Understandably we've mostly focused on the children who have been forcibly separated from their parents during this fucking mess, but now we’ve had reports that the border patrol station in McAllen, Texas, has reached an overcrowding level of 7 to 1, holding more than 900 people in a space designated for 125. This has created a dangerous health and safety situation for the parents and adults, as well as the children.

“We also observed detainees standing on toilets in the cells to make room and gain breathing space, thus limiting access to toilets,” the watchdog wrote.

Single adults were held in cells designed for one-fifth as many detainees as were housed there and were wearing soiled clothing for days or weeks with limited access to showers, the report said. Pictures published with the report show women packed tightly together in a holding cell.

The report included eyewitness accounts of families left outside in a parking lot. Staff members told the watchdog that as of May 11 they were no longer holding families in the parking lot.

The El Paso Del Norte Border Patrol processing facility in southern Texas, which has a maximum capacity of 125 detainees, was holding 900 people on site on May 8, the watchdog found in a report dated May 30.

U.S. officials say they have been overwhelmed by over a hundreds of thousands of mostly Central Americans crossing into the United States and turning themselves over to border agents. President Donald Trump has threatened Mexico with tariffs to do more to stop the flow.

The internal watchdog for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has urged officials to take immediate steps to alleviate “dangerous overcrowding” after it found some adult detainees being held in “standing-room-only conditions” for days or weeks at a border patrol facility in Texas.

This is not what is supposed to happen in America. This is not supposed to be a place that continues to implement slavery, and yet it is, as tens of thousands of immigrant detainees in our modern internment camps are being required to work for as little as $3 per week or just $1 per day during their captivity with for-profit private prison companies.

And just to be clear, that report was from January and is now slightly out of date. Although the government’s maximum detention capacity had been about 40,000 beds, they have since exceeded that by just about double and are currently housing more than 80,000 thanks to help from private prisons, according to acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan.

Prison labor is nearly as old as the American prison system itself, and it is protected by the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery and indentured servitude except as punishment for a crime. This exception means that prisons can require their prisoners to work, even without compensation.

Congress should not wait for these lawsuits to be decided. Democrats have won the House, so even if they can’t stop the president’s anti-immigrant push, they can push to raise the obsolete and exploitative $1-a-day wage. And, just as they have rejected Mr. Trump’s request for $5.7 billion for the border wall , they should reject the request for $2.8 billion to expand detentions to 52,000 beds.

One feature of privately run centers — the Voluntary Work Program — is the subject of six separate lawsuits, which say that privately run immigrant detention centers are coercing detainees into working for a dollar a day and punishing those who don’t. The lawsuits demand, among other things, that the practice stop and that detained workers be paid minimum wage.

In February 2017, Attorney General Jeff Sessions signaled renewed opportunities for private prison contractors by rescinding the Obama-era Justice Department memo intended to wind down the use of private prisons by BOP. By the end of the month, CoreCivic and GEO Group stocks had increased by 137 percent and 98 percent, respectively. In April, GEO Group won a $110 million contract to build the first detention center under the new administration, and ICE extended its contract with CoreCivic for a 1,000-bed immigrant processing center in Texas. In October, ICE issued a request for information about potential locations for up to 3,000 new detention beds within 180 miles of Chicago, Detroit, Salt Lake City, and St. Paul, Minnesota. Immigrant-rights advocates are bracing for widespread contracting activity beyond these developments, and efforts to push back on expanded detention have seen some success: California Governor Jerry Brown signed a bill in October 2017 blocking local authorities in the state from renewing or entering into contracts with for-profit companies to detain immigrants.

The private prison industry predicts greater profits due to an increase in ICE arrests within the country’s interior as compared to the level during the latter Obama years. Since removals in the U.S. interior take longer to process, immigrants could spend longer periods of time in detention—a fact cited by CoreCivic and GEO Group officials as a source of optimism during separate earnings calls in August 2017.

Placing their bet on the Trump administration appears to be paying off for private prison companies. A day after the election, GEO Group stock prices rose 21 percent and CoreCivic stocks soared by 43 percent. Shortly after his inauguration, President Trump signed two executive orders that benefit private prison interests. Executive Order 13767 included plans to tighten enforcement along the U.S.-Mexico border, increase the use of detention in order to end “catch and release” of migrants pending their removal hearings, and expand detention capacity. The desired scale of this expansion was revealed in a leaked White House memo calling for a doubling of people in immigration detention to 80,000 per day. Further, Executive Order 13768 reversed Obama-era policies by prioritizing all unauthorized immigrants for enforcement, in addition to reviving Secure Communities and pushing for new agreements allowing state and local law enforcement to enter into partnerships to assist ICE in immigration enforcement.

