Immigration raids conducted by the Trump administration are expected in major US cities on Sunday, a prospect that has sparked vigils, protests, condemnation and fear.
Related: 'This is tough stuff': Pence visits caged, unwashed, overcrowded migrants
Continue reading...Authorities say man threw incendiary devices and tried to ignite propane tank at Tacoma Northwest Detention Centre in Washington state
A 69-year-old man armed with a rifle threw incendiary devices at an immigration jail in Washington state early on Saturday morning, then was found dead after four police officers arrived and opened fire, authorities said.
The Tacoma police department said the officers responded about 4am to the privately run Tacoma Northwest Detention Centre, a US Department of Homeland Security detention facility that holds migrants pending deportation proceedings.
Continue reading...The vice-president, Mike Pence, got a first-hand view of migrant detention facilities after touring two centres in Texas as he spoke out against grandstanding on Capitol Hill after legislators delivered emotional testimony about appalling conditions. Pence was in the border city of McAllen, Texas where he was joined by a delegation of Republican lawmakers as they toured migrant detention centres. President Donald Trump has said that a nationwide wave of arrests of immigrants facing deportation will begin over the weekend.
Continue reading...Controversy continued on Saturday over Mike Pence’s visit to a detention facility on the Texas border, in which the vice-president said appalling conditions described by a pool reporter were “tough stuff” but placed the blame for the migrant crisis on Democrats in Congress.
Families fleeing violence, poverty and drought in Central America have been coming to the US in record numbers, peaking in May when the border patrol made nearly 133,000 apprehensions. Detention facilities quickly filled up, forcing many migrants to languish in unsuitable facilities much longer than the 72 hours required by law.
Continue reading...Mayors in major cities have pledged to support those targeted by Sunday’s ‘enforcement operations’
When CG heard that Donald Trump had announced raids by the immigration enforcement agency Ice a few weeks ago, she turned to her husband. Get groceries, she told him, like a storm is coming.
“Bananas, milk and bread,” CG lists off, remembering what she told him, “Because who knows when we’ll leave the house.”
Continue reading...In an emotional testimony to the House oversight committee on Friday, Democratic representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib described conditions at an immigrant detention center, decrying alleged mistreatment happening 'in front of the American flag'. During Ocasio-Cortez's testimony a congressional staffer fainted. The testimony comes as Mike Pence was due to travel to Texas on Friday to tour a facility and participate in a roundtable with border patrol and members of the Senate judiciary committee
Continue reading...Acosta was under fire for having granted Jeffrey Epstein immunity from federal prosecution in 2008, following sex trafficking ring investigation
Another big House vote this afternoon.
With a 402-12 vote, Congress approved a bill that would ensure funding for the 9/11 Victims Compensation Fund.
Jon Stewart says he looks forward to signing ceremony for bill funding 9/11 first responders compensation fund: "We'll all be here for that one final moment—not of celebration, but of relief. Let them exhale." https://t.co/NkJuIoh4fP pic.twitter.com/p7PI4cLDOc
The House has just voted to limit Trump’s authority to make war in Iran as part of a bill which also restricts the president’s budget request for the Pentagon.
Republicans joined the majority Democrats for a 251-170 vote.
Trump said last month he believes he does not need congressional approval to strike Iran. The vote Friday amounted to a pointed and bipartisan rebuttal — led by strange ideological bedfellows, Representatives Ro Khanna, a liberal Democrat from California, and Matt Gaetz of Florida, one of Trump’s most strident Republican allies in Congress.
“When this passes, it will be a clear statement from members of Congress on both sides of the aisle that this country is tired of endless wars, that we do not want another war in the Middle East,” Khanna said before the amendment vote.
Continue reading...Donald Trump abandoned his attempt to add a citizenship question to the 2020 US census but will sign an executive order forcing federal agencies to hand over citizenship data to the commerce department. 'As a result of today's executive order we will be able to ensure the 2020 census generates an accurate count of how many citizens, non-citizens and illegal aliens are in the United States of America. We will leave no stone unturned,' the US president said. The attorney general, William Barr, said including a question on the census was not the only way to obtain this 'vital information'
Continue reading...Faced with a defeat in court and few viable options, Donald Trump on Thursday backed off his effort to place a question about citizenship on the next US census while announcing executive action by his administration to collect information on its own.
Trump ordered federal agencies to turn over records on the number of citizens, non-citizens and undocumented immigrants living in the US.
Continue reading...In the House oversight committee, Yazmin Juárez, whose 21-month old baby daughter died in Ice custody, delivered searing testimony before Congress on Wednesday afternoon. 'We came to the United States where I hoped to build a better safer life for us,' said Juárez. 'Instead I watched my baby girl die slowly and painfully just a few months before her second birthday'
Continue reading...One of Canada’s biggest pension funds has quietly divested from two private prison operators responsible for the detention of thousands of migrants along the US-Mexico border.
