All migrant kids under 5 to be back with parents by Thursday -U.S. official

All migrant children under age 5 who were separated at the U.S.-Mexico border will have been reunited with their parents by early Thursday morning if they were eligible, a Trump administration official said in a statement on Wednesday.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which sued the government over its separation policies, disputed that assertion.

“Their statement is vague at a minimum," said attorney Lee Gelernt, noting that a San Diego judge had set a deadline of Tuesday for reuniting those children. "We know they missed the deadline.”

The government has said some children were not eligible for reunification because the parent was deported, had a criminal record or was otherwise unfit.

U.S. Judge Dana Sabraw in San Diego had ordered the government to reunite the children under the age of 5 by Tuesday and all separated children by July 26.

On Thursday, the government will give Sabraw a progress report on the younger children and whether it expects to meet the deadline for the older group.

The government has said around 2,300 children were separated from their parents at the border under the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" policy on illegal immigration, which was abandoned in June after intense protests.

The ACLU's Gelernt said the government is not even close to reuniting all the children under 5 with their parents, including 12 adults who were deported without their children. He said the government has not told him how many children have been reunified with parents.

“I’ve asked the government for numbers and they should have told me by now,” he told Reuters.

Since the government first came under pressure to ease its policy on separations weeks ago, it has shifted its estimates of the number of children it would reunite.

The latest figures released by the government were early on Tuesday, when officials said that four children under 5 had been reunited and at least 34 more would be with their parents by the end of the day.

Catholic Charities, which helped place some of the children in shelter facilities after their separation, held a news briefing in New York at which a handful of the reunited parents expressed relief after weeks of anxiety over the separations.

“I’m happy to finally be able to be with my child. I will never be separated from him, no matter what," said a tearful Javier, a 30-year-old from Honduras, who was reunited with his 4-year-old son after 55 days of detention. "Those were the worst days of my life. I never imagined that this would happen.”

The organization provided first names only.

The struggle to track and match parents with children under 5 suggests the government may have more difficulties in meeting a July 26 deadline for reuniting the remaining 2,000 older children with adults from whom they were separated.

"That is going to be a significant undertaking," Sabraw said on Tuesday of the next deadline.

U.S. President Donald Trump took to Twitter on Wednesday to blame the Democratic Party, among others, for failing to fix what he has characterized as a broken immigration system.

"Judges run the system and illegals and traffickers know how it works. They are just using children!" he said.

One immigration advocate told Reuters she was still awaiting details on when officials would return two children younger than 5 to their parents. One parent was from Honduras and the other from El Salvador.

"Our clients still have not been reunified!" said Beth Krause, an attorney with Legal Aid Society's Immigrant Youth Project, in an email to Reuters. She said the government said one would be reunited sometime Wednesday.

If the government failed to reunite all the children under 5 with their parents by Thursday, Sabraw asked the ACLU to suggest penalties he could levy against the government.

Rights advocates have blamed the U.S. government's poor technology for difficulties tracking children across multiple government agencies involved in their detention and care.

The government has said the delays stem from the time it takes to run background checks, confirm parentage and locate parents released from detention.

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Trump vows to keep Guantanamo Bay prison open

WASHINGTON - US President Donald Trump announced Tuesday he would keep Guantanamo Bay open, breaking from his predecessor Barack Obama's lengthy and ultimately failed efforts to shutter the maligned detention facility.

"I just signed an order directing Secretary Mattis to reexamine our military detention policy and to keep open the detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay," Trump said, in his State of the Union address to Congress, in keeping with a campaign promise.

Under president George W. Bush, the US military hastily constructed a prison camp on Guantanamo Bay, located on the US naval base on the eastern tip of Cuba, in the months following the US-led invasion of Afghanistan after the September 11, 2001 attacks.

At first, inmates were held in cages and fenced in with razor wire, and conditions for the orange jumpsuit-clad detainees provoked a global outcry in 2002.

That early facility, known as Camp X-Ray, was soon replaced with more permanent structures and today, Guantanamo Bay consists of numerous high-security prison buildings.

At the height of its operations after 9/11, the facility held 780 people, detained mostly for their alleged ties to Al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

Since then, hundreds have been transferred back to their home countries or other places.

Some of the most notorious inmates, including several alleged 9/11 co-conspirators, among them accused mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, are still awaiting trial.

Their cases have been beset by legal woes at Guantanamo, where a bespoke criminal justice system grants detainees -- who are considered "unprivileged enemy belligerents" -- only some of the legal rights that US federal courts guarantee.

Of the 41 inmates remaining at Guantanamo, about 26 are trapped in legal purgatory.

These so-called "forever prisoners" have never been charged -- yet they have been deemed too dangerous to release.

Some were cleared for release under Obama, but have been stranded at Guantanamo under the Trump administration.

'BAD DUDES' 

On the campaign trail, Trump famously vowed he would load Guantanamo with "bad dudes," and said it would be "fine" if US terror suspects were sent there for trial.

In 2009, soon after he was sworn in, Obama ordered the prison to be closed within a year, and no new inmate has been sent there since early 2008.

Political bickering, vehement Republican opposition and foreign allies' reluctance to take in the prisoners meant Obama could not close Guantanamo, though the population dropped from 242 to 41 under his watch.

Since becoming president, Trump has toyed with the idea of sending Americans to Guantanamo, though federal judges would likely bar any such attempt.