The largest private prison contractors reap sizeable annual profits from detaining immigrants, including those identified for removal, asylum seekers and others awaiting a hearing in immigration court, and those in the process of being deported. CoreCivic, Inc. and GEO Group, Inc.—which collectively manage more than half of private prison contracts in the country (including immigration and nonimmigration detention)—earned combined revenue exceeding $4 billion in FY 2017. They have spent millions of dollars on lobbying and campaign contributions, seeking to sway the political process toward detention-focused policies that favor their interests—a tactic that appears to be paying off in the Trump era.

While the push to increase spending on private prisons to provide more and more beds for internees continues, Trump has also been cutting funding for various programs provided to child detainees, including education and legal aid.

Federal officials have warned Congress that they are facing “a dramatic spike” in unaccompanied minors at the southern border and have asked Congress for $2.9 billion in emergency funding to expand shelters and care. The program could run out of money in late June, and the agency is legally obligated to direct funding to essential services, Weber said.

The Office of Refugee Resettlement has begun discontinuing the funding stream for activities — including soccer — that have been deemed “not directly necessary for the protection of life and safety, including education services, legal services, and recreation,” said Department of Health and Human Services spokesman Mark Weber.

The Trump administration is canceling English classes, recreational programs and legal aid for unaccompanied minors staying in federal migrant shelters nationwide, saying the immigration influx at the southern border has created critical budget pressures.

That $2. 9 billion figure is not at all coincidental, since the average price for holding immigrant detainees by private prisons tends to be about $145 per person per day. So with the approved number of about 50,000 detainees being held, that comes to a total of $2.6 billion—except that we are now holding far more detainees than that.

The drive to stem the tide of refugees streaming out of the Northern Triangle may be fruitless, as on top of the area being the most dangerous area on the planet ...

The number of asylum seekers worldwide originating from the Northern Triangle reached 110,000 in 2015, a five-fold increase from 2012. Unaccompanied minors accounted for much of this surge [PDF]. Migrants from all three countries cite violence, forced gang recruitment, and extortion, as well as poverty and lack of opportunity, as their reasons for leaving. While Belize, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama have reported a sharp increase in flows from the Northern Triangle since 2008, most migrants are passing through to settle in the United States. In 2015, the latest year for which data is available, as many as 3.4 million people born in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras were living in the United States, more than double the estimated 1.5 million people in 2000. About 55 percent of them were undocumented.

The region remains menaced by corruption, drug trafficking, and gang violence despite tough police and judicial reforms. While the United States has provided the three governments billions of dollars in aid over the past decade, some analysts believe U.S. immigration policies have exacerbated threats to regional security.

Tens of thousands of Salvadorans, Guatemalans, and Hondurans, many of them unaccompanied minors , have arrived in the United States in recent years, seeking asylum from the region’s skyrocketing violence. Their countries, which form a region known as the Northern Triangle, were rocked by civil wars in the 1980s, leaving a legacy of violence and fragile institutions.

It also appears, according to Nicholas Kristof, that climate change has made it nearly impossible for these refugees to provide their own food.

Mateo Gómez Tadeo borrowed thousands of dollars and migrated north to the United States several years ago after his crops here failed. He found work in Alabama cutting flowers but then caught an infection and died, leaving hungry children back home and a huge debt hanging over the family. Two of their sons, aged 7 and 14, soon died as well, apparently of malnutrition-related illnesses. Jorge Jorge pulled another son, Juan, out of school in the second grade so that he could work in the fields and help pay off the debt. If it isn’t paid, lenders will seize the family land. “We all suffer now,” Jorge Jorge told me grimly. “I have to struggle daily.” If any family understands the risks of traveling to the United States, it’s this one. Yet Juan, now 11, is talking about trying to make his own way north. And Jorge Jorge, while terrified at the prospect of losing him, approves. “I say, ‘Go,’” she said bleakly. “‘There’s nothing here, so go.’” I’m on my annual win-a-trip journey, in which I take a university student on a reporting trip, and we’ve come to Guatemala to report on migration. My student winner, Mia Armstrong of Arizona State University, and I have heard from innumerable Guatemalans that the most fundamental driver of emigration is desperation — and, to an extent that most Americans don’t appreciate, this desperation often reflects drought and severe weather linked to climate change. “Food doesn’t grow here anymore,” Jorge Jorge said. “That’s why I would send my son north.”

