LOS ANGELES - James can't afford to quarantine: he lost his job as a waiter in a Los Angeles restaurant and is two weeks away from running out of money for rent and food.
But as an undocumented immigrant, the 30-year-old Colombian cannot turn to the social aid programs being offered by the US government to deal with the coronavirus pandemic.
James is not his real name. It is the name on his fake social security card that, like many in his precarious position, he uses to get low-paying, hourly jobs.
He usually gets by on around $400 a week.
"I have to find a way to at least cover rent and food, and with this situation, getting a job is complicated," he told AFP.
Life as an undocumented immigrant is always anxiety-inducing, especially since Donald Trump became president having campaigned on a promise to crack down on illegal immigration.
Now there is the extra pressure of the pandemic, which has killed 417 people in the US out of more than 33,000 confirmed cases.
'HEALTH FIRST'
Luz Gallegos, from the TODEC non-profit which provides legal help to immigrants, held a workshop last weekend in a rural community north of Los Angeles.
Questions included: can I go to the hospital without insurance? Am I in danger of being deported? If I use government services for coronavirus, will it hurt me later applying for residency?
"COVID-19 is an additional stress for the community," Gallegos said. "It's a community that doesn't trust the government."
TODEC's message is "health first" -- but that does not erase the issue.
Many immigrants' chief concern is the new "public charge" rule, which allows health issues to be considered when granting visas or permanent residency.
US immigration officials insist medical tests to detect coronavirus or receive treatment for the disease will not be penalized.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement also announced it will temporarily stop arrests and deportations of undocumented immigrants during the crisis.
But uncertainty over the law means fear persists, especially as "the Trump administration keeps on changing" its policies on handling immigrants, said Gallegos.
'START OVER'
The US has pledged $100 billion in social aid for workers directly hit by the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic.
This includes paid leave for employees who fall ill, and easier access to unemployment benefits and food stamps for those who lose their jobs.
But these benefits can appear unattainable for the country's 11 million undocumented, many of whom are Latino.
"When we were notified that our jobs were gone, we were given a link to apply for government aid," said James.
"But I read that it's for citizens who have fully legal social security."
Although California is a "sanctuary state" for immigrants, half of the 15 staff at his Japanese restaurant have no papers and remain concerned.
"I think the situation will get more difficult in 15 days, a month, when we can't afford rent and bills," said the young man, who pays $580 per month for a small room.
His immediate plan is to deliver goods using a second-hand car he bought just two weeks ago, before the crisis struck.
"After two years in this country I finally felt at the point where I was getting my life organized," he said.
"And then this coronavirus thing came."
jt/amz/bgs
Agence France-Presse
CLAREMONT - Baby Jesus is lying in a manger inside a cage, wrapped in an emergency foil blanket and separated from Mary and Joseph, who are each trapped in cells of their own.
This is the startling nativity scene created by a Protestant church in California to draw attention to the plight of migrants.
"We put them in different cages, as a symbol representing our community, and all immigrants, who are being held in detention centers and need our help," Genaro Cordoba, co-creator of the installation and spokesman for Claremont United Methodist Church, told AFP.
"Jesus, Joseph, Mary represent all our immigrants, all the refugees, not just in the United States but all over the world," he said, switching from Spanish to English.
"We have seen how they suffer, and people don't want them, and (in) our country the same thing," Cordoba added.
Karen Clark Ristine, senior minister at the church about 30 miles (48 kilometers) east of Los Angeles, explained in a Facebook message accompanying the images that the Holy Family were "the most well-known refugee family in the world."
"Shortly after the birth of Jesus, Joseph and Mary were forced to flee with their young son from Nazareth to Egypt to escape King Herod, a tyrant," she wrote.
"They feared persecution and death. What if this family sought refuge in our country today?"
The grim Nativity scene appears to address that question.
Each cell is lined with barbed wire, and both Mary and Joseph are pictured facing the infant, their arms outstretched in hope and desperation.
"Imagine Joseph and Mary separated at the border and Jesus no older than two taken from his mother and placed behind the fences of a Border Patrol detention center as more than 5,500 children have been the past three years," wrote Ristine.
A Trump administration "zero tolerance" policy launched in 2018 saw thousands of children separated from their parents at the border, a tactic apparently meant to frighten the families, before the government backed down.
Migrants including children were held in caged enclosures.
"Jesus grew up to teach us kindness and mercy and a radical welcome of all people," said Ristine.