In October, he suggested that the man accused of carrying out a deadly truck attack along a bike path in New York could be sent to Guantanamo, but he later backed off the idea.

Another case that could potentially bring Guantanamo into legal focus is that of a US citizen who was captured in Syria and had allegedly been fighting for the Islamic State group.

The man, whose name has not been released, is apparently being held in Iraq.

The American Civil Liberties Union has taken up his case and a federal judge has ruled that the US must give it advance notice before transferring the man overseas.

That would allow time for the ACLU to mount a legal challenge.

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US court urged to allow abortions for immigrant teens

WASHINGTON - A US court on Monday heard arguments from lawyers for two pregnant teenage immigrants who are being prevented from having abortions while in custody.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), in a motion filed with the US District Court for the District of Columbia, identified the two girls by the pseudonyms "Jane Roe" and "Jane Poe."

"Jane Roe and Jane Poe seek a temporary restraining order to prohibit the federal government from continuing to block them from obtaining an abortion," the ACLU motion said.

"Both are 17-year-old unaccompanied immigrant minors who are currently in the federal government's legal custody, living in government-funded shelters," it said.

"Ms. Roe and Ms. Poe are pregnant and are resolute in their desire to have an abortion," the ACLU said.

The lawsuit is the second concerning abortion in just a few weeks pitting the ACLU against the administration of President Donald Trump.

Judge Tanya Chutkan, who heard the case on Monday, allowed another teenaged immigrant girl in federal custody to have an abortion in October.

"We've already stopped the Trump administration from blocking one young woman's abortion," ACLU attorney Brigitte Amiri said in reference to the previous case.

"It's unreal that the federal government is trying to force more young women to continue their pregnancies against their will," Amiri said.

The US Supreme Court affirmed the right to abortion nationwide in 1973 but the landmark legislation has come under threat since Trump took office in January.

The nearly century-old ACLU has undertaken numerous legal challenges of the Trump administration.

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Transgender military personnel sue Trump over service ban

Five transgender members of the US military including Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans sued President Donald Trump on Wednesday, challenging his ban on transgender people serving in the armed forces.

Trump said on Twitter on July 26 that the US government "will not accept or allow transgender individuals to serve in any capacity" in the military, a reversal of Pentagon policy that the lawsuit said was made without consulting senior military commanders.

The surprise announcement, citing healthcare costs and unit disruption, appealed to some in Trump's conservative political base but created uncertainty for thousands of transgender service members, many of whom came out after the Pentagon said in 2016 it would allow transgender people to serve openly.

Trump's tweets appeared to dismiss findings from a RAND Corporation study commissioned by the Pentagon that found allowing transgender people to serve would "cost little and have no significant impact on unit readiness."

The White House and the Pentagon said they do not comment on pending litigation. The lawsuit was filed in US District Court in Washington, D.C.

The service members suing the president are three US Army soldiers, one US Air Force airman and one member of the US Coast Guard who are active duty.

All have come out as transgender to their commanding officers but are anonymous in the lawsuit, named only as Jane Doe, for fear of retribution, said Jennifer Levi, a lawyer from GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders. The group filed the lawsuit along with the National Center for Lesbian Rights.

The American Civil Liberties Union said it was preparing its own lawsuit.

The lawsuit said Trump's tweets violate the rights of the service members to due process and equal protection under the law. It asks the court to declare Trump's directive as unconstitutional and to issue injunctions to stop it.

The defendants are listed as Trump, Defense Secretary James Mattis and other military leaders including Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Dunford said in a memo a day after Trump's tweets that there would be no change in policy until Mattis received an official order from the president.

That order has yet to be issued.

"In the meantime, we will continue to treat all of our personnel with respect," Dunford said.

Lawyer Levi said the plaintiffs, some of whom are near retirement, need not wait for an official policy because the tweets alone created uncertainty about their futures.

Reporting by Daniel Trotta; Editing by Grant McCool, Toni Reinhold

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Privacy groups urge US judge to support Apple in iPhone case

Digital privacy advocates have called on a U.S. federal judge to approve Apple Inc's request not to be compelled to build software to help the FBI unlock an iPhone used by one of the shooters in the San Bernardino attack.

The American Civil Liberties Union, Access Now and the Wickr Foundation laid out arguments in amicus briefs released on Wednesday ahead of a March 22 hearing in which Judge Sheri Pym will review Apple's appeal of a court order demanding it help unlock a phone used by Rizwan Farook.

Alphabet Inc's Google, Facebook Inc, Microsoft Corp and Twitter Inc also plan to file similar briefs, Twitter, Microsoft and people familiar with the plans of the other two companies said last week.

The ACLU argued that the FBI's request would undermine the privacy and security of Americans by forcing a private firm to act as its investigative agent, seeking information that it does not already possess.

"Law enforcement may not commandeer innocent third parties into becoming its undercover agents, its spies, or its hackers," according to a draft of the brief obtained by Reuters.

Access Now and the Wickr Foundation, which both advise activists on digital privacy, said in a joint brief that complying with the order would undermine human rights around the globe.

"In some countries reliable security tools such as encryption can be the difference between life and death," their brief says. "The relief sought by the government endangers people globally who depend on robust digital security for their physical safety and wellbeing."

The U.S. government has said the Dec. 2 attack in San Bernardino, California, was inspired by Islamist militants, and the FBI wants to read the data on Farook's phone to investigate any links with militant groups. Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, shot and killed 14 people and wounded 22 others before they themselves were killed in a shootout with police.

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