By Monday DHS reported that the Clint facility had moved most of the migrants to other facilities. There is a decrease in migrants coming in, which this report by the New York Times attributes to Mexico cracking down on immigrants on their side of the border; and DHS has “scaled back a policy requiring fingerprints from family members who applied to sponsor children in its care, speeding up the children’s release from government facilities.” On child separation, in come cases this is still happening: “The infants there had either been separated from adult family members with whom they had crossed the border or were the children of teenage mothers who had also been detained there. Some of the minors had been held there for nearly a month.”
According to two lawyers who toured the Clint center: “Many, including children as young as 2 or 3, have been separated from adult caretakers without any provisions for their care besides the unrelated older children also being held in detention.”
“As we interviewed the two brothers, he fell asleep on two office chairs drawn together, probably the most comfortable bed he had used in weeks. They had been separated from an 18-year-old uncle and sent to the Clint Border Patrol Station. When we met them, they had been there three weeks and counting.”
“A second-grader we interviewed entered the room silently but burst into tears when we asked who she traveled with to the US. “My aunt,” she said, with a keening cry. A bracelet on her wrist had the words “US parent” and a phone number written in permanent marker. We called the number on the spot and found out that no one had informed her desperate parents where she was being held. Some of the most emotional moments of our visit came witnessing children speak for the first time with their parents on an attorney’s phone.”
A doctor reported out: “After assessing 39 children under the age of 18, she described conditions for unaccompanied minors at the McAllen facility as including “extreme cold temperatures, lights on 24 hours a day, no adequate access to medical care, basic sanitation, water, or adequate food.”
All the children who were seen showed evidence of trauma, Lucio Sevier reported, and the teens spoke of having no access to hand washing during their entire time in custody. She compared it to being “tantamount to intentionally causing the spread of disease.”
The New York Times: “On Tuesday, the C.B.P. official said that those moves had alleviated overcrowding in Clint, and allowed for the return of more than 100 children there. The spokesman said that no additional resources had been provided to the children who were sent back.”
Also: “I personally don’t believe these allegations,” the Customs and Border Protection official.
According to Vox: The lone member of the team of legal investigators who visited the El Paso facility in which many children were sent from Clint — called “Border Patrol Station 1” — told Vox that conditions there were just as bad as they were in Clint, with the same problems of insufficient food, no toothbrushes, and aggressive guards.
Increasingly — as lawyers have been reporting, and as the investigators who interviewed children in detention last week confirmed — children are coming to the US with a relative who is not their parent, and being separated.
Here is a good explanation of what the government’s legal argument is behind the soap and toothbrush comments. Ken White doesn’t think it will work: The United States’s loathsome argument—that it is “safe and sanitary” to confine children without soap, toothbrushes, dry clothes, and on concrete under bright lights—is morally indefensible. It’s also a spectacularly foolish argument to raise in the famously liberal Ninth Circuit, where the United States should have expected exactly the reception that it got.
The House passed a $4.5 billion emergency border aid bill Tuesday.
A judge rules on Tuesday to reopen the Census question case, saying that new evidence suggests Republicans may have inserted the citizenship question to decrease the voting power of minorities: “It is becoming difficult to avoid seeing that which is increasingly clear,” he wrote. “As more puzzle pieces are placed on the mat, a disturbing picture of the decision makers’ motives takes shape.”
Trump continues to deny the Carroll allegation: “No. 1, she’s not my type. No. 2, it never happened. It never happened, O.K.?”
Russia News
Due to a subpoena, Mueller has agreed to testify before the House in two back to back session on July 17.
At the G20 Summit, Trump joked with Putin about election interference and agreed with Putin that it would be good to “get rid” of journalists (on the one year anniversary of the shooting in an American newsroom).
At the end of the G20 trip Trump flew to the DMZ and became the first sitting US president to step inside North Korea. He met with Kim there.
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Trump’s Job Approval: 42.3%