i hadn't heard of f.m. busby before, and while his wiki page describes what his works were about, i'm none the wiser as to how it applies here. unless, of course, you might mean obomba's 'deferred action so illegals' chirren can stay and work' for cheap?

but as ever, i'm trying to multi-task here, and while i used to be great at it...not so much in my dotage, smile. i can't even remember what ingredients i use to make thai noodles, lol.
thanks for reading, amiga.

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TheOtherMaven's picture

@wendy davis

The establishment of military prison camps on American soil marks an ominous milestone in US history. These are being erected to detain not only immigrants, but also striking workers, protesters against police violence, and all who resist conditions of deepening exploitation, war and dictatorship. This police state policy is aimed at the entire working class.

It's a bit difficult to describe Busby's capitalist dystopia in a few words, but - basically most of the world is run by the corporations, for the corporations, and the serfs are increasingly crammed into barracks where they are forcibly sterilized, regimented, robbed of any form of personal dignity, and forced to perform slave labor - including, especially for females, sex on demand. There's a small section of the world that's not under the corporate heel (the Hulzein Establishment), and a tiny sliver of carrot for the slaves - a lottery that makes whoever wins it fantastically rich (for as long as they can keep out of the tentacles of the corporate state, which for most of them is not very long). The first volume of the story concerns how a little girl (titular heroine Rissa Kerguelen) is ensnared by the corporate dystopia, and how, via the lottery and a Hulzein agent, she manages to escape after years of demeaning abuse.

Volumes Two and Three slowly bring the wheel full circle, as our escapee heroine participates in events that bring down upon the corporate state the karma it has earned and deserved.

But really, see if you can find copies and read them.

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There is no justice. There can be no peace.

wendy davis's picture

@TheOtherMaven

and while i keep swearing i'll learn to read one day, yes, i do remember that part. alec is kinda extrapolating on the 'soon all the dissenters will be in fema camps', the time mag piece didn't posit that, so... a bit polemical as to seeing the future of the under-classes.

if busby's vision is correct, yes, some will be slaves, as is far too often the case in CCA and other for-profit prisons. for now, these planned concentration camps are 'meant' to 'house' immigrants awaiting criminal charges, and iirc, the average wait is over 800 days, and often the crime is 'illegal entry', or 'suspected of being a drug dealer, gang member, or was under Obomba/jeh johnson rule.

but thanks for expanding and including busby's inverted totalitarian dystopia. in many ways, many of us are already slaves, aren't we?

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snoopydawg's picture

@TheOtherMaven

Rex 84

FEMA camps have long been said to be conspiracy theories and if you search for them you'll find lots of sites that say they are. But you can see that martial law has been planned for over a century. Each president will keep these executive orders updated.

FEMA camps and EOs

I hope that I don't live long enough to find out if they are CTs or not. But things always have a point where they start from like you have already stated.

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Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

wendy davis's picture

@snoopydawg

for a long time, and has been declared in 'emergencies' according to Our Betters. i was trying to remember the time frame of the declaration of 'constitution-free zones', two hundred miles from any amerikan border. i'd written abut it but as life is a time bandit for me, i just found it was from 2013 (under obomba). 'How to Learn to Love the March of Jackboots or… Hear Music Instead'.

At the time, I'd reckoned it was great satire, don't remember how it was received by the actual mostly Ds of firedoglake proper. well, there a whole 'nother exposé on customs and border and armed drones that's too long to explain easily, but this:

"Did you know that over 100 million Americans live in a Constitution Free Zone? This is a zone that according to the ACLU, seems to be legally exempt from providing you with your Constitutional rights and specifically violates the 4th and 5th Amendments of the Constitution.

'According to the Government and the Border Patrol, jurisdiction of the border patrol is within 100 miles of any border, effectively claiming 2 out of every 3 Americans as a resident within their jurisdiction. These boundaries or “jurisdiction” create what is defined by the ACLU, as the Constitutional Free Zone, where your fourth amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure, and your fifth amendment right to a fair trial and being innocent until proven guilty by a jury seem to just become void.'

and at some point, all dissidents were labeled as terr'ists, can't remember under whose administration, causing anthony freda to create this image: you are all terrorists

zo...while your links are rather dated, it's likely some of the longer plan, whichever 'deep state' is in effect.

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wendy davis's picture

@dfarrah

first, it's not clear to me that anyone is 'funding them' at all, unless you're referring to the unaccompanied minors that hypocrite obomba's DACA policy was, but even if that, often families might take up a collection for a bus ticket, wanting to keep their child/children safe from the ravages and dangers mainly created by the US. and those would take a book to write about, country by country.

but just for one, filling mexico with guns for drug dealers in trade for illegal drugs for the US, and i mean coke, heroin, etc., not cannabis. but O's detention camps for women and chirren was also augmented by the deal he made with pena nieto: he paid him to stop them at the southern border of mexico, and essentially do what he wanted with them. bet that wasn't pretty.

in other nations in central america, esp., arranging the overthrows of duly elected governments not er...friendly to the amerikan hegemon, small wonder, and what happened later to the supporters of the overthrown regimes, and the neoliberal austerity programs that came with the new ones.

as with obomba, of course, but here's immigration attorney free here again:
"Members of the Trump administration in recent days have avoided that characterization of its policy, but some officials, including the White House chief staff, John Kelly, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, have acknowledged that goal.

