KelleyKramer
KelleyKramer's JournalInside the ICE-box: Migrant kids describe being brutalized by US officials in a frigid old Walmart
This is disgusting and is being done in our name. I think this is just scratching the surface of what is being done. There is a reason even elected members of congress are being denied access, hopefully the truth will come out
Unbelievable! ...........
Inside the ICE-box: Migrant kids describe being brutalized by U.S. officials in a frigid old Walmart
Nicknamed the "hielera" or icebox, Casa Padre is a hellscape of cruel guards, sickening food, and psychological torture.
https://thinkprogress.org/inside-the-icebox-hielera-kids-own-words-trump-border-af33e9e0a7fb/?utm_campaign=trueAnthem:+Trending+Content&utm_content=5b5176f14b73850007660f1c&utm_medium=trueAnthem&utm_source=twitter
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Children are sleeping on floors and being cussed out by guards, subsisting on meager rations of beans, crackers, and tortillas that leave them feeling ill, and passing the nights sleeping on floors under bright lights in a converted Walmart in south Texas.
The new reports of harsh physical conditions, humiliating psychological abuse, and basic deprivation at the so-called “Casa Padre” facility in Brownsville, Texas, come almost a month after President Donald Trump took symbolic steps to quash public outcry over his family separation policy aimed at punishing and deterring migrants.
The children and parents who swore out hundreds of affidavits to attorneys appealing the United States government’s treatment of migrants have mostly fled violence in Central America. The conditions in which they find themselves today in the world’s richest and most powerful country shock the conscience — and almost certainly violate the conditions of the legal settlement that’s bound American officials in treatment of minors in immigration detention for decades, lawyers say.
In many cases, the only bathroom the children are allowed to use is located inside their holding pen. “There is a security camera in the room which points to the bathroom” in the cell where a 17-year-old from Guatemala named Noe is being kept with a dozen other boys, he said. “There is no privacy. It is dirty and they don’t clean it,” reported a Guatemalan boy named Erick. “The room is always cold. The guards took my sweater. I sleep on the floor. There are 3 mattresses, but the boys from Honduras have taken them,” he said, adding that those other boys threaten to stab him if he falls asleep.
More on the link --
https://thinkprogress.org/inside-the-icebox-hielera-kids-own-words-trump-border-af33e9e0a7fb/?utm_campaign=trueAnthem:+Trending+Content&utm_content=5b5176f14b73850007660f1c&utm_medium=trueAnthem&utm_source=twitter
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Devin Nunes used political dollars for $15K in Celtics tickets, winery tours and Vegas trips
Not only should he be voted out of office, this Russian traitor needs to be sent to prison ....
Nunes used political dollars for $15K in Celtics tickets, winery tours and Vegas trips
https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/article215099780.html
WASHINGTON
Rep. Devin Nunes used political donations to pay for nearly $15,000 in tickets to Boston Celtics basketball games as well as winery tours and lavish trips to Las Vegas, according to reports from the Federal Election Commission and two nonpartisan watchdog groups.
Nunes, R-Calif., has reportedly been a Celtics fan since high school, though he grew up in Tulare, California. He used the money from his political action committee last year on three occasions to buy tickets. His PAC also spent about $42,741 since 2013 on catering, site rentals, hotels and meals in Las Vegas. The most recent instance was March 9, when the PAC spent $7,229 at seven different restaurants and hotels in Las Vegas.
On June 19, the PAC’s expenditures included nearly $5,000 spent at six wineries in Paso Robles and Santa Margarita, both outside his district in California, and about $5,000 to Gold Coast Limousine the same day. Also listed was a hotel charge for $4,409 at Sea Venture, a hotel about 20 miles from Santa Margarita and located right on the beach. All Boston, Vegas and winery charges were listed as fundraising expenses.
Nunes responded, “I wish I could help you,” when McClatchy approached him Wednesday with questions about his PAC spending. His office would not respond to requests for comment.
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DOJ to judge: Dog sitting more important than getting 100+ toddlers/infants back to their moms
Add another one to the 'Trump admin is so disgusting you just can't make this shit up' department.