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Agence France-Presse
WASHINGTON - With a little help from the Supreme Court and Mexico, US President Donald Trump's fitful crackdown on immigration is finally gaining traction.
Trump has spent his entire presidency promising to stop illegal immigration, shut out asylum seekers and wall off the Mexican border.
The far-reaching policies sparked an avalanche of court challenges, complaints from human rights organizations and derision from opposition Democrats ahead of next year's elections.
Undeterred, Trump has hammered away, making construction of a US-Mexican border wall one of his presidency's centerpieces -- and a key part of his 2020 reelection platform.
And this week he celebrated a string of victories.
The latest boost came Wednesday when the Supreme Court said he could enact severe restrictions on asylum seekers.
The ruling requires would-be refugees to ask for asylum in the first country they visit and only then -- if they are rejected -- can they attempt to apply in the United States.
The ruling -- which has temporary effect while challenges play out in lower courts -- shuts out large numbers of people fleeing violence and poverty in Central America. They will now have to apply for asylum in Mexico, rather than head directly to the United States.
Trump's opponents, as well as dissenting Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, say the change upends decades of tradition in which the US, itself founded by waves of often poor immigrants, has welcomed refugees.
But Trump, who argues that economic migrants abuse the system with fraudulent asylum claims, went on Twitter to herald the "BIG United States Supreme Court WIN for the Border on Asylum!"
"The Southern Border is becoming very strong despite the obstruction by Democrats," he tweeted.
MEXICO COMES ON BOARD
That's far from all.
In July, the Supreme Court backed Trump's move to divert billions of dollars in Pentagon funds to pay for extending or rebuilding stretches of wall on the Mexican border. This lets him circumvent fierce resistance to funding in a divided Congress.
The Pentagon also said this Tuesday that the deployment of 5,500 troops on the border -- something that was initially highly controversial -- was being extended for the coming year.
While Trump exaggerates the amount of wall-building activity there's no question that momentum is gradually shifting his way.
"The Wall is going up very fast despite total Obstruction by Democrats in Congress, and elsewhere!" he tweeted Wednesday.
Perhaps the most significant shift has happened on the other side of the long, rugged frontier, where the Mexican government has set aside previous hostility to cooperate with Trump.
The change in mood follows threats by Trump to impose trade tariffs on Mexico, even though the two countries are in a free trade agreement together with Canada.
Not that Mexico is entirely happy. Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard called the new US asylum restrictions, which could mean a torrent of new cases for his country, "unprecedented."
"Or course we disagree," he said.
But Mexico appears to have accepted it has no choice but to play by Trump's rules.
On Monday, Mark Morgan, head of the US border patrol service, welcomed "unprecedented support" from Mexico, which he said has deployed 10,000 troops on its own southern border with Central America and 15,000 on the US border.
Proof that the joint crackdown is having an effect is in the numbers, US officials say.
August detentions of undocumented migrants numbered 64,000, down from 82,000 the previous month and 144,000 in May, Morgan said. Mexico, he said, has apprehended 134,000 people so far this year, compared to 83,000 in all of 2018.
Democrats use the immigration issue to paint Trump as heartless, even racist. But the president feels he's on the right track.
On Monday, as streams of Bahamians tried to exit islands ravaged by Hurricane Dorian, Trump made clear the United States would eye this latest group of asylum seekers skeptically.
"I don't want to allow people that weren't supposed to be in the Bahamas to come into the United States, including some very bad people and some very bad gang members and some very, very bad drug dealers," he said.
The language echoed his long-term characterization of Central American migrants as potential rapists and gang members.
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source: news.abs-cbn.com
The city of San Francisco and nearby Santa Clara County sued President Donald Trump's administration on Tuesday, seeking to block a new rule that would drastically reduce legal immigration by denying visas to poor migrants.
Some experts say the new rule could cut legal immigration in half by denying visas and permanent residency to hundreds of thousands of people if they fail to meet high enough income standards or if they receive public assistance such as welfare, food stamps, public housing or Medicaid.
"This illegal rule is just another attempt to vilify immigrants," San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera said in a statement. Trump has made efforts to curb both legal and illegal immigration, an issue he has made a cornerstone of his presidency and one that he has stressed again as the campaign for the 2020 presidential election heats up.
The rule, unveiled on Monday and to take effect Oct. 15, expands the definition of a public charge, allowing denials to visa applicants who fail to meet income requirements or who receive public assistance.
