These images, which look so much like 2019, are a reminder yet again that CBP has had SEVEN YEARS to get its act together.
Congress keeps pouring billions into more agents, more tech, and more wall. But that won't do anything to stop scenes like this. We need a better system.
These are images of children held in filthy Border Patrol cells in 2014, packed in like sardines. They were leaked to Breitbart by Border Patrol officers to make a splash against the Obama administration.
This is the first time that "hieleras" at the border made national news.
These are images of people packed into Border Patrol cells in 2015, revealed as part of a lawsuit @immcouncil and other organizations brought against the Tucson Sector Border Patrol.
At the time, no one even got mats. They slept on the concrete floor.
This is an image inside the "Perrera" (the dog kennel) in south Texas in 2018, just days after family separation was halted by a court.
Once again, children were sleeping on the floor for days.
Then in 2019, we saw the worst overcrowding in years, and the appalling pictures of families and children yet again shoved into chain-link fence cages and cells in horrific conditions... and still no major changes were made!
Now it's 2021 and once again we're getting horrifying images of people locked in Border Patrol custody.
It's been SEVEN YEARS, and the most CBP has done is stand up a few tents and give people mats to sleep on.
It's time for a new system, one that treats people with dignity.
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This morning @DHSOIG revealed the results of surprise inspections at the ICE detention center in Eloy, AZ. The OIG says that "detainee reports and grievances allege an environment of mistreatment and verbal abuse," and that the jail is likely responsible for a COVID outbreak.
Here's the primary conclusion of @DHSOIG's report on the La Palma Correctional Center in Eloy, AZ, where conditions for those held by ICE have long been reported as terrible.
Alarms have been raised about this detention center for years!
Last year, it was reported that private prison company CoreCivic was forcing asylum seekers held at La Palma to clean the jails, threatening to throw them in solitary confinement if they refused to do things like clean feces from a cell without gloves. thehill.com/homenews/admin…
The highest recorded monthly apprehensions in the highest year ever was 220,063 in March 2000. That month, it's likely there were at least ~500,000 crossings (many the same people crossing multiple times).
So 243,000 monthly apprehensions through September is a WILD prediction.
Also I'm pretty sure I remember seeing that CBP estimated over 1,000,000 apprehensions in 2019, which... did not happen.
If anyone can find that prediction, which I think was reported on in late 2018/early 2019, I will owe them my gratitude. I've been trying to dig it up.
Yesterday reporters toured a Border Patrol facility where children are being held. The agent giving the tour said things are different now because families & kids "know that we're releasing them."
But that comment was absurd on its face, as the agent surely knew. A 🧵 on why.
In May 2018, when family separation was still going on and the nation's attention turned to the border, the Trump administration was loud and clear about "releases"—they publicly declared multiple times that any family that stepped foot on US soil would be released.
Trump repeated this fact—that most families were being released at the border—throughout 2018. Here's a rally comment from November 2018, where he again told cheering crowds of thousands that any family arriving at the border would be released.
This is a nice thought experiment, but I don't buy it. I suspect these former officials don't appreciate the state of the border pre-inauguration—esp. Mexico's rejecting families. From 12/31 to 1/20, 41% (1,293 of 3,143) of families were released. The trend was already there.
Of course, it's all a counterfactual. Is the suggestion seriously that Biden should have gotten on TV on Day One and said "America, I know I made a lot of promises for immigrants. I'm breaking every single one of them."
Obviously that would have been a political disaster too.
Sadly, there's not really much daylight between this article and what Stephen Miller and the Trump administration argued on a daily basis. About the only difference is some professed moral qualms about a belief that cruelty is the answer.
We have years of evidence that it isn't.
You hear this "well we can't let them all in" argument all the time, and it's so frustrating, because
1) Asylum IS legal immigration 2) Obviously not everyone is going to migrate 3) We've tried cruelty, and it does. not. work. long. term. 4) Actually we'll be totally fine.
I want to make it crystal clear that I've been acknowledging the unprecedented levels of unaccompanied kids, and arguing that the real challenge is how we handle those numbers safely and humanely.
The problem is conflating 12,000 unaccompanied kids with 100,000 encounters.
"Chart-makers" like myself also want people to acknowledge the facts about what's happening, and to ensure that lazy reporting doesn't throw blame around and incorrectly put the burden for the increase on specific things, or falsely conflate perception with reality.
The biggest critique of the Post article isn't that it got the trends wrong, it's that it ignored when the overall trend began, ignored the complicated policy reality on the ground, and acted as if the perception of Biden doing something was the same thing as him doing it.