The organization also says that in some cases, the children were taken away under the pretense that they would be getting a bath.
From an article about the current US practice of separating children, including infants, from their parents at the border:
https://www.npr.org/2018/06/19/621065383/what-we-know-family...
Also, keep in mind that it isn't all asylum applicants who get separated. If you show up at a valid port of entry into the US and request asylum, then no crime has been committed and no one is separated from their families. Only people who sneak across the border illegally(which is a crime) are processed from their criminal behavior.
Going to a valid port of entry also happens to be a much cheaper and safer way of getting to America, considering it doesn't require the use of human mules, paying exorbitant fees and coordinating with drug cartels, and performing dangerous desert crossings where you may get abandoned if your mule gets spooked.
edit: alasdair_, I can't comment on your post thanks to HN aggressively preventing a poster responding to numerous comments on a post, but I would imagine the reason that she couldn't file an asylum claim is right in the article: Because she lied about being a US citizen in the past, and that bars you from presenting for asylum. And finally, the father separated himself from his children before he even entered the US, because he knew he couldn't enter the US because he was already deported from the US in the past.
> Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials say Maria made a false claim of US citizenship in 1999 and served a 75-day sentence in a federal prison before being deported back to Guatemala at that time. In a statement provided to CNN, ICE says that lying about citizenship status "results in a permanent bar from being able to legally enter the United States."
Yet, somehow, having what is essentially a concentration camp of kids isn't the president going too far and being sick.
There is in my mind zero justification for the current state of things and I don't care what argument is used to try to claim there is.
I don't plan to participate further in this discussion. I think I have made all the comments I can make while complying with HN guidelines. This situation is just beyond the pale for me.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2018/06/photos-a-tent-city...
The child will end up in a temporary foster home or similar housing. They will not be kept in locked chain-link areas for weeks on end.
>Also, keep in mind that it isn't all asylum applicants who get separated. If you show up at a valid port of entry into the US and request asylum, then no crime has been committed and no one is separated from their families.
This is flat out wrong.
See (for example - there are many other documented cases) https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/05/us/guatemalan-immigrant-famil...
"After the rest of the family took their chances by presenting themselves to US immigration authorities, the possibility of forced separation became reality. The 20-year-old son was sent to a detention center in San Diego. Maria and her three youngest children were shipped to a family detention center in Dilley, Texas -- about 70 miles southwest of San Antonio."
"The two youngest members of the Villatoro family are now at a detention center in New York state while their mom remains detained in Texas."
Sneaking across the border is a crime but its a misdemeanor like driving without a seatbelt or ignoring a "No Trespassing" sign. It's very rare for people to be thrown in jail while awaiting trials for misdemeanors and generally the consequence of committing a single one isn't jail time.
So US policy at the border, while legal, is horribly unreasonable and maliciously cruel.
I love your point about sneaking across the border. Those supporters of the current regime's policy, some 25-30% of the polled US population, will often simply state that these are law-breakers and criminals for breaking our laws. And yet, is the same opprobrium applied to those who speed, shoot off fireworks illegally, or dodge taxes (like many of the rich today)? If they were truly about law and order, rather than about an othering/discriminatory scheme, surely they would decry these other violations of the law?
Generally people don't support this. Therefore, downvotes.
However, arresting and prosecuting every single person who crosses the border in a nominally illegal way[1] is not a norm, and neither is deporting parents while their children are still being held in the US.
[1]: "Nominally" because many of the current cases involve asylum seekers who have been cut off from actually seeking asylum.
Besides, ethics are more important than laws.
Source: http://www.alllaw.com/articles/nolo/us-immigration/crime-ent...
I wish for a better human race. We still live in primitive times.
[0] https://www.livescience.com/41572-male-lion-survival.html
A slow boil the frog.
Or maybe the job will get so skillfully done,unopposed and complete we will get away with it without needing to answer to history? We have now already improved on Korematsu in leveraging infliction of family pain as a deterrent like the mob.
I write this under a throwaway, as a legal immigrant.
Now, give your silence too.
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.[1]
> The chaplain had mastered, in a moment of divine intuition, the handy technique of protective rationalization, and he was exhilarated by his discovery. It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.
In the right frame, any action can be justified.
We hear that these people are all asylum-seekers, but asylum from what exactly? I was unaware that Mexico has mass political repression.
You haven't been paying attention to the news.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/12/mexico-electio...
> Purón was the 112th politician murdered in Mexico since September 2017 when the election process began, according to Etellekt, a risk analysis consultancy.
They're generally from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, fleeing through Mexico, which isn't a particularly safe place for them either.
Interesting, then you should really read almost any basic summary of Mexico's current government.
http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/02/23/obama-pena-nieto-mexico-...
Not to mention asylum in the US isn't only limited to political asylum
>an applicant must establish that the government is either involved in the persecution, or unable to control the conduct of private actors
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_asylum
Asylum seekers do not have to be fleeing political persecution but violence or persecution in general.
Furthermore, many of the people crossing at our southern border are not Mexicans. Many are central- and south-Americans fleeing horrible civil strife.
And in the ancient days, you often had to live in a country such as Judea for three generations before being accepted as a member of the country. You couldn't seek asylum and then be voting in elections five years later.
Not to mention, in Mexico specifically, it is cartel violence that people are largely escaping (assuming they aren't simply looking for better economic opportunity, which is also often the case).
When Gina Haspel was nominated to be the Director of the CIA, I was struck by the inadvertent echo of this in so many defenses of her involvement in the Agency's black-site "enhanced interrogation" (aka torture) program. Her defenders argued that this experience actually said positive things about her, since she only tortured people when ordered to by the President, and stopped doing so the moment those orders stopped coming. In other words, torturing people didn't turn her into the sort of person who tortures people. She remained civilized.
Putting aside the obvious objection that Nuremberg should have eliminated "she was just following orders" as a valid defense for all time, it was remarkable how willing even people like Democratic Senators were to separate the act of having tortured people from the idea of what a torturer looks like. Just having tortured people isn't enough to make you a torturer anymore.
Welcome The Sessions Is A Nazi Abolish Ice In Despite In His From The Welzer The It It That Similarly Hence
"They were able to integrate mass killing and other horrible deeds into their perception of normality. They had been able to make these actions part of their normative orientation, their values, and what they identified as acceptable in interpersonal interactions."
As noted by a holocaust survivor's daughter: "'Never Again' is now".
The current administration & the Russian teams working to undermine the West are not so much hacking technology, as they are hacking our sense of truth and normalcy. Fake news, conspiracy theories, and outrageous actions are all part of the hacking.
I thought I was in for a nice long story about history but it's just someone on reddit calling the Trump administration nazis again.
No thanks, not interested. Not hacking, not news.
Not like I'm the arbiter of what makes it on this site but I don't come here for emotional bait and political... anything, really.