"The final rule rejects the longstanding, existing definition of public charge, and attempts to redefine it to include even minimal use of a much wider range of non-cash benefits," said the lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco.
"The final rule will worsen the health and well-being of the counties' residents, increase risks to the public health, undermine the counties' health and safety-net systems, and inflict significant financial harm," the suit said.
San Francisco is both a city and a county. Santa Clara County includes the city of San Jose and various other parts of Silicon Valley.
The suit names U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the Department of Homeland Security and their directors as defendants. The former agency declined to comment and the latter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The suit claims the new rule violates the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 by contradicting the longstanding definition of public charge as a person "primarily" dependent on public assistance for survival.
The suit also claims the new rule would split families, undermining immigration laws to prioritize family unification; misapplies the intent of Congress on the description of self-sufficiency of immigrants; and runs contrary to the statutes governing SNAP, also known as food stamps.
The National Immigration Law Center said it also will file a lawsuit to stop the rule from taking effect. The attorneys general of California and New York have also threatened to sue. (Reporting by Daniel Trotta Editing by Leslie Adler)
source: news.abs-cbn.com
MIAMI - US officials said that some 680 undocumented migrants were detained in raids Wednesday at food processing plants in the southeastern United States, part of President Donald Trump's announced crackdown on illegal immigration.
Most of those detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents were Hispanic migrants, officials said.
"Special agents executed administrative and criminal search warrants resulting in the detention of approximately 680 illegal aliens," said Mike Hurst, US Attorney for the Southern District of Mississippi.
"They have to follow our laws, they have to abide by our rules, they have to come here legally or they shouldn't come here at all," Hurst said at a news conference.
The US attorney did not spare the employers.
"To those who use illegal aliens for competitive advantage or to make a quick buck, we have something to say to you: If we find that you have violated federal criminal law, we're coming after you," he said.
Matthew Albence, the interim ICE head, said the raids were the result of a year-long investigation.
He said that the children of detained parents will be sent to live with relatives or other families.
Some of the migrants will be released with electronic ankle monitors as they await a court hearing.
ICE agents raided food processing plants in the towns of Morton, Carthage, Canton, Pelahatchie, Sebastopol and Bay Springs, all in the state of Mississippi, officials said.
In June, Trump tweeted that ICE "will begin the process of removing the millions of illegal aliens who have illicitly found their way into the United States."
Trump has also tweeted several times about an alleged "invasion" of people crossing the southern border into the United States.
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source: news.abs-cbn.com
TIJUANA, Mexico - The children crammed into the bus and sat in two neat lines, poring over notebooks at desks where once there had been passenger seats. From the overhead baggage bins, a teacher hung their exploits: colored alphabet letters, watercolor paintings.
In the border city of Tijuana just miles from the U.S. border, in a dirt parking lot adjoining a migrant shelter, that bus is offering a rare chance at school to Central American and Mexican children.
For most of the several dozen who have passed through the program since it began in mid-July, education was a distant dream in the weeks or months since their parents decided to uproot and head north to seek refuge or a better life.
Estefania Rebellon, director of the program called Yes We Can, said it offers specialized bilingual education for children who tend to have low literacy and struggle with social skills. Providing care and security are important too.
"These are children from very dangerous areas, where they have very big issues with trust," she said. Despite a shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, over the weekend that left 22 people dead, including eight Mexicans, she said the violence they saw in their home countries was likely worse. Police say the gunman posted a racist, anti-immigrant manifesto before the shooting.
She said it was upsetting that vulnerable people could not count on finding safety in the United States, even to run basic errands such as back-to-school shopping.
"It's atrocious that there's the amount of hate in this country that's been converted into mass shootings. It's taken innocent lives," she said.
Rebellon, who also works as an actress in Los Angeles, said she knows what it is like to feel lost as a migrant child. When she was 10 years old, she moved to Miami from Colombia, where her parents had received death threats.
School became her refuge.
When she saw large groups of Central American migrants arriving in Tijuana late last year, she launched a school program for children in tents at a large shelter.
The "tiny home movement" - a eponymous social movement that advocates for smaller homes - inspired her to try the same concept in an old bus.
Rebellon's bus used to have a capacity for 55 people - but with the old interior torn out, it can now seat 80 children.
The bus has welcomed aboard 37 students ages 5 to 12 since opening, and will take in another 20 children in the coming weeks. Yes We Can will also launch a program for teenagers in tents outside, Rebellon said.
