From Greg Hadley, Trump administration considering separating immigrant parents from children at border, reports say, Sacramento Bee, March 3, 2017.

In an attempt to deter parents thinking of illegally entering the U.S. with their children, the Department of Homeland Security is considering a proposal that would separate adults and children who cross the southern border together, according to multiple media reports.

News of the policy, which is still being considered by department officials, was first reported Friday by Reuters, who spoke to three government sources, and later confirmed by CNN and MSNBC.

Such a policy move would mark a significant change in immigration enforcement, as families are currently kept together and released until their court date, according to MSNBC. . . . The new policy would mean that adults are kept in custody instead of being released, while children will be placed in the care of the Department of Health and Human Services, before they are placed with a relative or state-sponsored guardian, per Reuters. … **We are trying to find ways to deter the use of children in illegal immigration, the official said. We are seeing kids essentially kidnapped and used to get here and stay.

All border controls are violent, and all border enforcement policies are awful. What distinguishes this — if La Migra attempts to go through with it — is the sheer malice. This idea serves no conceivable rational purpose other than deliberate cruelty, and pure political sadism, using the lives and emotions of children and taking them as hostages to punish their parents. The administration’s explicit theory is that the prospect this kind of deliberate cruelty to children might “deter” their parents. That is wrong. It’s not foolish, or mistaken, or ill-conceived. This proposed policy is, flatly, unspeakably evil.

Shared Article from sacbee

Trump administration considering separating immigrant parents fr…

Reuters and CNN say the Department of Homeland Security is considering a proposal aimed at deterring immigrants with children from entering the countr…

sacbee.com

StopDeportation #AbolishICE #NiFronterasNiSuPincheMuro

When La Migra reaches the bottom of the barrel, they pick that barrel up and they start digging.

Shared Article from Jezebel

ICE Agents Target Hypothermia Shelter In a Church to Arrest Home…

Following Donald Trump's executive order expanding the power of immigration authorities, those affected have included a married mom of two, an …

jezebel.com

Following Donald Trump's executive order expanding the power of immigration authorities, those affected have included a married mom of two, an individual protected by DACA, and a victim of domestic violence who was in court seeking a protective order. Now ICE has moved on to target people seeking safety from deadly weather.

NBC News 4 reports that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials surprised a group of men leaving a hypothermia shelter in Alexandria, Virginia early on Wednesday morning. The shelter is part of Rising Hope Mission Church, and thus falls under ICE's "sensitive location" policy. The policy demands that arrests not take place at churches, schools, or medical facilities. Agents reportedly waited until the men had crossed the street before surrounding them.

–Aimée Lutkin, [ICE Agents Target Hypothermia Shelter]
Jezebel (February 16, 2017).

Shared Article from Washington Post

!!!@@e2;20ac;2dc;This is really unprecedented': ICE detains woman …

"It really was a stunning event," said the county attorney. "It has an incredible chilling effect for all undocumented victims of an…

washingtonpost.com

A hearing in El Paso County in Texas went from ordinary to "unprecedented" last week when half a dozen Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents showed up at a courthouse where an undocumented woman was seeking a protective order against the boyfriend she accused of abusing her.

The woman, a citizen of Mexico who was living in El Paso had been driven to the courthouse by a victim's advocate from the Center Against Sexual and Family Violence, a shelter for victims of domestic abuse where she had been living.

She left under arrest. . . . It was the first time in her 23 years at the courthouse, [El Paso County Attorney Jo Anne] Bernal said, that she can remember ICE agents making their presence known during a protective order hearing. The agents had come to stake out the woman, identified by her initials I.E.G., because, Bernal speculates, they likely received a tip from the only other person who knew the time and place of the hearing — the woman's alleged abuser.

–Katie Mettler, [This is really unprecedented]
Washington Post (February 16, 2017)

Shared Article from Washington Post

Memos signed by DHS secretary describe sweeping new guidelines …

The documents detail plans to hire thousands of additional enforcement agents and expand the pool of immigrants prioritized for removal.

washingtonpost.com

If these guidelines are enacted, it will be an appalling escalation of this already-terrible situation. It will be a brutal use of state violence to separate families, punish the weakest and the most vulnerable, to destroy livelihoods and literally endanger lives. And all for what? To enforce a ridiculous system of international segregation. To hell with that.

End 287(g). Stop deportation. Abolish ICE. Abolish DHS. Abolish the Presidency. Open the borders, and free the people who cross them.

Thank goodness. They should have done this, anyway, decades ago. But now it is more urgent than ever.

Shared Article from Remezcla

LA Won't Arrest Undocumented Street Vendors Anymore

Some vendors receive warnings or tickets. Others face arrest and criminal misdemeanor charges, which increases their chances for deportation.

Yara Sim?@c3;b3;n @ remezcla.com

Recently from Jesse Walker:

In practice, CVE’s efforts are already focused overwhelmingly on Muslims. But the big question here shouldn’t be which groups ought to be the program’s targets. It’s whether the program should exist at all. No matter whether it’s aimed at Islamists, white nationalists, or anyone else, the CVE approach has two big problems.

First: It rests on the idea that the best way to root out terrorism is to fight “radicalization.” This idea has support among both Democrats and Republicans, but the evidence supporting it is sparse. When investigators at the British think tank Demos (not to be confused with the U.S.-based liberal group of the same name) spent two years studying the differences between violent and nonviolent radicals, they found that while nonviolent radicalism can be a stepping stone to terrorism, it can draw people away from terrorism too. Meanwhile, there were other forces pulling people into terrorism that didn’t have much to do with ideology at all. Other probes have reached similar conclusions. So the focus here is all wrong: Radical ideas do not usually lead to violent tactics, and violent tactics do not emerge only from radical ideas.

Second: That focus can lead to some serious civil liberties problems. “Even though the agencies running the programs promised that they wouldn’t use CVE for intelligence purposes (as they did in earlier iterations of it), the program itself is designed to teach community members, teachers, police, social workers, and religious leaders to identify and report to law enforcement people showing signs of ‘radicalization,'” comments Michael German, a former FBI agent who now hangs his hat at the Brennan Center for Justice. So in practice, he argues, you get “soft surveillance,” and that surveillance “is intended to suppress ideas, which is likely to cause more problems than solve them. It encourages the identification, reporting, and ‘treatment’ of people with bad ideas, which will only lead to misuse of security resources and deprivation of civil liberties.”

Needless to say, that sort of surveillance can itself radicalize people. So CVE also runs the risk of contributing to the very process it’s meant to stop.

–Jesse Walker, Don’t Rebrand the ‘Countering Violent Extremism’ Program—Just End It
Reason, 2 February 2017

Shared Article from Reason.com

Don't Rebrand the 'Countering Violent Extremism' Program—…

The question shouldn't be which groups the program ought to target. It's whether the program should exist at all.

Jesse Walker @ reason.com

There is no nation on earth that is worth even a single human life. There is no border that is more important than a refugee, or a dream, or a family, or just a plain old honest living. Nationalism is the most toxic idea in the world to individual liberty, to global justice, fairness, compassion or simple human decency. Border controls are a form of population control, one of the most mean-spirited and practically most lethal in the world today. Tear down this wall, tear down every wall and bury the rubble in the dirt.