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| Turns out Shaun King was wrong. . . The pic was taken in 2014 during the Obama administration |
Author, Speaker, Instructor, Radio Host
I oppose amnesty. If a family commits an illegal action, such as breaking into an amusement park, and they are discovered, would the police arrest and expel from the park only the parents and allow the children to remain in the park? Would the whole family be put into the same jail cell, or would the children be placed under the guardianship of a family services agency until due process has been fully navigated?
President Trump is no pushover, and he is using a strategy that is essentially forcing the Democrats to double-down on what beats them. He is herding them into screaming for an even more extreme position than the Ryan Amnesty plan calls for. In short, Trump has positioned the Democrats into admitting they are in support of open borders. Senator Feinstein out of California, for example, has all of the Democrat Senators as co-sponsors on a bill that would push illegal aliens upon 80% of the States. This bill, alone, could cost the Democrats a few seats in the U.S. Senate in November.
Horror stories, pinning mistreatment of illegal alien children on the Trump administration, are being hysterically painted on the liberal left’s journalistic canvas. The problem is, it is all a bunch of lies, and a desperate attempt to use their losing illegal alien position as a weapon against the current administration.
There was never a solution offered by the Democrats then, and there is no solution being offered now, because they would rather use the immigration issue as a political weapon.
In 1997, the Clinton administration entered into something called the Flores Settlement Agreement, which ended a class action lawsuit first brought in the 1980s.
The settlement established a policy that the federal government would release unaccompanied minors from custody to their parents, relatives, or other caretakers after no more than 20 days, or, alternatively, determine the “least restrictive” setting for the child.
In a separate development, in 2008 the Democrat-controlled Congress approved bipartisan legislation to combat human trafficking and President George W. Bush, a Republican, signed it into law.
Section 235 (g) in that law, the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, states that unaccompanied minors entering the United States must be transferred to the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement rather than to the Department of Homeland Security.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit expanded the Flores settlement in 2016 to include children brought to the country illegally by their parents.
For consistency between the provision of the anti-trafficking law and the 9th Circuit’s interpretation of the Flores agreement, children who came into the country illegally with parents had to be taken into HHS custody, said Art Arthur, former general counsel for Immigration and Naturalization Services (now known as Immigration and Customs Enforcement) as well as a former federal immigration judge.
“If you’re smuggling a child, then we’re going to prosecute you, and that child will be separated from you, probably, as required by law,” Sessions said. “If you don’t want your child separated, then don’t bring them across the border illegally. It’s not our fault that somebody does that.”
The Daily Signal reports:
The Department of Homeland Security rejected the comparison, noting that most children caught crossing the border illegally are not detained by federal officials.
“We have high standards,” Nielsen said during the White House press briefing Monday. “We give them meals and we give them education and we give them medical care. There are videos, there are TVs. I visited the detention centers myself.”
In the last fiscal year, 90 percent of apprehended children were released to a sponsor who was either a parent or close relative, according to the department.
Homeland security officials also say they work with HHS to improve and ease communication between detained parents and their children in HHS care.
Sponsors may be “a parent, adult sibling, relative, or appropriate home that meets criteria for the safety of the child and continuation of any immigration proceedings,” according to DHS. Also, a parent who is prosecuted and later released can be a sponsor and ask HHS to restore custody of the child.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement has dedicated a facility to operate primarily as a family reunification and removal center. ICE staff who interact with parents will receive training in trauma-informed care, and the agency will assign staff trained in mental health care to detained parents who have been separated from children, according to DHS.
In a conference call with reporters last week, a senior Department of Homeland Security official said this was not the case.
“We do not separate breastfeeding children from their parents. That does not exist. That is not a policy. That is not something that DHS does,” an official told reporters Friday. “We believe that that is false.”
The immigration reform law calling for mandatory E-Verify died. Now the less desirable bills are moving through Congress. I am guessing none of them will pass.