Last week, free software developer Seth Vargo pulled the plug on tools he made to work with software developed by his former employer Chef, in protest of Chef's ongoing contracts with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a federal agency that has been implicated in crimes against humanity, including ethnic cleansing, family separation, and the deaths of children in its custody. Read the rest
The long-running kids' publication 'Highlights for Children' condemned the Trump administration's policy of separating children from families at the US-Mexico border in a statement published on social media. Read the rest
The administration of President Donald Trump is today reported to be considering a plan to detain separated migrant children at Fort Benning, a military base in the state of Georgia. Read the rest
Kirstjen Nielsen was Trump's DHS Secretary, where she oversaw the performatively cruel practice of separating thousands of children from their parents, in a calculatedly shambolic and chaotic way, ensuring that many of them will never be reunited with their families. Read the rest
A ton of criticism, anger and pain has come from the family separation policy being enforced on the southern border of the United States. Few pieces of commentary on the subject nail the fine points of the topic with such humor and sadness as John Oliver's passionate rant against the inhuman practice on Last Week Tonight. Read the rest
Despite an uprising of Amazon employees over the use of the company's AI facial recognition program ("Rekognition") in law enforcement, the company is actively courting US Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the hopes that it will use the wildly inaccurate technology. Read the rest
This is completely terrible. Trump's ICE squads are sending separated under-5 children back to countries of origin without telling the kids' families. This week, U.S. Immigration officials sent a 4-year-old separated child from the U.S. to Guatemala City, an extremely dangerous place, without even telling her relatives in Guatemala that she was coming home. Read the rest
Amnesty International's new report on family separations reveals that the Trump administration stole at least 4,000 more children from their parents than the previous total of 2,500-3,000. Read the rest
According to the ACLU, the nightmare perpetuated against immigrants and refugees attempting to find safe harbor in the United States has taken a new, unexpected turn for the worse: the parents, separated from their children as part of the Trump administration's drive to make migration into the United States as miserable as possible, are refusing to be reunited with their children. The reason is absolutely heartbreaking:
From Reuters:
Immigrant parents separated from their children by the Trump administration and returned to their homes are refusing to be reunited with their children because their countries are so dangerous, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union told a court on Friday.
Gelernt said parents who refused to be reunited tended to have older children who could be recruited by violent gangs if they returned home. In addition, some children have relatives in the United States and are unlikely to end up in foster care.
The ACLU contacted parents in Central America of 162 children and said 109 refused reunification, according to a court filing.
According to Reuters, Gelernt recently spent time in Guatamala attempting to help parents separated from their kids by U.S. Immigration officials to reunite their families. Of the 300 parents that Gelernt spoke to, roughly two-thirds preferred to let their kids take their chances in the United States where they'd have a greater expectation of safety and prosperity.
I'm not a parent, so I can't even begin to imagine the sort of painful parental devotion it would take to leave a child behind, in the name of keeping them safe, in a country that despises me enough to have torn my family apart rather than providing them with refuge from harm. Read the rest
The official story of the Trump administration's family separation policy is that it came about as a result of "zero tolerance" in which every person who could be charged with a crime would be, and that meant that parents were arrested too, and since the parents were going to jail, their kids had to be held somewhere. Read the rest