This pretty much sums things up ..........
https://twitter.com/PeterAlexander/status/1015357998296977408
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Records linking children to their parents have disappeared, and in some cases have been destroyed
My theory is that this was the plan from the start. They were going to make sure these kids would never see their parents again. Fucking monsters! ..............
Trump Administration in Chaotic Scramble to Reunify Migrant Families
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/us/migrant-children-chaos-family-separation.html
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Faced with a court-imposed deadline to reunite families separated at the southwest border, federal authorities are calling in volunteers to sort through records and resorting to DNA tests to match children with parents. And they acknowledged for the first time Thursday that of the nearly 3,000 children who are still in federal custody, about 100 are under the age of 5.
Records linking children to their parents have disappeared, and in some cases have been destroyed, according to two officials of the Department of Homeland Security, leaving the authorities struggling to identify connections between family members.
The effort is complicated by the fact that two federal agencies are involved in detaining and sheltering migrants, and they did not initially share records with each other. On Friday, the leadership of the Department of Health and Human Services, which shelters the children and must now undertake reunifications, sent out a plea to federal public health workers for help with an exhaustive manual search of records.
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But those precautions were undermined in some cases by the other federal agency that has initial custody of apprehended migrants in the first 72 hours after they cross the border — Customs and Border Protection. In hundreds of cases, Customs agents deleted the initial records in which parents and children were listed together as a family with a “family identification number,” according to two officials at the Department of Homeland Security, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the process. As a result, the parents and children appeared in federal computers to have no connection to one another.
More on the link
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/us/migrant-children-chaos-family-separation.html
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Yeah, suuuuuuure ... Jim Jordan now says abuse reports were 'locker room talk'
So far, Jordan has insisted he knew nothing of the abuse. But there are now at least 5 people who have come forward to say Jordan DID know.
Now Jim is starting to sing a different tune. He is now going with the 'locker room' defense
Yeah, suuuuuuure ......
https://twitter.com/JuddLegum/status/1015374388093489152
And just for bonus points, Jordan already has a backup excuse in case his first backup excuse doesn't work.
His backup backup is.. wait for it........ it's Rod Rosensteins fault!!! .............
https://twitter.com/JuddLegum/status/1015376361345703936
Another very important point from a twitter commentor ....
As a state employee this man was a mandatory reporter in Ohio. If he heard whispers, or had a reasonable suspicion that abuse was occuring he was REQUIRED BY LAW to report it. It is not his job to verify, it’s his job to report and let the experts investigate.
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The Guardian - Inspired by Trump, the world could be heading back to the 1930s
Inspired by Trump, the world could be heading back to the 1930sThe US president tears children from parents, and in Europe his imitators dehumanise migrants. We know where such hatred leads
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jun/22/trump-world-1930s-children-parents-europe-migrants?CMP=share_btn_fb
You’ll remember Godwin’s law, which holds that the longer an online debate goes on, the likelier it is that someone will mention Hitler or the Nazis. It was an amusing observation and one that served a useful purpose, guarding against hyperbole and fatuous comparison. Except last August, as the American far right staged a torchlight parade in Charlottesville, Mike Godwin suspended his own law. “By all means, compare these shitheads to Nazis,” he tweeted. “Again and again. I’m with you.”
Despite that dispensation, I’ve tended to abide by my own version of Godwin’s law. I try to avoid Nazi comparisons, chiefly because they’re almost always wrong and because, far from dramatising whatever horror is under way, they usually serve to minimise the one that killed millions in the 1940s. And yet, there’s a cost to such self-restraint. Because if the Nazi era is placed off limits, seen as so far outside the realm of regular human experience that it might as well have happened on a distant planet – Planet Auschwitz – then we risk failure to learn its lessons. That would be to squander the essential benefit offered by study of the Third Reich: an early warning system. So yes, when Donald Trump ordered US government agents on the southern border to separate migrant children from their parents, to tear screaming toddlers from their fathers and even to pull a baby from its mother’s breast, he was not re-enacting the Holocaust. He was not ordering the eradication of an entire people or sending millions to their deaths. But there were echoes. And we must hear them.
