The government does not answer to us. The people who run the world use us and
manipulate us. A few of us understand what is happening, care about our fellow
humans, and fight back. But that is a tiny minority.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Tuesday, December 04, 2018 1:11 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: No One Knows What's Happening in This Tent City
for Migrant Kids
When secrecy is the rule,
conditions are bare and cruel.
Does anyone think of any event that was so positive and grand that the
government just had to cloak it in secrecy to keep it from the People?
Have the American working class become so stupefied that we can't understand
that the government answers to us, not the reverse?
Which "People" are being protected when the secrecy wraps are on?
Someone knows what's going on. Who are they and why are they more American
than the average American? Abe Lincoln said"...of the people, by the people
and for the people..." That is us. And if we are to have a representative
government, we need to know what's going on. Seeking Justice in a black room
will only result in a broken nose.
Frankly, the people currently running our government are doing quite well...for
themselves. Isn't it about time we shared in both the running and the profits?
Okay, I'm over it...
Carl Jarvis
On 12/3/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
No One Knows What’s Happening in This Tent City for Migrant Kids
The detention camp in Tornillo, Texas, currently holds about 2,300
migrant children.
Ivan Pierre Aguirre / Reveal
By Laura C. Morel& Patrick Michels, The Center for Investigative
ReportingPublished December 3, 2018
N
This story was originally published by Reveal from The Center for
Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit news organization based in the
San Francisco Bay Area. Learn more at revealnews.organd subscribe to
the Reveal podcast, produced with PRX, at revealnews.org/podcast.
Tornillo, Texas — About 40 miles southeast of El Paso, past the
billboards for fast food joints and rugged desert hills, residents of
this small community sometimes can see the lights of the nearby
detention camp glowing in the night.
Some of them have brought gifts for the roughly 2,300 childreninside,
only to be turned away by guards.
Months after the government erected a tent city in the desert, most of
what happens inside the encampment remains hidden, even from curious
neighbors in the nearby town of 1,600 residents. The only images of
the minors in the camp, standing outside in an orderly line or playing
soccer, have been released by the Department of Health and Human
Services.
When it opened in June, the detention camp in Tornillo, Texas, was
meant to be a temporary home for children ages 13 to 17 caught
crossing the border alone. But its population has grown, and a federal
contract will keep it open at least through December.
Ivan Pierre Aguirre / Reveal
“We have the same access that the whole world has,” said Tornillo
schools Superintendent Rosy Vega-Barrio, “which is none.”
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There is one local organization that gets inside the camp regularly:
Diocesan Migrant & Refugee Services. The El Paso legal nonprofit is
among dozens of groups funded by the government to provide legal
services to immigrant children in custody.
But lawyers at Diocesan Migrant & Refugee Services, known locally as
DMRS, can’t speak publicly about the children at Tornillo. Their
contract prohibits them from talking to the media, Executive Director
Melissa Lopez said in an interview. It’s another aspect of the
conflict of interest built into the funding for legal aid, which also
prevents lawyers from taking the government to courtto get children released.
She referred questions to the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement.
“It’s better for the details to come from them,” she said. The agency
has not responded to a request for comment.
When it opened over the summer, the camp was meant to be a temporary
home for children ages 13 to 17 caught crossing the border alone. But
with a growing population and a contract to keep it openat least
through December, the camp is taking on a role similar to the
government’s permanent shelters for unaccompanied migrant children. It
can now accommodate up to 3,800 minors.
The secrecy surrounding the camp has frustrated longtime residents of
Tornillo and alarmed lawyers and advocates who question its conditions.
After a tour of the tent citySept. 24, advocates left with
concernsthat children were given only workbooks, but no other
education, and less access to mental health counseling than found in other
shelters.
There is also evidence that children aren’t getting the legal
representation they need.
The town’s representative in the Texas Legislature, Democratic Texas
state Rep. Mary González, said she is particularly concerned that the
children aren’t receiving adequate legal help. During a recent morning
at immigration court in El Paso, she saw several minors from the camp
appear before a judge without a lawyer, González said.
“DMRS is a nonprofit organization. They’re doing the best that they can,”
González said. “But think about it this way: They were already
overwhelmed with the services they had to provide in the local
community. Now there’s a thousand kids in Tornillo.”
However strained the group has been, its contract prevents officials
from complaining publicly if children aren’t getting representation.
“I don’t want the government telling anyone they can’t speak to the press,”
González said. “Transparency, particularly in a situation as sensitive
as this, is such a vital tool.”