People in the Northern Triangle are not taking part in this mass exodus for trivial reasons. Trump’s attempts to ramp up the cruelty in order to force them to stay or go somewhere else have been completely ineffective because there’s literally nothing he can do that is more harsh and deadly than having your children at risk of being killed or recruited by a vicious, murdering gang, or starving to death from the lack of food due to the effects of climate change. Their motivation to leave is basically the same as people who are willing to take the risk of leaping through the window of a burning building, choosing the risk of serious injury over certain death.

They have no real choice. It’s literally a matter of life and death.

However, Trump does have a choice. As I’ve noted many times, it’s perfectly legal to cross the border without a visa between designated points of entry in order to apply for asylum.

(a) Authority to Apply for Asylum.- Sec. 208. (a) Authority to Apply for Asylum.-

(1) In general. - Any alien who is physically present in the United States or who arrives in the United States (whether or not at a designated port of arrival and including an alien who is brought to the United States after having been interdicted in international or United States waters), irrespective of such alien's status, may apply for asylum in accordance with this section or, where applicable, section 235(b). [Emphasis added.]

This is the law. It is a giant lie to claim that those seeking asylum can only enter the country at a standard point of entry, particularly when the Trump administration has also been closing those points of entry to asylum seekers in order to force them to enter between those points so they can be arrested.

Jeff Sessions’ “zero tolerance” policy sought to arrest and criminally prosecute every migrant who crosses the border “improperly”—that is, at any point between the 44 official land border crossings, or ports of entry—even if that migrant is asking for asylum. The result would be to force asylum-seekers to avoid arrest by crossing at official ports of entry. “You are not breaking the law by seeking asylum at a port of entry,” Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen tweeted in mid-June. But at the same time as the flow was being diverted to them, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents at the ports of entry notably slowed their reception of asylum-seekers. During March, April, and May 2018, more than 6,000 children and families reported to ports of entry as what CBP calls “inadmissibles.” Every month since June, however, the number of children and families at the ports has held mysteriously steady at 4,000 per month, even as “zero tolerance” was encouraging them to approach the official crossings. The numbers point to a deliberate effort to throttle asylum-seekers’ access to the ports of entry (see WOLA’s report on this, published earlier this year). Reports from sectors all along the border point to the same thing. Starting in May or June, most ports of entry began stationing CBP officers directly on the borderline, checking documentation and preventing asylum seekers from setting foot on U.S. soil, which would give them the right to ask for protection. Instead, the officers most often tell them to “come back later,” and accept only a very limited number of asylum applicants per day.

The throttling of points of entry to aslyum seekers, combined with the wholesale arrest and detention of tens of thousands of asylum seekers is completely illegitimate and frankly, quasi-legal. The so-called “crime” of crossing the border is normally only a misdemeanor on the first offense, which is punishable by a fine starting at $25.

8 U.S. Code § 1325. Improper entry by alien (a) Improper time or place; avoidance of examination or inspection; misrepresentation and concealment of facts Any alien who (1) enters or attempts to enter the United States at any time or place other than as designated by immigration officers, or (2) eludes examination or inspection by immigration officers, or (3) attempts to enter or obtains entry to the United States by a willfully false or misleading representation or the willful concealment of a material fact, shall, for the first commission of any such offense, be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than 6 months, or both, and, for a subsequent commission of any such offense, be fined under title 18, or imprisoned not more than 2 years, or both. (b) Improper time or place; civil penaltiesAny alien who is apprehended while entering (or attempting to enter) the United States at a time or place other than as designated by immigration officers shall be subject to a civil penalty of— (1) at least $50 and not more than $250 for each such entry (or attempted entry); or at least $50 and not more than $250 for each such entry (or attempted entry); or (2) twice the amount specified in paragraph (1) in the case of an

twice the amount specified in paragraph (1) in the case of an alien who has been previously subject to a civil penalty under this subsection. Civil penalties under this subsection are in addition to, and not in lieu of, any criminal or other civil penalties that may be imposed.

To resolve the obvious conflict between asylum law (which allows for asylum seekers to enter regardless of where or how) and immigration law (which requires authorized entry, previous administrations have temporarily suspended implementation of immigration law until after the completion of the asylum application process. If the detainee manages to succeed in their asylum claim, the immigration violation is waived. If they do not, then criminal, civil, and/or deportation proceedings are resumed.

Trump’s minions have reversed this practice, beginning criminal and civil penalties first while doing their best to block asylum seekers’ access to their legal rights.

