Stephen Miller's secret campaign against helpless kids
That it's happening in the shadows doesn't make it less of a moral blight.
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Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff, is making his dreams come true: accelerating the arrest and removal of thousands of unaccompanied immigrant kids.
The man behind family separation in the first Trump term who once boasted that policy would “prove to be a migration deterrent” has now teamed up with another deadly threat, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to attack the most vulnerable kids in our country: those here on their own.
By law, kids who cross the border alone are put into the care of the Office Of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). In recognition of children’s vulnerabilities and need for protection, this system exists outside the confines of the Department of Homeland Security and therefore the clutches of ICE and Border Patrol.
Thanks to the Constitution itself and federal law, these children have the right to legal counsel, age-appropriate living quarters usually in state-licensed settings with prompt release to vetted sponsors, and fair hearings with special allowances to protect them from trafficking or other abuse.
But as The Guardian reported from immigration court in New York City, “the faces of migrant children — some as young as three — have been beamed onto a video screen throughout the summer as they faced deportation hearings.” These children did not have lawyers, in violation of aforementioned federal law, and thus faced interrogation by Trump appointee Judge Lisa Ling.
This is a scene taking place out of public view across the country, impacting 24,000 kids.
In the shadows
HHS refused to renew the contract for the legal services to represent these children after stiffing lawyers seven months of pay to the tune of $65 million. The nonprofits successfully sued for and have received back pay.
Nevertheless, a $244 million contract went to Our Rescue, an NGO whose founder was accused of sex trafficking and abusing women and whose CEO had a tenure as a DHS agent lowlighted by setting up a fake university to entrap and then arrest foreign students.
As of June, legal experts report that around 1,800 unaccompanied kids are in so-called ORR “shelters.” These sites are intended to be child appropriate and focused on welfare, but spots in Texas, Florida, and South Carolina, for example, no longer have state licensing, exempting them from oversight and inspections. These kids are in captivity an average of 194 days, where the law demands a maximum of 20 and no more than 72 hours in DHS holds.
Last August, the Trump administration attempted to send children alone to Guatemala in the middle of the night, before judges halted the flights. But if there are no real lawyers present such eleventh hour rescues become impossible. And that appears to be precisely the purpose of the let’s-first-eliminate-the-competent-lawyers scheme.
Indeed, the regime has accelerated plans to build new or repurpose places to hold thousands more kids captive. They put out a bid for a 3,000 Texas child concentration camp — the legally designated term for a place where civilians are held without due process — and there are widely reported proposals to convert an ex-military base deemed toxic into a second site in Louisiana. At least for the time it takes to conduct the mass tribunals already underway, new beds are intended to be filled with kids who are then sent to other countries without adult supervision or loved ones to meet them upon arrival.
At every point along the way, speed and obscurity seem to be the objective. Thanks to state and local 287(g) agreements, local law enforcement is now kidnapping on ICE’s behalf with a $22,500 bounty offered per child. Across the country, police are coming to kids’ homes under the guise of wellness checks only to arrest and send them to ORR captivity and perilous next steps. Many of these children had been living with family or vetted sponsors and were alone only after ICE abducted these adults.
Republicans, attendant to their falling numbers in immigration and across the board, have spun their usual lies about what’s happening to immigrant kids and who’s to blame. In a turn even Orwell could not have scripted, the regime has announced a new HHS hotline that immigrant children can call to report abuse or exploitation. In other words, they’re aiming to get possible trafficking victims to trust and confide in the administration that previously issued $5,000 fines to kids who came to seek protection, coerced them to leave the US, and forced them to sign forms admitting to criminal liability if they came back to seek help.
Democrats have been terrifyingly inactive about all of this. Some have issued social media statements about the ending of the contract for legal counsel, and Sen. Wyden wrote a letter to HHS in June about the administration targeting 500 kids for rapid removal in defiance of “core humanitarian and child welfare mandates.”
We can only speculate about the reasons for this reticence. Perhaps it’s simply the deluge of all of the unrelenting horrors of this regime. Another disturbing possibility is that they’re tongue tied in the face of the standard Republican playbook: evade guilt for your crimes by making accusations.
But given that Republicans have been very public about protecting pedophiles and denying justice to survivors, it would seem fairly simple to drive the narrative that the Epstein Regime is trying to fast track a way to torture and traffic immigrant kids by doing away with the experienced lawyers who have long represented them.
Hellbent on harm
The challenge with the crimes this regime is committing against these 24,000 unaccompanied children — as with family separation that went on for a year before there was loud, sustained, effective public outcry — is that they’re happening largely out of public view. But we cannot afford to wait any time at all to bring this out of the shadows. Every possible alarm must be sounded before even more kids are subjected to physical and psychological harms, if not worse.
The issue is in one way very complex: you’ve got to cancel the sham contract for Our Rescue, pay and reinstate the lawyers who actually care for children, halt construction or remodeling on the Texas and Louisiana camps, stop local law enforcement from running a trafficking ring, and demand children receive equal justice. And, in another, the issue is very simple: we must be the adults fighting for kids who have no one else to protect them from of a regime hellbent on harming them.
Programming note
Due to travel Aaron is doing this week, there will be no PN Pod this week. The show will return next Friday, August 21.
That’s it for today
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It's obvious that our elected officials aren't doing enough to stop this treatment of children and immigrants in general. All of us can put our efforts into making sure that your community doesn't have 287(g) agreements. All of us can petition our elected officials to do more in this area. If we don't do something, what are we doing here. It's way past time to think someone else will handle this.
Thank you for shining the spotlight on this. Another reason to make sure you vote in November so that accountability can begin. I want these sub-human Maggats in prison. They deserve hard time.😡