***
There is someone who can talk about life inside the tent city.
Over the summer, a 17-year-old boy named Bruno left Guatemala and
traversed
1,800 miles on buses, semitrailers and trains until he reached an El
Paso port of entry in July.
After more than a month at another Texas shelter for immigrant
children, Bruno was transferred. No one told him why, he said. Reveal
is not using his full name due to concerns that his decision to speak
publicly about Tornillo may affect his pending immigration case.
Bruno arrived at the Tornillo camp at night. He saw the tents and
asked a worker where he would be sleeping. “Here,” the worker told him.
His friends called the camp “el infierno,” because of the sweltering
summer temperatures. The teens were allowed to play soccer only early
in the morning when it was cooler outside, Bruno said. He remembers
one week when the air conditioning in his tent stopped working.
“My friends would tell me that maybe we would never get out,” Bruno said.
“And I told them we would leave one day. But then I started to think,
‘I’m in the desert. I’m never leaving.’ ”
Children sent here were supposed to move through Tornillo quickly, on
their way to placement with family in the United States while they
awaited a court date. But the government’s placement process has
stalled. Roughly 90 children have been held at the camp for more than
three months, according to recent court filings.
BCFS Health and Human Services, the contractor running the camp, has
said many of the teens stuck at the camp for months were awaiting
fingerprint results for their prospective sponsors, according to a
court declaration from Leah J. Chavla, a visiting attorney from the
Women’s Refugee Commission.
In her declaration, Chavla said hundreds of children “were not far
along in the reunification process,” including more than 150 who had
no viable sponsors.
During his seven weeks at Tornillo, Bruno remembers seeing an attorney
who asked him and other teens about conditions at the camp. But he
never met with a lawyer about his case or his legal rights, he said.
He tried to stay hopeful and followed orders from the staff. Bruno
slept with 19 other boys in a tent lined with bunk beds. Workers
taught the teens how to make bracelets. He went to church services at the
cafeteria.
Bruno was released from the shelter Sept. 22 and reunited with family.
He searches Facebook for the friends he left behind at Tornillo,
hoping some may have been released and have access to social media.
So far, he hasn’t found them.
***
Boys enter the Office of Refugee Resettlement’s tent city in Tornillo,
Texas, on November 15.
Ivan Pierre Aguirre for Reveal
As sweltering summer days at the tent city have given way to freezing
fall desert nights, more and more of the children living there are
going to court.
Iliana Holguin, an El Paso immigration attorney, said her
understanding was that, since Tornillo was a temporary shelter,
children weren’t supposed to face immigration court while being held at the
camp.
“We always were under the impression that the Tornillo kids were not
going to be appearing in court here in El Paso because it was
considered a temporary shelter,” Holguin said.
Today, that’s all changed. Children are hauled from Tornillo to El
Paso’s downtown immigration court as many as four days a week. Without
their families and, in many cases, without the legal help to which
they’re entitled, they’re forced to make major decisions like whether
to return to their home countries or whether to seek asylum.
Detained migrant children are entitled to legal representation under
federal law. Diocesan Migrant & Refugee Services’ federally funded
legal aid contract includes doing that work.
But on Oct. 11, according to a BuzzFeed report, 11 children from
Tornillo faced a judge with no legal help, only a representative from
BCFS Health and Human Services, the contractor that runs the shelter.
The following week, González, the state lawmaker, went to court to see
for herself. This time, she said there were about 10 children, most in
their mid-teens.
“The kids walk in, they’re asked their name and age, they’re told how
important this hearing is,” she recalled. “They’re told, ‘We advise
you to get a lawyer.’ ”
González said there was an attorney from Diocesan Migrant & Refugee
Services present — but only to give advice as a “friend of the court,”
not to represent the children. Instead, she said, they were given a
list of pro bono legal resources— in English only — which includes
DMRS and five other groups, one of which won’t take clients who are in
detention.
It was clear, González said, that children weren’t getting the help
they needed. Most were making their first court appearance and asked
the judge for later court dates to prepare their asylum claims.
One of the minors was a 12-year-old boy from Guatemala, González said.
It was his fourth court hearing, but the first in which he had access
to a translator who spoke his indigenous language. Rather than seek
asylum, she said, the boy agreed to be sent back to Guatemala.
“He was so little, he was so adorable. He came all this way from
Guatemala not even speaking Spanish,” she said. “I don’t know, maybe
that kid wanted to go home. I know he had already been in our system,
detained for a significant time. I don’t know his story. All I know is
that in the little bit that I saw, he wasn’t given full access to the
United States justice system.”