Implementing the worst possible penalty on every asylum seeker is rather like arresting and detaining every person who crosses a street without the “WALK” sign flashing even though they’re in the crosswalk, which should normally grant them the right of way. It’s like impounding and arresting everyone who doesn’t come to a full stop at a stop sign. It’s like arresting and holding every shoplifter until they come up with bail, or every person with a broken tail light, or every person with the improper level of tire inflation.

The result of this abuse of power, lack of common sense, and absence of discretion should be obvious. If we were to do any of the above it would lead to massive, dangerous, and unsanitary overcrowding in the detention areas. This is all leading toward death, in numbers that may severely shock the conscience.

We have to understand that this very overcrowding, putting the health and lives of these asylum seekers at risk, increasing the pain and trauma by ripping children out of the arms of their parents only to be held elsewhere in the country, and now cancelled education programs, sports, and legal aid to the detained children have all been deliberate parts of the plan to raise the level of pain and difficulty for these immigrants. It’s all been done out of bigoted spite.

The Trump administration is canceling English classes, recreational programs and legal aid for unaccompanied minors staying in federal migrant shelters nationwide, saying the immigration influx at the southern border has created critical budget pressures. The Office of Refugee Resettlement has begun discontinuing the funding stream for activities — including soccer — that have been deemed “not directly necessary for the protection of life and safety, including education services, legal services, and recreation,” said Department of Health and Human Services spokesman Mark Weber. Federal officials have warned Congress that they are facing “a dramatic spike” in unaccompanied minors at the southern border and have asked Congress for $2.9 billion in emergency funding to expand shelters and care. The program could run out of money in late June, and the agency is legally obligated to direct funding to essential services, Weber said.

Taking away these programs is not going to deter these children or their parents from trying to escape the death cauldrons that their native countries have become.

A wall is not going to stop their exodus, even if Trump were to arm it will machine gun parapets, moats, and mine fields any more than doing the exact same thing with the No-Man’s Land area between North and South Korea, or the Berlin Wall deterred East Germans from frequently taking the risk of crossing toward freedom.

Trump’s latest doomed gambit of placing tariffs on Mexico to push them into stemming the flow of migrants is also likely to fail and has managed to at long last generate a backlash from Senate Republicans. This has mostly happened because their supporters in the business community are abjectly against being saddled with this tax.

Republicans are warning that President Donald Trump could face a shocking rebellion against him on the Senate floor if the president slaps Mexico with wide-ranging tariffs. At a closed-door lunch Tuesday, two Trump administration officials laid out the president’s view: There is a crisis at the border and Mexico needs to stem the surge of migrants to avoid the new levies. But White House deputy counsel Pat Philbin and Assistant Attorney General Steve Engel faced brutal push-back from the GOP, according to multiple senators, with some threatening that Trump could actually face a veto-proof majority to overturn the tariffs. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told reporters the party spent “almost our entire lunch” going back and forth with the administration and warned afterward “there is not much support in my conference for tariffs, that's for sure.”

So these Republicans aren’t moved by the overcrowding in our detention centers, and they aren’t moved by the fact that at least five children so far have died in border patrol custody. They’re only moved by “higher taxes.”

A 16-year-old boy died in a Border Patrol station in Texas on Monday. He was the fifth child to die after spending time in United States government custody since December. Customs and Border Protection agents found the Guatemalan teenager unresponsive that morning and announced his death soon after. The boy, identified as Carlos Hernandez Vasquez, had told CBP agents the night before that he wasn't feeling well, and was prescribed medication for what a nurse diagnosed as a flu.

To get out of this problem with Republicans Trump’s “agreement” with Mexico of them sending the national guard to their southern border was something they had already offerred to do months ago so basically what just happened was that Trump caved on his own tariff threat. Even this modification doesn’t solve the original problem which is in the Northern Triangle, and frankly Mexico can’t really deliver on blocking asylum seekers because they’ve signed the same UN Refugee Treaty that we have, plus the Treaty of Cartegena which goes even further a protecting the rights of refugees. Mexico would be violating two international treaties if they tried to turn refugees back or illegally incarcerated them, so this changes nothing.

Just imagine if a fresh measles outbreak among unvaccinated children were to slam its way though an overcrowded immigration detention center like a wildfire. The spread of disease is exactly how more than 1,800 detainees held in the Japanese-American internment camps of World War II perished.

A total of 1,862 people died from medical problems while in the internment camps. About one out of every 10 of these people died from tuberculosis.