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But the echoes don’t end there. The wire cages. The guards telling weeping children they are forbidden from hugging each other. And then this chilling detail, reported by Texas Monthly. It turns out that US border guards don’t always tell parents they’re taking their children away. “Instead, the officers say, ‘I’m going to take your child to get bathed.’ The child goes off, and in a half-hour, 20 minutes, the parent inquires, ‘Where is my five-year-old?’ ‘Where’s my seven-year-old?’ ‘This is a long bath.’ And [the officer says], ‘You won’t be seeing your child again.’” It’s not the same as telling Jews about to die they are merely taking a shower, but in the use of deception the echo is loud.
And if the mechanics of this operation strike a familiar note, so too does the rhetoric and propaganda deployed by those behind it and defending it. You don’t have to go to back to 1930s Germany to know that the first step towards catastrophe is the dehumanisation of a reviled group. It happened that way in Rwanda and the Balkans in the 1990s, and it’s happening in today’s United States. “These aren’t people, these are animals,” the US president said last month. They want “to pour into and infest our country”, he tweeted this week. “Infest” is a word reserved for rats and insects. This is the language of those seeking to choke off human sympathy, by suggesting those suffering are not even human.
Much more on the link
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jun/22/trump-world-1930s-children-parents-europe-migrants?CMP=share_btn_fb
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Alumni from Kirstjen Nielsen's Tampa high school condemn her in open letter to school's headmaster
These Nazis need to be publicly shamed at every turn ...........
Alumni from Kirstjen Nielsen's Tampa high school condemn her in open letter to school's headmaster
https://www.abcactionnews.com/news/region-tampa/alumni-from-kirstjen-nielsen-s-tampa-high-school-condemn-her-in-open-letter-to-school-s-headmaster
TAMPA, Fla. — Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen is facing backlash from her Tampa high school after she went before a national audience defending the Trump administration's highly scrutinized immigration policy. On Tuesday, a group of alumni from Berkeley Preparatory School drafted a petition opposing her and calling for the school to condemn her actions.
"Secretary Nielsen, Class of ’90, does not reflect the core values that were taught at our independent high school, especially the value ingrained in most graduates’ heads: Make a positive difference, and use your privilege for good," the group of alumni wrote in a press release.
This comes just a day after Nielsen declined to apologize for the administration’s family separation practices. "We will not apologize for the job we do or for the job law enforcement does for doing the job that the American people expect us to do," Nielsen said on Monday. "Illegal actions have and must have consequences. No more free passes, no more get out of jail free cards."
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In a letter to Berkeley Preparatory School Headmaster Joseph Seivold, the group asked:
"Today, we respectfully request that you condemn the policies causing the separation of children from their families at the US-Mexico border, implemented and enforced by Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen — known to us as Kirstjen Nielsen, Class of 1990."
More on the link
https://www.abcactionnews.com/news/region-tampa/alumni-from-kirstjen-nielsen-s-tampa-high-school-condemn-her-in-open-letter-to-school-s-headmaster
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ICE Spokesman Resigns, Saying He Could No Longer Spread Lies for Trump Administration
ICE Spokesman Resigns, Saying He Could No Longer Spread Falsehoods for Trump Administration
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/13/us/california-ice-spokesman-resigns.html
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A spokesman for United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement has resigned, saying that he could no longer “bear the burden” of spreading falsehoods on behalf of the Trump administration. The spokesman, James Schwab, who had worked for the agency’s San Francisco Division, told news outlets Monday that his decision was prompted by false statements made by the agency on Feb. 27 and repeated by Attorney General Jeff Sessions last week.
The statements criticized the mayor of Oakland, Libby Schaaf, for her decision last month to warn city residents that a raid by federal immigration agents targeting roughly 1,000 people was imminent. The agency’s deputy director, Thomas D. Homan, said that Ms. Schaaf’s warning had helped “864 criminal aliens and public safety threats” to evade capture in the raid.
