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Photo Galleries: A Weekend of #KeepFamiliesTogether Demonstrations Throughout San Diego County

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Eds Note: This story will be updated as more information becomes available.

In San Ysidro, Otay Mesa, Chula Vista, downtown San Diego, and Escondido, people throughout the region this weekend raised their voices in opposition to the zero tolerance and family separation policies of the Trump administration.

At 9 am on Saturday, people began gathering in San Diego’s Community Concourse. By 10am, the place was jammed, and police blocked off Third Street to handle the overflow crowds. After a couple of hours of speaks and music, the crowd marched down Broadway to Front Street and rallied in front of the Federal Building housing the ICE offices for San Diego. Local media estimates of the crowd size put it north of 5000 people.

I’ve been going to demonstrations for five decades, and this was one of the best organized I’ve ever seen. It started on time, the public address system was actually good enough to cover the whole area, and the security people were friendly, well organized and helpful.    [Read more…]

Muro (The Wall) | Video Worth Watching

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The bilingual band from L.A., The Mexican Standoff, performs Muro (The Wall). From their YouTube site:

“Muro” is the narrative of one of eight hundred thousand stories. Today´s president is making a lot of noise about building a border wall when there are around 344 miles of wall built already. Politics are out of control, and as musicians and story tellers we want to bring some humor and music to today’s issues. We hope to bring people together in these days where America is divided. We support dreamers. We support immigration. We support equality.

  [Read more…]

Navy Proposes to Build Trump Internment Camp at Camp Pendleton

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In response to the President’s call for the military to assist in holding ICE detainees, the Department of the Navy has drawn up plans to build “temporary and austere” tent cities for tens of thousands of immigrants on remote bases in California, Alabama, and Arizona.

A facility at Camp Pendleton, according to an internal planning memo obtained by Time Magazine, will be built to house 47,000 people; another at a former Naval Weapons Station in Concord, near San Francisco, will hold a similar number.

Abandoned airfields near Mobile, Alabama, at Navy Outlying Field Wolf in Orange Beach, Alabama, and nearby Navy Outlying Field Silverhill will have facilities for an additional 25,000 people. The document suggests a further study to consider housing an undetermined number of detainees at the Marine Corps Air Station near Yuma, Arizona.

  [Read more…]

Behind the Criminal Immigration Law: Eugenics and White Supremacy

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The history of the statute that can make it a felony to illegally enter the country involves some dark corners of U.S. history.

By Ian MacDougall / ProPublica

Amid a bipartisan backlash, President Trump has tried repeatedly to shift blame to Democrats for his own administration’s “zero-tolerance” immigration policy, which has resulted in more than 2,300 migrant children being taken from their families along the U.S.–Mexico border. “The Democrats have to change their law — that’s their law,” Trump told reporters on Friday.

The president didn’t specify which law he was talking about. But the statute at the center of his administration’s policy is the work of Republicans — with origins dating back all the way to World War I — albeit with substantial Democratic support along the way. Known originally as the “Undesirable Aliens Act,” the statute would not exist without support from, respectively, a eugenicist and a white supremacist.

The law in question was the foundation of a memo Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued in early April that laid out the administration’s new, zero-tolerance policy. In the memo, Sessions instructed federal prosecutors in the southwestern United States to file criminal charges against any adults caught entering the country illegally. His order stripped officials of discretion over whether to place migrant families seeking asylum into civil proceedings, which allow families to stay together. (Court rulings limit how long the government can detain migrants in civil proceedings. There’s also no guarantee they’ll return for future hearing dates once they’re let out, a phenomenon that has prompted the president’s complaints about “catch and release.”)

On Monday, ProPublica published audio recorded at a U.S. Customs and Border Protection detention facility in which a Border Patrol agent mocks the   [Read more…]

Migrant Kids Update: Trump Fixed It! (Snark Alert) | Video Worth Watching

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Full Frontal’s Samantha Bee regrettably notes that Trump’s Executive Order attempting to “fix” the problem of baby jails that his policy of “zero tolerance” has created, essentially just replaces the baby jails with Mommy & Me jails. In passing she also reveals that Border Patrol is uncomfortable about the use of the “c” word in reporting on its facilities.   [Read more…]

Immigrants as Hostages: The GOP’s Midterm Election Strategy

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Plus: Listings of ways you can help in San Diego

I laughed when late-night host Steven Colbert said the President folded like an origami Trump Casino on the child separation issue. The joke, however, is on us. The immigration policies of the administration remain fundamentally unchanged. And it has nothing to do with comprehensive reforms or building the great wall of Donald.