Late last year, the Guardian reported that the Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB) held nearly US$8m in stock in Geo Group and CoreCivic, which between them hold the lion’s share of contracts to manage Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention facilities in the US.
Continue reading...In 2017, agents made plans to apprehend more than 8,000 people and described the work as ‘fun’
US immigration officials planning countrywide raids targeting thousands of undocumented immigrants wrote cheerful messages about the potential arrests, wishing one another “Happy hunting!”, jokingly calling the initiative “Operation Super Epic Mega”, and saying the work was “fun”, records show.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) documents released Wednesday show how officials at the agency prepared for a set of coordinated raids in 2017 that aimed to detain more than 8,000 people for deportation. The agency officially called it “Operation Mega” and officials boasted in the documents that it would be the “largest operation of its kind in the history of ICE, targeting all aliens who are present in the United States in violation of the [law]”. Some documents also suggested field offices might have had specific arrest quotas.
Continue reading...Report from government’s own auditors includes images of children and adults penned into rooms
New images of children and adults in “dangerously” overcrowded US border patrol facilities in Texas have been released as part of a report from government auditors.
The congressional House oversight committee announced on Tuesday it will hold a hearing next week on the treatment of migrants held in detention facilities at the southern border after a series of reports of poor treatment.
Continue reading...Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and Angie Valeria were brought to their final rest in ceremony attended by 200 relatives and friends
A Salvadoran man and his young daughter who drowned trying to cross into Texas were brought to their final rest on Monday, a week after a heartbreaking image of their bodies floating in the Rio Grande cast a spotlight on America’s migration crisis.
About 200 relatives and friends followed a hearse bearing the bodies of Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his 23-month-old daughter, Angie Valeria, to La Bermeja municipal cemetery in southern San Salvador. The ceremony was private, and journalists were not allowed access.
Continue reading...Despite fears stoked by Trump, fewer migrants are arriving at the border than in past years – but most are now children headed to facilities that are ill-equipped to receive them
At a border patrol processing facility in McAllen, Texas on 11 June, a group of lawyers and doctors met a 17-year-old girl from Guatemala. She was in a wheelchair and she held her tiny one-month-old daughter, who was swaddled in a gray sweatshirt so dirty it was almost black.
Related: ‘People with no names’: the drowned migrants buried in pauper’s graves
Continue reading...Court expected to hear arguments late this year, with a decision on Dreamers likely to come before 2020 election
The supreme court will review the constitutionality of an Obama-era program allowing undocumented immigrants who came to the US as children to get temporary deportation relief and work permits.
Trump ended the program, called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca), but the decision was challenged in several lawsuits. The program protected about 700,000 people known as Dreamers.
Continue reading...Horror builds with each new report – children kept in cages, children taking care of infants, mothers who have been torn from their babies. What if it was your child?
Warning: graphic images
For as long as I have been a mother, I’ve had recurrent nightmares about water carrying my children away. In the dreams, my sons slip quietly beneath the surface, becoming blurry underwater shapes, and then disappearing completely. My panic is animal – a pulsing in my ears, static in my brain, a scream-howl building in my chest. I wake up thrashing against the water, searching desperately for my boys.
When the news broke of 23-month-old Valeria and her father, Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez, Salvadoran migrants who had been swept away by the Rio Grande, I was camping along a river in northern Arizona, without access to the internet. I had been photographing plants and making videos of the river to show my desert children, who were at home in Tucson with my parents. When I emerged from the woods, I came face-to-face with a gas station newspaper and saw it.
Continue reading...In an age when social media has undermined our ability to engage with pictures, Julia le Duc’s tragic image raises tough questions
Warning: graphic images
Julia le Duc’s image of Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his 23-month-old daughter, Valeria, lying drowned on a muddy shoreline after an attempted crossing of Rio Grande into the US appears like a summation of all the arguments about the Trump administration’s harsh immigration policies.
The pair look as though they could be locked in a sleeping embrace, the child’s head tucked inside her father’s T-shirt, where she’d been placed by him for safety as he swam, protecting their last dignity.
Continue reading...The father and his toddler daughter pictured face down in the river were two of dozens who drowned this year while crossing the border to seek asylum
Under a hot sun beating down on the US border, a family of five can be seen mid-river, struggling against a cruel current of greenish-grey water threatening to sweep them off their feet. It appears to be a couple and their three children, risking their lives in the treacherous Rio Grande that divides Mexico from Texas.
The father clutches a black backpack in his hand, the family’s only luggage. On his back he’s carrying a small boy wearing a rainbow-striped T-shirt. A little girl is on the woman’s back, small arms clasped tightly around her mother’s neck.
Continue reading...Searing photographs showing a man and his 23-month-old daughter lying face down in shallow water along the Mexican bank of the Rio Grande near the US border highlight the perils of the latest migration crisis involving mostly Central Americans fleeing violence and poverty.
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