"Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Huddled Masses Yearning to Breathe Free..."

[Content Note: Nativism; child abuse.]

One of the (many) things that is absolutely enraging me about the public discourse around the obscene mistreatment of migrant children is that it utterly lacks this notion: We can afford to welcome every last one of those children and their families into this country.

We have the resources. We have the space. We have need for workers who are looking for stable work, if we can muster the political will for infrastructure and green jobs. The only reason to pretend we don't have these things is because it's politically expedient to exploit fear.

Please, if you talk about this subject today and I hope you will, make sure to include in that conversation the fact that the crisis is a lack of empathy and welcome. We do not lack the ability to integrate migrants and refugees. We lack the compassion.

We have to change this conversation. We cannot keep talking about it using the dishonest frames of the nativist wrecks who are driving policy. There is no need to detain children and/or their parents indefinitely. NONE. That is a fact.

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In other news this morning...

A young Honduran boy was separated from his father at the border.

We represented him and he told us what it feels to be locked up in a cage.

This must stop.https://t.co/vF66DHS5HA

— RAICES (@RAICESTEXAS) June 25, 2019

[CN: Video may autoplay at link] Graham Kates at CBS News: John Kelly Joins Board of Company Operating Largest Shelter for Unaccompanied Migrant Children. "Friday, Caliburn International confirmed to CBS News that Kelly had joined its board of directors. Caliburn is the parent company of Comprehensive Health Services, which operates Homestead and three other shelters for unaccompanied migrant children in Texas. Prior to joining the Trump administration in January 2017, Kelly had been on the board of advisors of DC Capital Partners, an investment firm that now owns Caliburn." These fucking ghouls.

[CN: Video may autoplay at link] Clara Long and Nicole Austin-Hillery at CNN: We Went to a Border Detention Center for Children; What We Saw Was Awful.

Based on our interviews, officials at the border seem to be making no effort to release children to caregivers — many have parents in the U.S. — rather than holding them for weeks in overcrowded cells at the border, incommunicado from their desperate loved ones. By holding and then transferring them down the line to ORR facilities, the government is turning children into pawns for immigration enforcement.

A second-grader we interviewed entered the room silently but burst into tears when we asked who she traveled with to the U.S. "My aunt," she said, with a keening cry. A bracelet on her wrist had the words "U.S. parent" and a phone number written in permanent marker. We called the number on the spot and found out that no one had informed her desperate parents where she was being held.

Alex Samuels at the Texas Tribune: People Want to Donate Diapers and Toys to Children at Border Patrol Facilities in Texas; They're Being Turned Away. "A slew of other sympathetic people, advocacy groups, and lawmakers on both sides of the political aisle have expressed a desire to lend a hand to the kids housed in the facilities. But after purchasing items like toys, soap, toothbrushes, diapers, and medicine — especially as news reports circulate of facilities having drinking water that tastes like bleach and sick children without enough clothing — they've been met with a common message: No donations are being accepted."

The Washington Post Editors: America Should Be Horrified by This. "Children wearing clothes filthy with snot and tears and food. Children locked in cells nearly all day long, sleeping on cold concrete floors. No windows. Always hungry. No toothbrushes, toothpaste, or soap. Children alone, even the littlest among them. These are the conditions in which hundreds of immigrant children are being held at Customs and Border Protection facilities along the U.S. border. Most pets get better treatment."

The New York Times Editors: There's No Excuse for Mistreating Children at the Border; Here's What to Do About It. "By his divisive, incoherent, and barbaric policies, Mr. Trump has only made agreeing on an approach to immigration in the United States far more difficult. He has done so by systematically creating a false narrative of immigrants as job-stealing criminals, by insisting that there is a crisis of illegal immigration where there is none, and, most maliciously, by dreaming up schemes to torment these people in the perverse notion that this would deter others from trying to reach the United States. The most appalling of these has been the separation of children from their parents and detaining them in conditions no child anywhere should suffer, and certainly not children in the care of the American government."

There are a number of action items at the link. RESIST.