San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Detention center:
Bay Area lawmakers tour Texas facility.
Bay Area lawmakers decried conditions inside Texas detention facilities they visited Saturday, while other local residents demonstrated in the streets of San Francisco against President Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy of prosecuting undocumented migrants who cross the U.S.-Mexico border.
“No country with a love of children would do this to kids,” Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Hillsborough, told The Chronicle.
She and two dozen other Democratic members of Congress said they were on a “factfinding mission” after Trump instituted, then rescinded, a policy of separating families who are caught entering the country together. They said there are no clear systems in place for reuniting the children and parents who remain apart from one another.
More than 2,300 youngsters were put in shelters or foster care in recent weeks while their parents awaited prosecution and deportation proceedings in separate detention centers. In an executive order Wednesday, Trump said families from then on would be detained together “where appropriate and consistent with law and available resources.”
Lawmakers in the visiting delegation said they saw children sleeping behind bars, on concrete floors and under emergency Mylar heat-resistant blankets at a processing center in McAllen, Texas. Some were kept separated from their parents in adjacent cells, they said.
The delegation also visited the Port Isabel detention facility in Los Fresnos, where 1,200 women were brought in shackled and kept behind barbed wire, Speier said. She recounted the stories of two women in the facility.
One had been breastfeeding a 5-month-old child who was taken away from her. Another said immigration officials had taken her son to Florida, injecting him with some type of sleep-inducing substance before he got on the flight.
Speier also planned to visit a kinder care facility for young immigrant children “that frankly we didn’t know existed until this week,” she said.
Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland, said there was no evidence that children are receiving counseling while in custody, calling the conditions she saw “shocking and outrageous.” Yet some of the Democrats said they believed U.S. border patrol agents were handling the situation as best they could.
Trump kept up his hardline immigration stance and rhetoric, despite his reversal on family separations.
“The United States cannot have an open border to every illegal alien family and minor on the face of the Earth,” Trump said in his weekly address Saturday. “Unfortunately, open-border Democrats support the loopholes that prevent families from being detained and removed together. They just want everyone to be released into our country, no matter how dangerous they are.”
At San Francisco’s Embarcadero Plaza, about 200 activists and politicians rallied Saturday morning to condemn the administration, some waving signs showing Trump with a devil’s face and others wearing what appeared to be Mylar blankets to invoke the conditions of migrant detention centers.
The event put together by Women’s March San Francisco — a local branch of the national Trump resistance movement — featured speeches by Mayorelect London Breed, Assemblyman David Chiu, D-San Francisco, and other city politicians.
San Francisco Democratic Party Chairman David Campos gave an emotional speech about his own experience crossing the border as an undocumented immigrant from Guatemala. He was detained at age 11 with his parents and two younger sisters.
“I can tell you that as an 11-year-old, the experience of being in a jail is something that stays with you the rest of your life,” he said. “As traumatic as it was for me, I had my dad in my cell. I can’t imagine what it’s like to be a 2-year-old and go through that experience without a parent.”