The motivation for those policies, exploiting a fear of the “other” manifested as racism remains. Donald Trump has overruled GOP strategists who thought campaigning on the strength of the economy and tax cuts was the ticket to victory (defined as not losing too many seats) in November 2018.

The specter of immigrant “gangsters, drug deals, rapists and welfare cheats” ‘infecting’ America will be the core GOP strategy this fall, whether the (few) remaining rational people in the party like it or not.   [Read more…]

‘Immigrant Orphans’? No Plan to Return over 2,300 Children to their Parents

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State Sponsored Terrorism In Our Name

There are 11,000 children currently in detention in 100 shelters in 17 states. This figure includes unaccompanied minors. Over 2,300 children, including babies and toddlers have been separated from their parents seeking asylum at the border between May 5 and June 9 alone. These children who arrived at the border with their family are being sent all across the country, ending up in places as diverse as Grand Rapids, Michigan and New York City. We know that some of these children are in El Cajon and Lemon Grove.

These children have been snatched from their family, sent to undisclosed locations and there is no plan to reunite them with their parents.   [Read more…]

Mom Separated From Son: We’re ‘Trying To Save Our Lives’ | Video Worth Watching

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Supporters of the current administration’s policy of “zero tolerance” for the federal misdemeanor of illegal entry appear to believe that the vast majority of those seeking asylum are actually dangerous criminals intent on “infesting” the United States. Congressional representative Roger Marshall (R-KS), interviewed by Chris Hayes earlier today, referred to “people that are doing human trafficking, terrorists and cartel members using young kids” as the typical border crossers “posing as families”, even though when pressed by Chris Hayes for evidence, he could only say that the DHS reassured him that it is the truth.

For a more accurate understanding of a typical asylum seeker, watch this interview by MSNBC’s Trymaine Lee of an El Salvadoran mother who sought refuge with her husband and their two children, a four-year old and a fourteen-month old. When the husband presented himself for asylum with the fourteen-month old, the infant was taken from him without explanation and it took eighty-five days for the mother to be reunited with her infant. The father is still in custody.   [Read more…]

‘Tender Age Facilities’ the Most Grotesque Orwellian Doublespeak of All

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Is there no limit to bureaucratic sadism?

“Where are the girls? Where are the babies and toddlers?” are the questions many of us have been asking all week.

We have learned that the GOP is our domestic Boko Haram, silent on the location of the girls and their treatment. And now we have learned that the babies, the children who have been ripped from their mothers’ arms are being placed in “Tender Age Facilities.” These are not shelters. These are prisons—for babies and toddlers who sit unattended in cages.

Over 2,300 children have been separated from their families since May. The GOP is a terrorist organization.   [Read more…]

Elijah Cummings Rips Republicans For Allowing Trump’s Child Internment Camps | Video Worth Watching

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During a joint hearing of the House Oversight Committee and the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, investigating the investigation into Hilary Clinton’s emails, Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) in his opening remarks called out the unwillingness of the Republicans to exercise any oversight of the Trump administration, including the new policy of separating children from their […]

Student, Farmworker Visas to Be Targeted as Administration Looks to Double Down on Immigration

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Officials with the Trump administration have been quietly meeting for several months, according to an article in Politico, planning additional crackdowns on immigration prior to the mid-term elections.

While the details are still being worked out, proposals include tightening rules on student visas and exchange programs; limiting visas for temporary agricultural workers; creating obstacles making it harder for legal immigrants to obtain residency; and collecting biometric data from visitors from suspect countries.

The H-2A program for agricultural workers is uncapped, meaning there’s no annual limit on visas. Limiting the number of visas flies in the face of immigration bills proposed by Congressional Republicans, which typically try to make it easier for farmers to bring in guest workers.   [Read more…]

Listen to Children Who’ve Just Been Separated From Their Parents at the Border | Video Worth Watching

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Yes, folks, this is still happening. Prepare to have your heart ripped out. ProPublica received an audio recording of children from inside a U.S. Customs and Border Protection facility. According to ProPubilca:

The person who made the recording asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation. That person gave the audio to Jennifer Harbury, a well-known civil rights attorney who has lived and worked for four decades in the Rio Grande Valley along the Texas border with Mexico. Harbury provided it to ProPublica. She said the person who recorded it was a client who “heard the children’s weeping and crying, and was devastated by it.”

The person estimated that the children on the recording are between 4 and 10 years old. It appeared that they had been at the detention center for less than 24 hours, so their distress at having been separated from their parents was still raw. Consulate officials tried to comfort them with snacks and toys. But the children were inconsolable.

The Washington Examiner notes that HHS reports holding around 11,500 children at the moment, but at the current rate of prosecutions and separations, that figure will climb to around 30,000 by August.   [Read more…]

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