Free said the logic of detention as a deterrent to illegal immigration ignores the reality that many US-bound migrants are fleeing violence in Central America because they believe they have no other options.

As Free put it, the deterrence argument "assumes a parent would rationally choose to watch her daughter raped or murdered in Guatemala, El Salvador, or Honduras instead of helping her flee to seek the domestic and international legal protections of US law."

He continued: "People in the Northern Triangle were (and are) fleeing for their lives. They're looking to what we've held out as a shining city on a hill and following the beacon to safety.

now that was back in the obomba days, but jeh johnson had said and done the same exact thing. but who reaps profits ? back then,

"Free reasoned that Obama believed that basically only immigration attorneys cared about the practice of holding asylum-seekers in the detention centers, an apparent byproduct of a deal struck between the Obama administration and the Corrections Corporation of America, which had received a four-year, $1 billion government contract to build facilities to hold women and children seeking refuge in the US, The Washington Post reported in 2016."

the subject of this OP was the $32 billion paid by HHS ad DHS to these often barbaric and sadistic 'resettlement homes'.

ingraham's formula sounds like some easy fix, but all of this is either directly part of the plans, or a by-product of the bigger plans by the oligarchical classes ruling both the US and in 'our backyard' nations. i can't imagine what sort of philanthropic organization either of you imagine could make their lives better on any scale. same as in amerika, the rich get rich by corrupt power, the poor get poorer and deader.

if i get your drift, that is. ha; wasn't it laura ingraham who'd coined the term 'anchor babies'? if so, she must have learned have learned purdy danged good lessons from the elites she met in SA. 'open borders wackos': who are they?

am i one give that i'm convinced that most immigrants come to amerika from the south because of the evils wrought onto them by USian policies and i have heart for them?

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@wendy davis about 1/3 of what you said.

The open borders people would include people who support unlimited immigration into the US; they don't believe in countries having borders. One would be Cathy Areu.

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dfarrah

wendy davis's picture

@dfarrah

i'd wikied cathy areu, no clues there. but there's no question that nationalism's massively on the rise, which is said to be the end state products of capitalism.

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I don't know whats going on with the political spectrum but our humanity and morality are being challenged by selfish narcissists who don't give a crap about humanity and morality. I'm ready to join with Democrats and moderate Republicans and Independents and every other decent person who is seeing this immoral shit done by our government with our tax money. And they still won't let us see the kids. Fuck Them. Good people everywhere need to come together and stand up.

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Beware the bullshit factories.

wendy davis's picture

@Timmethy2.0

'Good people everywhere need to come together and stand up.', i question your pragmatism on supporting 'Democrats and moderate Republicans and Independents, etc.' first, after electing anyone to federal office based on their promises, i've always seen their feet of clay be unearthed (and that includes the EU and greece) quite quickly.

second, as i'd posited above, this all seems to be part of the nationalistic plan, for both Ds and Rs, and is the product of late stage capitalism (prolly to the marxists among us).

a comment at the cafe brought this from wsws as well: 'Italy’s interior minister announces plan to register Roma and Sinti', Marianne Arens, 23 June 2018

"Following his threat to expel “all 600,000” immigrants from Italy, Italian interior minister Matteo Salvini (Lega) now plans to register and count all Sinti and Roma living in the country. Such a move would be the prelude to mass, fascist-style repression.

“I’m drawing up a dossier on the Roma in Italy at the Ministry, it’s a mess. It used to be called a census, but you cannot call it that anymore. So let’s call it a personal register or an inventory,” Salvini said in an interview on Telelombardia, a Milan-based local television network, on Monday. He would prefer to deport all of the country’s 140,000 Roma, but, “unfortunately, we have to keep the Italians among them,” he added provocatively.

On Wednesday, Salvini announced that many local authorities had already contacted him to declare their readiness to start counting.

Salvini’s project of a Roma card index recalls one of the darkest periods in European history. It draws inspiration directly from the vicious measures of Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime, which registered all Jews in the country before their deportation to Nazi extermination camps. Sinti and Roma were also deprived of all rights, persecuted and murdered by the Italian fascists in league with Hitler’s regime.

The plans of the ultra-right interior minister are so monstrous that representatives of his own government, from Lega and Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S, Five Star Movement), were forced to repudiate them. Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said on Tuesday, “No one here has any intention of filling a register or making counts on an ethnic basis, a measure which, by the way, would be unconstitutional and obviously discriminatory.” Luigi Di Maio (M5S), vice premier and Salvini’s coalition partner, whose father was a neo-fascist local councilor, commented: “One cannot conduct censuses on a racist basis.”

and so it goes, as kurt vonnegut would say. but i am sincerely glad that you've witnessed this particular evil afoot that's being paid for by ameriakan taxpayers & former taxpyers, even partly by the military war budget increases 'necessitating' more hits on what's left of the social safety net.

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