1. This is a must-read Twitter thread by Elizabeth C. McLaughlin, on the abysmal conditions inside CBP facilities. Both Shaker Karma Kaze and I linked this thread in comments yesterday, in two different posts, and I also tweeted it, but, in case you missed it, I wanted to include it on the main page, too. Please take the time to read and share it. It is imperative that we understand and raise awareness about what is happening at the southern border.
Toddlers in the "Dog Pound" who had been eating solid food are given only infant formula. Moms are trying to start breast feeding again so their children don't starve.
— Elizabeth C. McLaughlin (@ECMcLaughlin) June 13, 2019
These moms are dehydrated, sick, & have walked miles through desert with no water. CBP gives them nothing.
7/
I don't know how anyone reads witness accounts like this and doesn't understand these are things that happened at places like Dachau. We must raise our voices against this horror.
2. Also on Twitter, this important thread, with action items, care of RAICES, which is the largest immigration legal services non-profit in Texas, focusing on underserved immigrant children, families, and refugees. Additionally: If you are looking to direct financial support to the fight against Trump's human rights abuses against migrants, immigrants, and refugees, you can donate to RAICES here.
3. Eastsidekate rightly wonders why it is that the U.S. anticipates needing "two whole concentration camps for transgender asylum seekers."
4. Angelina Chapin at the Huffington Post: [CN: Video may autoplay at link] Teen Mom and Prematurely Born Baby Neglected at Border Patrol Facility for 7 Days.
A prematurely born infant and her 17-year-old mother spent seven days being almost entirely neglected in Border Patrol custody, according to lawyers who visited an immigrant processing station in McAllen, Texas, on Tuesday and Wednesday.Which one imagines is entirely the point.
The baby, barely a month old, was wrapped in a dirty towel, wore a soiled onesie and looked listless, said one of the lawyers, Hope Frye. The mother was in a wheelchair due to complications from her emergency C-section and had barely slept ― the pain made it too uncomfortable for her to lie down, the immigration and human rights attorney said.
"I looked at that baby and said 'Who does this to babies?'" Frye said. "They were being sadistically ignored."
...Medical experts have previously told HuffPost that Border Patrol centers are not a safe place for kids, in part because no thorough medical assessments are provided by pediatricians and diseases can spread quickly in the environment. The McAllen processing center, the largest in the country, recently had to quarantine three dozen migrants with the flu, after a 16-year-old in the same facility died of the infectious disease.
"The baby infant and mother should never have been held in detention for five minutes," Frye said. "Any small sickness would kill her, period."
5. Patrick J. McDonnell at the L.A. Times: At Mexico's Southern Border, Migrants Feel the Pinch of a Crackdown Spurred by U.S. "Long lines of migrants, mostly Central Americans [fleeing poverty and violence in their homelands], line up daily outside the Tapachula offices of the refugee agencies of Mexico and the United Nations. ...Almost all those seeking help have a common destination — the United States — but they find themselves caught in an expanding Mexican immigration crackdown prompted by U.S. pressure and marooned in this sweltering city in southern Mexico. They cannot proceed north without risking arrest, so they remain in Tapachula seeking documentation allowing legal travel to the U.S.-Mexico border, more than 1,000 miles away."
The not-very-sub subtext of what Trump was always saying regarding "immigration negotiations" with Mexico was, "Let them die on your soil, not ours." He knows damn well that the international media pays less attention to Mexico than the U.S.
The official contempt for the lives of migrants and refugees is enraging and heartbreaking. I am just relentlessly angry and grief-stricken watching this unfold.
MAKE YOUR CALLS. Additional actions items here.
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