My Spidey senses were tingling when I read this reporting on Friday. It simply could not be true, because ICE does not announce when it is conducting raids. ICE would lose the element of surprise, and the immigrants they are searching for would have time to go underground.
Both the New York Times and the Washington Post reported that:
President Trump has directed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to conduct a mass roundup of migrant families that have received deportation orders, an operation that is likely to begin with predawn raids in major U.S. cities on Sunday, according to three U.S. officials with knowledge of the plans.
The “family op,” as it is referred to at ICE and the Department of Homeland Security, is slated to target up to 2,000 families in as many as 10 U.S. cities, including Houston, Chicago, Miami, Los Angeles and other major immigration destinations, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the law enforcement operation.
Unless this is an amateurish head-fake to get migrant families that have received deportation orders to let down their guard on Sunday (and you should not), President Trump today announced that He’ll Delay Deportation Operation Aimed at Undocumented Families:
President Trump on Saturday delayed plans for nationwide raids to deport undocumented families, but threatened to have Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents resume the raids in two weeks if Democrats do not submit to changes in asylum law they have long opposed.
Immigration agents were allegedly planning to sweep into immigrant communities in 10 major cities on Sunday in coordinated raids. Officials said on Friday that they would target about 2,000 families in a show of force aimed at enforcing immigration laws.
If the plans had gone forward, some immigrant children — many of whom are American citizens because they were born in the United States — would have faced the possibility of being forcibly separated from their families when ICE agents arrived to arrest and deport their undocumented parents.
Democratic lawmakers and immigration activists had demanded that the raids be stopped, calling them a cruel attack on minority communities whose only crime was illegally entering the country. Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Saturday called the raids “heartless” and urged Mr. Trump to “stop this brutal action.”
The president did that a few hours later, saying in his tweet that “at the request of Democrats, I have delayed the Illegal Immigration Removal Process (Deportation) for two weeks.”
But Mr. Trump made clear that he planned to use the looming threat of family deportations as a cudgel to try to extract concessions from Democratic lawmakers in his long-running battle over changes to immigration laws.
Because The Cruelty Is the Point, as Adam Serwer observed. This purposeful cruelty was on full display this week, at Gabe Ortiz at Daily Kos reports. Attorneys describe dozens of sick kids jailed in filthy conditions and neglected by Border Patrol:
A team of lawyers inspecting a Border Patrol facility near El Paso, Texas, found hundreds of children—more than two dozen of them sick, some separated from their families, and all without adequate food, drinking water, and sanitation—neglected by the federal government. “Data obtained by The Associated Press showed that on Wednesday there were three infants in the station, all with their teen mothers, along with a 1-year-old, two 2-year-olds and a 3-year-old. There are dozens more under 12. Fifteen have the flu, and 10 more are quarantined.”
Including jailed children forced to take care of other jailed children. Three girls said they were trying to watch over a 2-year-old boy “who had wet his pants and no diaper and was wearing a mucus-smeared shirt when the legal team encountered him.” Others said they’d gone weeks without being able to take a bath or even change their clothes. Weeks, when under the law, Border Patrol is not supposed to be detaining them longer than 72 hours.
Trump administration officials were just in court arguing that they shouldn’t have to provide so much as soap and toothbrushes to jailed children. This, this is how and why they keep dying in U.S. custody. “In my 22 years of doing visits with children in detention,” said Holly Cooper of the University of California, Davis’ Immigration Law Clinic, “I have never heard of this level of inhumanity.”
UPDATE: Feds Tell 9th Circuit: Detained Kids ‘Safe and Sanitary’ Without Soap:
The Trump administration argued in front of a Ninth Circuit panel Tuesday that the government is not required to give soap or toothbrushes to children apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border and can have them sleep on concrete floors in frigid, overcrowded cells, despite a settlement agreement that requires detainees be kept in “safe and sanitary” facilities.
All three judges appeared incredulous during the hearing in San Francisco, in which the Trump administration challenged previous legal findings that it is violating a landmark class action settlement by mistreating undocumented immigrant children at U.S. detention facilities.
“You’re really going to stand up and tell us that being able to sleep isn’t a question of safe and sanitary conditions?’” U.S. Circuit Judge Marsha Berzon asked the Justice Department’s Sarah Fabian Tuesday.
U.S. Circuit Judge William Fletcher also questioned the government’s interpretation of the settlement agreement.
“Are you arguing seriously that you do not read the agreement as requiring you to do anything other than what I just described: cold all night long, lights on all night long, sleeping on concrete and you’ve got an aluminum foil blanket?” Fletcher asked Fabian. “I find that inconceivable that the government would say that that is safe and sanitary.”
The settlement at issue came out of Jenny Lisette Flores v. Edwin Meese, filed in 1985 on behalf of a class of unaccompanied minors fleeing torture and abuse in Central America.
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On Tuesday, Fabian asked the Ninth Circuit to reverse Gee’s findings because they added new requirements – such as giving detainees soap and toothbrushes – that were not specifically included in Flores.
“One has to assume it was left that way and not enumerated by the parties because either the parties couldn’t reach agreement on how to enumerate that or it was left to the agencies to determine,” Fabian said.
“Or it was relatively obvious,” Fletcher shot back. “And at least obvious enough so that if you’re putting people into a crowded room to sleep on a concrete floor with an aluminum-foil blanket on top of them that it doesn’t comply with the agreement.”
“It wasn’t perfumed soap, it was soap. That’s part of ‘safe and sanitary.’ Are you disagreeing with that?” he added.
Class counsel Peter Schey said that … “The first thing you do is honor the plain meaning” of words like “safe” and “sanitary,” Schey said.
“Today we have a situation where once a month a child is dying in [federal] custody,” he added. “Certainly the Border Patrol facilities are secure, but they’re not safe and they’re not sanitary.”
On rebuttal, Fabian said the administration plans to file a motion for reconsideration with Gee upon a favorable ruling from the panel, eliciting a portentous reply from Berzon.
“Have you considered whether you might go back and consider whether you really want to continue this appeal?” Berzon said.
“There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot left of it, considering that life has so moved on now,” she added, and noted that a government regulation codifying and extinguishing Flores is in the works.
“I just feel like we’re litigating ancient history at this point,” Berzon said.
Attorneys said as many 250 kids were being jailed at this site, and they interviewed 60. The three girls said the 2-year-old boy had been handed off to them by a Border Patrol agent, who went into their room and asked, “Who wants to take care of this little boy?” This should be the job of a trained child welfare expert—an adult, for crying out loud—and the agent tossed this child to other children.
”Law professor Warren Binford, who is helping interview the children, said she couldn’t learn anything about the toddler, not even where he’s from or who his family is. He is not speaking.” Attorneys said other kids there had been separated from their families. How is this happening, if the Trump administration is under court order to stop this policy? Because their guardians were aunts and uncles, and the government doesn’t consider that an authentic family.
It was barely last week when attorneys said they’d found that Border Patrol had been illegally jailing a sick, prematurely born one-month-old infant and her 17-year-old mother for days. The baby had been wrapped in a sweatshirt and was reportedly “weak and listless.” They were removed from the facility only because attorneys found them and then advocated for them. But there are still more kids being jailed in places where kids should never be even for a day. This is how and why they keep dying in U.S. custody.
Because the cruelty is the point.