Mr. Sessions, in a visit to California last week, condemned Ms. Schaaf, a Democrat, and echoed the agency, asserting that her actions had allowed hundreds to escape. Mr. Schwab said in interviews, first with The San Francisco Chronicle and then with CNN, that he had been frustrated by the remarks, and had quit “because I didn’t want to perpetuate misleading facts.”
“I asked them to change the information,” he told The Chronicle, referring to the 864 people to whom the statement alluded. “I told them that the information was wrong, they asked me to deflect, and I didn’t agree with that. Then I took some time and I quit.”
More on the link
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/13/us/california-ice-spokesman-resigns.html
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Sinclair forces news stations to air segment blaming media for overreacting about child separation
IMHO Sinclair buying up all our local tv stations is a serious threat to our democracy. Here is their latest 'must run' abomination ...............
Sinclair forces news stations to air segment blaming media for overreacting about child separation
Sinclair's newest "must-run" segment is all passive voice and full of lies about Trump's abusive immigration policy.
https://thinkprogress.org/sinclair-must-run-child-separation-2748522511ef/?utm_campaign=trueAnthem:+Trending+Content&utm_content=5b2c85ea3ed3f000070b7f97&utm_medium=trueAnthem&utm_source=twitter
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President Donald Trump’s ever-shifting explanations regarding his choice to forcibly remove migrant children from their parents as part of a “zero-tolerance” immigration policy have left his media allies scrambling to keep up in recent weeks. But the newest must-run segment by right-wing Sinclair Broadcast Group — the country’s largest owner of local television stations — may preview the administration’s final-draft spin plan.
The president “correctly decided to step in” Wednesday “to stop the separation of children from their families at the border,” former Trump staffer turned Sinclair propagandist Boris Epshteyn says in the segment.
“President Trump [made the decision] to enforce a ‘zero tolerance’ policy and prosecute all adults illegally crossing our borders,” Epshteyn says. “Many members of the media and opponents of the president have seized on this issue to make it seem as if those who are tough on immigration are somehow monsters. Let’s be honest: While some of the concern is real, a lot of it is politically driven by the liberals in politics and the media.”
Sinclair-owned stations are required to run Epshteyn’s segments. The company currently controls local media in four out of every 10 U.S. homes, and could soon reach seven in 10 if Trump’s FCC approves its purchase of the Tribune Company’s television holdings. That means Epshteyn’s blatant reconfiguring of very recent history will be forced down the brainstems of roughly the same share of the country as still approves of Trump’s job performance in tracking polls.
More, including video of the segment, at the link-
https://thinkprogress.org/sinclair-must-run-child-separation-2748522511ef/?utm_campaign=trueAnthem:+Trending+Content&utm_content=5b2c85ea3ed3f000070b7f97&utm_medium=trueAnthem&utm_source=twitter
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Democrats just flipped the 43rd seat red to blue since Trump took office
This is a district Trump won in a 17 point blowout
We just turned it Blue
This is great news but we need to keep the pressure up. We need to keep the momentum going and get out the vote in November!
Democrats Flip Another Wisconsin Seat, Making 43 Since Trump Inauguration
The victory follows other surprise wins by the party in conservative districts in the state this year.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/democrats-flip-another-wisconsin-seat-making-43-since-trump-inauguration
Wisconsin Democrats may have put fear into the heart of Republican Gov. Scott Walker again.
On Tuesday, they flipped another legislative seat in a traditionally conservative district, marking the 43rd seat to shift from Republican to Democratic control since President Trump’s inauguration.
In Wisconsin’s 1st Senate District, Democrat Caleb Frostman defeated GOP State Rep. Andre Jacque. With 100 percent of precincts reporting, Frostman led 51-49, a total of almost 1,000 votes. Republican Frank Lasee previously held the seat but was appointed to Walker’s administration last December. This district, including Door and Calumet, voted for Trump by 17 points and for Mitt Romney in 2012 by almost 5 points.
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