The three teachers, accredited in Mexico, have experience working with displaced children in Latin America.
Yes We Can is working to bring on a fourth teacher who speaks two indigenous language, in addition to Spanish and English.
Most of the children are from families that are stuck in limbo in Tijuana for weeks or months as they inch higher on a long wait list to apply for asylum in the United States.
They come from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala as well as Mexican cities in states including Guerrero and Michoacan, where locals often fear getting caught in the crossfire of warring drug gangs.
Rebellon said parents from those cities have told her that teachers often refuse to show up at school for fear of getting killed or kidnapped, and some children had missed school for several months.
If the program can secure enough funding, Rebellon said she would like to expand to Ciudad Juarez and Mexicali, other border cities with surging migrant populations.
"We can be in a bus, in a house, in a boat," she said. "It's more about what we teach the children."
source: news.abs-cbn.com
WASHINGTON - Democrats in the US Congress demanded Thursday that President Donald Trump protect families and children ahead of expected immigration raids this weekend.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will launch sweeping deportation operations on Sunday as the administration expands its crackdown on undocumented immigrants, the New York Times reported.
ICE has obtained court orders for the removal of about one million undocumented migrants, according to a senior administration official, but the initial raids will target some 2,000 across at least 10 cities, the Times said.
Democrats lashed out at the plans, saying they threaten people who have lived in the United States for many years and built families that include US citizens.
House leader Nancy Pelosi called the ICE plan "heartless" and said Sundays are when many Hispanic immigrant families are in church.
"These families are hardworking members of our communities and our country. This brutal action will terrorize children and tear families apart," she told reporters.
"Many of these families are mixed-status families," she added, referring to families who include members in the United States legally and illegally, such as migrants with children born inside the country.
Ken Cuccinelli, acting director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, said Wednesday that ICE has nowhere near the resources needed to pursue the full one million cases.
"They are absolutely going to happen," he said of the raids, however.
MIGRANTS STILL ARRIVING AT HIGH RATE
The removal orders can be issued on the completion of court cases involving the migrants, whether for minor civil infractions or their own citizenship or asylum cases.
Fearing arrest and deportation, migrants often don't show up for cases and judges summarily rule against them.
Senior Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer warned the Trump administration that ICE should not split families with young children if it carries out the raids.
"Stop separating children from their families. Tell your agencies, do not separate a single child from their parents," he said.
ICE hasn't commented on the raids, which would come with Trump seeking to demonstrate toughness on immigration amid a still-strong influx of migrants across the border with Mexico.
On Wednesday, the Department of Homeland Security said 104,344 migrants were detained after crossing the border in June, down 28 percent from May's 13-year record high but still an extremely high figure, some 60,000 more than the same month last year.
While migrant flows usually ebb in the hot summer, DHS said initiatives with El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, where most of the migrants come from, and a joint crackdown with Mexico, whose territory most must transit, had contributed to the downturn.
pmh/ft
source: news.abs-cbn.com
WASHINGTON - A merit-based immigration proposal being put together by White House senior adviser Jared Kushner could lead to an increase in U.S. visas for highly skilled workers, sources familiar with the effort said on Wednesday.
Kushner is expected to present the comprehensive plan next week to President Donald Trump, who will decide whether to adopt it as his official position or send it back for changes, the sources said.
The plan does not propose ways to address young people who came to the United States illegally as children who were protected by President Barack Obama in the 2014 program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), or those people who have Temporary Protected Status, the sources said.
Democrats, whose support the White House would need to advance any kind of immigration legislation through Congress, have insisted that the DACA recipients be protected.
Kushner has held about 50 listening sessions with conservative groups on immigration, a senior administration official said. He has been working with White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett and policy adviser Stephen Miller on the plan and the sources said there has been some intense behind-the-scenes jockeying about the plan.
At a Time magazine forum in New York on Tuesday, Kushner said he was working well with Miller, an immigration hawk, on the topic. The two men are both long-time Trump advisers.
"Stephen and I haven't had any fights," he said with a smile.
That drew skepticism from immigration advocate Marshall Fitz of the Emerson Collective, who gave Kushner credit for advancing criminal justice reform but said immigration was a dramatically different issue that Miller was dominating at the White House.
"It's impossible to see how Kushner could navigate an issue this freighted with history and central to the president's re-election strategy in a way that would actually move the ball forward," Fitz said.