In total, more than 120,000 American citizens of Japanese descent were held in these camps, while according to the Trump administration the current number of those held on a daily basis in immigrant detention has now reached 80,000 people, which is twice the capacity which was budgeted in the 2019 immigration bill that was passed by Congress.

U.S. immigration authorities now have over 80,000 people in custody, a record level that is beyond sustainable capacity with current resources. Over 7,500 single adults are in custody at the border and Immigration and Customs Enforcement is holding over 50,000. … … Over 2,350 unaccompanied children — the highest level ever — are currently in custody waiting for days for placements in border stations that cannot provide appropriate conditions for them because Health and Human Services is out of bed space and Congress has failed to act on the administration’s emergency supplemental request for more than four weeks.

It’s likely that by next month we will move from double capacity to triple capacity at over 120,000 detainees—or more.

We’re literally on the verge of a massive catastrophe.

Most of the criticism of Congress has been that they haven’t provided enough money to increase detention capacity, or that we simply haven’t been “tough enough” yet to deter these refugees via a giant wall and greater and greater cruelty toward immigrants.

This path is deeply, seriously, dangerously misguided.

There is no valid reason to block legitimate asylum seekers from open access to safety. In fact, it is specifically against international law to summarily deport them back to their original nations when their lives may be at risk. This is an international right known as the right of non-refoulement.

Non-refoulement (/rəˈfuːlmɒ̃/) is a fundamental principle of international law that forbids a country receiving asylum seekers from returning them to a country in which they would be in likely danger of persecution based on "race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion".

Certainly refugees should be vetted and potential criminals should be identified and segregated, if not deported. But the pathway that Trump has placed us on is in direct violation of our humanitarian principles. These detentions are unlawful not simply because they violate asylum law, but also because they violate civil rights principles that state that persons of any particular national origin will not be treated unfairly.

This is clear. This is obvious. And I frankly don’t understand why there aren’t riots in the streets against this. I don’t understand why we aren’t overwhelmed with outrage. But perhaps, we’ve never truly held onto our principles as much as we claim. We allowed slavery to exist while pretending to be the “land of the free.” We allowed the Trail of Tears, and we allowed Americans to be interned and imprisoned without a trial or due process simply because they were of Japanese descent. The Supreme Court ultimately approved Trump’s Muslim ban.

I’m not sure how we haven’t yet again proven that our values are hollow and empty, merely a pretense and a sham.

To stave off the impending disaster, Congress does need to act, but not by further clamping down on immigration. They need to officially grant refugees from the Northern Triangle with Temporary Protective Status, essentially granting them all pre-cleared asylum protection while their home nations remain in a crisis, and they need to re-establish the USAID programs which were cancelled by Trump and had been working to reduce the violence in those nations by as much as 50 percent. We need to implement the Central American Marshall Plan, which has been proposed by former HUD Secretary Julian Castro.

The US should launch a 21st-century Marshall plan in Central America to help stricken countries combat gangs and poverty to stem the flow of undocumented immigrants to America’s southern border, the Democratic presidential candidate Julián Castro has proposed. Castro, a former mayor of the Texas city of San Antonio and cabinet member under Barack Obama, is calling for the US to emulate Harry Truman’s 1948 aid program that helped western Europe recover from the ravages of the second world war. In a modern echo, the US would inject resources and knowhow into the struggling societies of Central America as a humane alternative to Donald Trump’s proposed wall. In an interview with the Guardian, Castro said that his proposal for a new Marshall plan would stand in contrast to the cruelty of Trump’s immigration crackdown.

[Edit: The House just passed a party-line Immigration bill 5 days ago that grants a pathway to citizenship for the undocumented, protects Dreamers for ten years and also helps those under TPS status fleeing natural disasters from Central America — which frankly should include many of those currently charging toward our borders now — and claws back the money Trump has tried to divert to border barriers with his fake “emergency”, but it it has no chance of seeing daylight in the Senate and Trump has already threated to Veto it.]

There is a path away from this impending humanitarian catastrophe. There is a way to pull back from the precipice, but we need to find some way to rediscover our basic humanitarian values. We need to recommit ourselves to never creating another artificial crisis like this one. We need to rededicate ourselves to our fellow man, to redoubling the battle against both climate change and international narco-gangs.

The citizens of the Northern Triangle deserve life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness just as much as we do. Ignoring this fact is not only a betrayal, it’s a tragedy.

It’s a crime against humanity itself. It’s about time we realized that, because time is running out for tens of thousands of people who are trapped in Trump’s racist internment camps.