“I’ll be honest,” she said, “I walked out and I cried.”
Without answers from DMRS or the federal government, it’s unclear how
many of the children at Tornillo are getting legal representation in court.
Another group on the list of pro bono legal providers that children
are given is the Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center. Its director,
Linda Rivas, said in an email that she has not received calls from
children at Tornillo seeking representation. But she’s not surprised,
because she knows that DMRS has a contract to represent them.
“DMRS is passionate about their representation of unaccompanied
children and always has been,” Rivas said. “If they were to need our
help, I know they wouldn’t hesitate to ask, and we would help them as
much as we can.”
But Holguin believes that DMRS only recently got approval from the
government to begin representing kids from Tornillo directly, and not
only appear with them as a “friend of the court.”
Holguin was the legal aid group’s executive director from 2006 to
2012. She said DMRS will have to hire more lawyers to do the job. “I’m
sure they didn’t have staff members to absorb that demand,” she said.
If lawyers with the group already are frustrated by the sudden
increase in clients, they can’t say so without risking their government
funding.
“The attorneys at DMRS are very hesitant to disclose something that
would cause ORR (the refugee office) to potentially risk their
contract, leaving these children without representation,” Holguin said.
Back then, Holguin said, there was less of a concern about speaking
out of turn. “I never felt like if I said something I was going to
lose my ORR contract,” she said. “I get the sense that it’s a very
different kind of threat now.”
***
Religious leaders and other protesters rally outside the gates of the
tent city in Tornillo, Texas, on November 15. The secrecy surrounding
the camp has frustrated town residents and alarmed lawyers and
advocates who question its conditions.
Ivan Pierre Aguirre / Reveal
González, the state legislator, is one of the few people who tried to
bring attention to Tornillo before the summer. She tried to extend
natural gas service to homes and clean up its arsenic-laced drinking
water. (The $1,000-a-daycost of housing each child at the tent camp
includes delivery of water from the outside.)
“This is a beautiful, humble, loving community, and this is really
antithetical to what the community stands for,” González said. “It’s
family separation, just by another name. All these kids have a place
to go, have a family to be with.”
When Alfredo Escalante first heard about the encampment, he headed to
the shelter with a few other residents and hauled goods, such as
soccer balls and home-grown watermelon, for the children. But a guard
at the gate told them to leave.
“They turned us away,” Escalante said. “We were just rejected from the
door.”
Escalante and other Tornillo residents joined protests outside the
shelter at the height of the Trump administration’s policy that
separated roughly
2,600 immigrant children from their parents at the border.
Tornillo schools Superintendent Rosy Vega-Barrio, shown at a county
park work site, says the school district has requested access to the
detention camp through local lawmakers, but hasn’t received a
response. “We have the same access that the whole world has,” she says,
“which is none.”
Ivan Pierre Aguirre / Reveal
In conversations with school staff, Superintendent Vega-Barrio said
the camp comes up often. The district has requested access to the
shelter through local lawmakers, but hasn’t received a response.
“We need answers — as the public, as the community, as a nation. I
think that’s what’s really frustrating at this point in time,” Vega-Barrio
said.
“I don’t want Tornillo to be seen or to be remembered as a place where
kids — underage kids — were detained. It’s just not who we are.”
The white tents of the detention camp for migrant children are visible
from Tornillo High School’s stadium bleachers.
Ivan Pierre Aguirre / Reveal
Vega-Barrio described the town as quiet and family-oriented. There are
reminders of the town’s new neighbor. The lights illuminating the
tents at night can be seen from the high school stadium. Large white
buses heading to the camp sometimes cut through Tornillo.
Surrounded by desert and cotton fields, the town with no traffic
lights has one mom-and-pop grocery store and a gas station. On a
recent afternoon, Escalante’s mother waited for customers to arrive at
her hair salon, which she runs out of a small brick house in her backyard.
Maria Escalante, who owns Maria’s Beauty Salon in Tornillo, Texas,
says the government’s tent city “came out of nowhere” over the summer.
“What’s happening is just sad,” she says.
Ivan Pierre Aguirre / Reveal
People in town talk about the shelter, Maria Escalante said. Many are
sympathetic to the children because they’re separated from their
families and living in a strange place. Some residents, she’s heard,
now are working at the camp.
“It came out of nowhere,” she said of the shelter. “If it was a good
thing, we would feel good about it. But what’s happening is just sad.”
Psssttt! While you’re here we need your help.