As a White House candidate in 2016 and throughout his presidency, Trump has advocated a hard-line policy on immigration, pushing for a wall to be built on the U.S.-Mexico border and using bruising rhetoric to describe people who have fled Central American countries to enter the United States.
Republicans have largely supported his immigration proposals, but the latest White House plan aims to bring them together on a broader basis.
Some in the U.S. business community have asked that the number of highly skilled visas be raised to attract more employees from abroad for specialized jobs amid a booming U.S. economy. Trump himself has talked of the need to bring in more skilled workers.
The immigration plan would either leave the number of highly skilled visas each year at the same level or raise it slightly, the sources said.
The overall goal is to reshape the visa program into a more merit-based system, a key Trump goal. Officials working on the plan have been reviewing the systems used by Canada and Australia as possible models for the Trump effort.
The group has been working on a guest-worker program as part of the proposal to address the U.S. agriculture community's need for seasonal labor while not hurting American workers, but nothing has been finalized, the sources said. Trump has sought to court farmers in key battleground states to boost his chances of re-election in 2020.
The proposal will include recommendations for modernizing ports of entry along the U.S. border to ensure safe trade while preventing illegal activity. It will also address asylum laws to take account of Trump's desire to reduce the number of people who overstay their visas, the sources said.
Kushner, who is Trump's son-in-law, is also a main architect of a Middle East peace proposal that the president is expected to unveil this summer.
His objective on the immigration plan at the very least is to have a document that represents the president's immigration policy and provide something that Republicans can rally around.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
AMSTERDAM - The haunting image of a little girl crying helplessly as she and her mother are taken into custody by US border officials Thursday won the prestigious World Press Photo Award.
Judges said veteran Getty photographer John Moore's picture taken after Honduran mother Sandra Sanchez and her daughter Yanela illegally crossed the US-Mexico border last year showed "a different kind of violence that is psychological".
The picture of the wailing toddler was published worldwide and caused a public outcry about Washington's controversial policy to separate thousands of migrants and their children.
US Customs and Border Protection officials later said Yanela and her mom were not among those separated, but the public furore "resulted in President Donald Trump reversing the policy in June last year," the judges said.
'FEAR ON THEIR FACES'
Moore was taking pictures of US Border Patrol agents on a moonless night in the Rio Grande Valley on June 12 last year when they came across a group of people who tried to cross the border.
"I could see the fear on their faces, in their eyes," Moore told the US-based National Public Radio broadcaster in an interview shortly afterwards.
As officials took their names, Moore said he spotted Sandra Sanchez and her toddler who started wailing when her mom put her down to be searched.
"I took a knee and had very few frames of that moment before it was over," said Moore, who had been covering the US-Mexico border for a decade.
At the awards ceremony in Amsterdam, Moore told AFP: "I wanted to tell a different story."
"For me it was a chance to show a view of humanity that is often only related in statistics," the 51-year-old photographer said.
"I think an issue like this, immigration issues, resonates not just in the United States, but around the world," Moore also told several hundred guests at the awards.
MIGRANT CARAVAN
The sensitive issue of immigration was further highlighted at Thursday's awards.
Judges chose Dutch-Swedish photographer Pieter Ten Hoopen's images of the 2018 mass-migrant caravan to the US border as its winner in the "World Press Photo Story of the Year Award".
Ten Hoopen's pictures, which show families and children as they made their way from Honduras in mid-October to the US border "showed a high sense of dignity," one of the judges said.
Ten Hoopen thanked the migrant families, saying without them his award would not have been possible.
Trump said Tuesday he won't resume separating children of undocumented migrants, but insisted that the policy did prevent people from illegal border crossings like a trip to "Disneyland".
His words came after he announced the departure Sunday of the official in charge of fighting illegal immigration -- Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen.
According to US media reports, Trump's reshuffle could herald even harsher measures on the southern border.
Judges selected this year's winners from 78,801 images entered by 4,738 photographers worldwide, the Amsterdam-based organisers said.
Three lensmen from AFP, John Wessels, Brendan Smialowski and Pedro Pardo were handed one second place and three third places overall in the various categories.
Based in Kinshasa, Wessels' series of pictures of last year's Congolese elections took second prize in the General News-Stories category, while his series of images about an Ebola outbreak in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo came third in the same category.
