"In the 10 days following Trump's introspective commentary, his immigration policies have gone from entirely awful to beyond monstrous, culminating with this holiday weekend's move to deport roughly 600, mainly Indigenous, unaccompanied children back to Guatemala -a country from which they had fled violence, trafficking, family destruction, death squads, and myriad other causes that lead a young child to cross a border without their parents."
"Attorneys who rushed to facilities in Tucson, Arizona and in San Antonio, Harlingen, and El Paso in Texas, reported children having panic attacks and sobbing as they were woken up and ordered by contract workers with MVM, an Ashburn, Virginia-based company which has a nearly $1 billion contract with ICE that includes facilitating airplane repatriations of deportees, to pack their meager belongings and get onto aircraft."
"Even after attorneys, who had been given only a half hour warning that MVM was about to initiate the deportations, informed the contractors that there was a court order blocking the flights, the children continued to be crammed onto three planes. In Harlingen, one of those planes began taxiing down the runway before, at the last moment, its pilot finally decided to obey the court order and returned to the airport parking area."
Roughly 600 unaccompanied children, mainly Indigenous and from Guatemala, were targeted for deportation after fleeing violence, trafficking, family destruction, death squads, and other threats. Attorneys coordinated by the Acacia Center for Justice report children as young as seven and a 14-year-old with a three-week-old US-citizen baby were awakened at detention centers in Arizona and Texas and told to prepare to leave even though a judge had ordered they not be deported for weeks. Contract workers with MVM, a company holding nearly a $1 billion ICE contract, moved children toward planes despite lawyers' warnings and a court order, causing panic, sobbing, and last-minute flight interventions.
Read at The Nation
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]