Children in Trump’s horror jails, infants die

This 21 June 2019 video from the USA says about itself:

The Associated Press reports migrant children are being neglected at a Texas border facility near El Paso. According to the report, children are not being provided with adequate food, water or proper sanitation. CBS News correspondent Mireya Villareal has been covering the situation on the border and joins CBSN to discuss.

Translated from Dutch NOS TV today:

250 migrant children taken away from horrible reception location in Texas

In the US state Texas, some 250 children have been taken away from a border police reception jail where they were detained for weeks in dire circumstances.

The location, near the border town El Paso, was overcrowded. Lawyers who visited the site last week sounded the alarm. The older children had to take care of babies and small children. The lawyers reported, eg, about a 4-year-old child who had not been washed for days, and hungry and inconsolable children.

Some have been detained for three weeks, while it has been legally established that children cannot stay in a temporary reception location for more than 72 hours. Some children had crossed the border with Mexico by themselves, but according to the lawyers, some were also separated from their parents at the border.

“Help urgently needed”

In an e-mail to news agency Associated Press, the border patrol admitted that the location is not suitable for accommodating young children. …

Veronica Escobar, member of the House of Representatives on behalf of the Republican Party

No, NOS; Ms Escobar is a Democratic Party representative.

Many questions remain to understand what happened and the Trump admin. should answer:
 
How many children in Clint were separated from their parents?
What is the administration doing to reunite these families?
Who will be held accountable for these atrocities?

— Rep. Veronica Escobar (@RepEscobar) June 24, 2019

Children do not belong in detention and @realDonaldTrump's failed policies are only harming children and promoting needless and cruel family separation.

This must end.

— Rep. Veronica Escobar (@RepEscobar) June 24, 2019

criticizes President Trump’s policy on migrant children on Twitter. …

It is not clear where the 250 children are now. According to Escobar, some have been transferred to another location in the area. Human rights organizations also have doubts about that jail. Thirty children are now staying in the reception location at El Paso.

Yesterday, the Texas authorities reported that seven migrants were found near the border in the last week who were killed in the extreme heat. Among them are a woman with two babies and a small child. They had probably died days ago when they were found.

By Eric London in the USA:

Horror across US-Mexico border with multiple parents, infants dead

25 June 2019

Catastrophe struck Central American immigrants attempting to flee imperialist war and violence across the US-Mexico border last weekend, generating widespread outrage in the Latin American working class.

On Sunday morning, US officials discovered the bodies of four people—a 20-year-old, a young child and two babies—dead in the Texas desert on the US side of the Rio Grande, known to Latin Americans as the Rio Bravo. The Guatemalan embassy has since identified the young people as Guatemalan nationals. Temperatures in the area reached 113 degrees Sunday.

The FBI has announced it is reviewing the deaths, a highly unusual step which raises questions about whether the immigrants were murdered on the US side of the border. Regardless of the exact cause of death, the immigrants were killed by the policies of the Trump administration.

The same day, a young father and his infant daughter drowned attempting to cross the river on the border of Brownsville, Texas and Matamoros, Tamaulipas. ElSalvador.com wrote, “Sunday afternoon, a Salvadoran and his 1 year, 11-month-old daughter were overcome by the current of the Rio Bravo in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, Mexico when they attempted to cross it to enter the US.”

The father was named Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramirez, he was just 25 years old. His daughter, whose arm was draped around her father’s back when their bodies washed up on the shore, was named Valeria.

This photo by Julia Le Duc shows Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramirez and his daughter Valeria, dead in the Rio Grande river.

This photo shows Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramirez, his daughter Valeria and his partner, when Óscar and Valeria were still alive.

The deaths have sparked mass outrage across Latin America and engendered even deeper hatred against the Trump administration and American imperialism. Practically every major newspaper across the region ran banner headlines describing the deaths and a litany of other horrors confronting immigrants fleeing north.

Salvadorans were outraged after Mexican police assassinated a young Salvadoran woman traveling to the US along Mexico’s east coast this weekend. Elsalvador.com wrote:

“María Senaida Escobar, 19 years old, died after being shot in the head when Mexican police from Veracruz intercepted the truck in which she and other immigrants were driving to the United States.”

On Friday, Mexican National Guardsmen wielding assault rifles were filmed tearing two Nicaraguan mothers from the arms of their young daughters at the border with the US in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua. Photos of the National Guardsmen in battle gear frog marching the crying mothers back to Mexico was widely viewed on social media throughout Mexico and Central America and particularly in Nicaragua.

…

The Trump administration was forced to relocate 300 immigrant children from a concentration camp in Texas where they were being housed under filthy conditions by the fascistic guards.

The New York Times reported: “The move came days after a group of lawyers was given access to the station in Clint and said they saw children as young as 8 years old caring for infants, toddlers with no diapers, and children who said they were waking up at night because they were hungry.”

The lawyers “said that children lacked access to private bathrooms, soap, toothbrushes or toothpaste. Many were wearing the same dirty clothes that they had crossed the border in weeks earlier.”

The children were whisked off to a variety of other concentration camps, including a tent encampment outside of El Paso, Texas.

The attacks on immigrant workers escaping home countries devastated by decades of US imperialist violence has provoked outrage in the American population as well.

Beyond a small segment of die-hard Trump supporters, the masses of people regard the migrant deaths and the deterioration of conditions in the concentration camps with disgust and shame.

Over the weekend, a group of protesters gathered at the Fort Sill military base in the Midwestern state of Oklahoma, the former Japanese internment camp that the Trump administration is opening for detaining 1,400 immigrant children. The group included a number of elderly Japanese Americans who themselves were interned as young children, and one man who was born in a camp in Topaz, Utah.

Military police interrupted the protest and screamed at the former internees: “What is it you people don’t understand!” one soldier shouted, demanding the protesters leave immediately.

“My earliest recollection is being on the train with my family, leaving that camp”, Satsuki Ina, a 75-year-old woman, told Newsweek. “I was two years old.”

Mike Ishii, whose mother, aunts and grandmother were detained in internment camps, also travelled to Oklahoma from New York. “I am just so heartbroken and outraged,” he told Newsweek.

“For me, I don’t feel like I have a choice. I have to go. I need to go there. I need to register my opposition and I think that is a sentiment that is shared by a lot of people in my community. As soon as I first saw the headlines coming out about this policy to bring 1,400 children to Fort Sill, I felt like I just had to be there.”

On Saturday, Trump announced he was postponing by two weeks plans for a massive 10-city series of raids to arrest 2,000 immigrant families at the request of Congressional Democratic leaders Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer.

The Democrats, who never raised doubts when Democratic President Barack Obama deported 3 million people, undoubtedly warned Trump that his raids would likely provoke mass demonstrations that they feared neither party could control. Now the two parties are agreeing to provide billions more to fund Trump’s American Gestapo, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection.

ICE INCARCERATES ILL, PREGNANT MOTHER Immigration and Customs Enforcement plans to deport a severely ill pregnant mother with her two children on Wednesday, even though she’s still fighting her removal order in court. [HuffPost]

KIDS REMOVED FROM DANGEROUS DETENTION CENTER The U.S. government has removed most of the children from a remote Border Patrol station in Texas following reports that more than 300 kids detained there were caring for each other with inadequate food, water and sanitation. [AP]