Smialowski and Pardo came third in their respective categories with a picture of Trump leading French President Emmanuel Macron by the hand and immigrants climbing over the US-Mexico border fence respectively.
Last year AFP's Ronaldo Schemidt took top honours in the 2018 competition, winning the World Press Photo Award with a fiery image of a masked Venezuelan protester in flames.
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source: news.abs-cbn.com
Christian Mejia thought he had a shot at getting out of immigration detention in rural Louisiana after he found a lawyer to help him seek asylum.
Then he was quarantined.
In early January, a mumps outbreak at the privately run Pine Prairie U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Processing Center put Mejia and hundreds of other detainees on lockdown. "When there is just one person who is sick, everybody pays," Mejia, 19, said in a phone interview from the Pine Prairie center describing weeks without visits and access to the library and dining hall.
His attorney was not allowed in, but his immigration court case continued anyway - over a video conference line. On Feb. 12, the judge ordered Mejia deported back to Honduras.
The number of people amassed in immigration detention under the Trump administration has reached record highs, raising concerns among migrant advocates about disease outbreaks and resulting quarantines that limit access to legal services.
As of March 6, more than 50,000 migrants were in detention, according to ICE data.
Internal emails reviewed by Reuters reveal the complications of managing outbreaks like the one at Pine Prairie, since immigrant detainees often are transferred around the country and infected people do not necessarily show symptoms of viral diseases even when they are contagious.
Mumps can easily spread through droplets of saliva in the air, especially in close quarters. While most people recover within a few weeks, complications include brain swelling, sterility and hearing loss.
ICE health officials have been notified of 236 confirmed or probable cases of mumps among detainees in 51 facilities in the past 12 months, compared to no cases detected between January 2016 and February 2018. Last year, 423 detainees were determined to have influenza and 461 to have chicken pox. All three diseases are largely preventable by vaccine.
As of March 7, a total of 2,287 detainees were quarantined around the country, an ICE official who spoke on condition of anonymity told Reuters.
Ten Democratic members of Congress sent a letter on Feb. 28 to ICE acting Director Ronald Vitiello seeking more information about viral diseases at immigration detention centers in Colorado, Arizona and Texas. Lawmakers did not mention the Pine Prairie outbreak.
Pablo Paez, a spokesman for the GEO Group, the private prison operator that runs Pine Prairie under government contract, said its medical professionals follow standards set by ICE and health authorities. He said medical care provided to detainees allows the company "to detect, treat and follow appropriate medical protocols to manage an infectious outbreak."
'UNPRECEDENTED NUMBERS'
The first cases at Pine Prairie were detected in January in four migrants who had been recently transferred from the Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility in Mississippi, according to internal emails.
Tallahatchie, run by private detention company CoreCivic Inc, has had five confirmed cases of mumps and 18 cases of chicken pox since January, according to company spokeswoman Amanda Gilchrist. She said no one who was diagnosed was transferred out of the facility while the disease was active.
Tallahatchie houses hundreds of migrants recently apprehended along the U.S.- Mexico border, ICE officials said.
On Tuesday, U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan told reporters that changing demographics on the southwest border, with more immigrants from Central America traveling long distances, overwhelmed border officials and raised health concerns.
"We are seeing migrants arrive with illnesses and medical conditions in unprecedented numbers," McAleenan said at a press conference.
However, vaccination rates in the countries of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras are above 90 percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. ICE detainees come from countries all over the world, with varying degrees of vaccination coverage.
'HIGH-PROFILE REMOVAL'
At Pine Prairie, staff members were at times at odds with the warden about how to manage the mumps outbreak, internal emails show. The warden decided not to quarantine 40 new arrivals from Tallahatchie in February despite concerns raised by the medical staff, one email showed.
The warden, Indalecio Ramos, who referred questions about the outbreak to ICE and the GEO Group, argued that quarantining the transfers would keep them from attending their court hearings, the facility's health service administrator wrote in a Feb. 7 email.
In a Feb. 21 email, ICE requested that medical staff members at Pine Prairie clear a detainee quarantined for chicken pox and mumps for travel, calling him a "high-profile removal scheduled for deport." In an email to staff later that day, warden Ramos wrote that medical staff had wanted to exclude the detainee from transfer but "ICE wants him to travel out of the country anyway ... Please ensure he leaves."
The ICE spokesman said that travel is restricted for people who are known to be contagious but those exposed to diseases who are asymptomatic can travel.
Since January, the 1,094-bed Pine Prairie facility has had 18 detainees with confirmed or probable cases of mumps compared to no cases in 2018, according to ICE. As of mid-February, 288 people were under quarantine at Pine Prairie. Mejia said his quarantine ended on Feb. 25.
Detention centers in other states also have seen a rise in outbreaks.
There have been 186 mumps cases in immigration detention facilities in Texas since October, the largest outbreak in centers there in recent years, said Lara Anton, the press officer for the Texas Department of State Health Services.
In Colorado, at the Aurora Contract Detention Facility near Denver, run by the GEO Group, 357 people have been quarantined following eight confirmed and five suspected cases of mumps detected since February, as well as six cases of chicken pox diagnosed since the beginning of January, said Dr. Bernadette Albanese from the Tri County Health Department in Colorado.
Civil rights attorney Danielle Jefferis said court hearings for quarantined immigrants at Aurora were largely canceled.
At Pine Prairie on Feb. 12, Mejia said he felt confused and hopeless during his video hearing, with no attorney by his side.
After Mejia's lawyers complained, attorneys were allowed to visit quarantined detainees on Feb. 13 - one day too late for Mejia.
While he is appealing his case, his lawyers say he could be deported at any time.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
MIAMI, United States - Texas officials are investigating the reported death of a migrant child who had been held recently at a US detention center under allegedly "unsanitary conditions."
State health and human services officials told AFP they had opened an investigation into the allegations, which first surfaced earlier this month.
The probe began Thursday after representatives for the family shared the child's name -- which remains confidential -- to the authorities.
The mother's attorneys said they disclosed information about "a small child who tragically died after being detained by (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE) in unsanitary conditions."
"We currently are assessing the case and have no further comments," the Arnold & Porter law firm added in a statement.
ICE said it was cooperating with the investigation.
Neither authorities nor attorneys provided details such as the child's gender, nationality or cause of death.
The firm only indicated that the child had been detained at a facility in Dilley, southern Texas -- one of three ICE centers that house families.
Controversy over the rumored death erupted this week after The Dallas Morning News first reported the allegations on August 1.
Family centers house children only if they are part of a family unit.
In July, the three detention centers of this type held a total of 1,437 detainees. The total number of immigrants detained in all ICE facilities in the United States amounted to 44,210 on July 16.
A "zero tolerance" policy implemented earlier this year by President Donald Trump's administration, and since reversed, greatly increased arrests on the US-Mexico border.
It caused at one point more than 2,300 children to be detained without their parents, who were prosecuted for crossing the border even if they did so to seek asylum.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
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
NEW YORK - US Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Thursday barred immigration judges from a once-common practice of shelving deportation cases involving some immigrants with deep ties to the United States.
The practice known as administrative closure allowed judges to clear low-priority cases off their dockets, effectively letting some immigrants remain indefinitely in the United States despite their lack of legal status.
Under President Barack Obama there had been an effort to administratively close certain cases as a way of allowing judges to focus on higher-priority matters and reduce the immigration court backlog. More than 200,000 cases were closed during the last six years of his presidency.
The closures were routinely used for people without criminal backgrounds who had lived for many years in the United States, often with U.S. citizen children or spouses. In many cases, the immigrants became eligible for work permits.
The administration of President Donald Trump has taken a sharply different tack on immigration, declaring that all those in the country illegally, whether or not they pose a threat to public safety, are subject to deportation.
Since immigration courts fall under the jurisdiction of the Department of Justice, the attorney general can issue opinions in immigration cases to establish legal precedent for judges across the country and the Board of Immigration Appeals.
On Thursday, Sessions issued such an order in a case in which a judge had granted administrative closure for an unaccompanied minor from Guatemala.
Before Sessions' ruling, the government or an immigrant could ask a judge to close a case. The attorney general ruled that judges "do not have the general authority to suspend indefinitely immigration proceedings by administrative closure." He said exceptions could be made in some cases, including when an immigrant has certain forms of legal status pending.
Sessions had already quietly been instituting the policy even before this announcement. Reuters reported last June that government prosecutors were moving to put cases that had been previously closed back on the court calendar.
Sessions acknowledged in the order, however, that recalendaring all cases that had been closed "would likely overwhelm the immigration courts." Immigration attorneys and advocates quickly criticized Sessions' decision. The ruling was intended "to reduce immigration judges to deportation machines," said Chuck Roth of the National Immigrant Justice Center.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
