Migrant children held in deplorable conditions at US border

After just 2 months in office, the acting commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, John Sanders, plans to step down in the coming weeks., according to two agency officials. Customs and Border Protection has come under fire in recent days amid revelations that nearly 300 migrant children — from infants to 17-year-olds — had been detained in a remote Border Patrol station in West Texas without adequate food, water and sanitation.

All but 30 of the children were transferred out of the center in Clint, Texas, after revelations last week that they were being held in squalid conditions. But a CBP official confirmed today that 100 of those children have been moved back to the same Border Patrol station because there wasn’t room in child shelters run by Health and Human Services.

A law professor who recently visited the facility, Warren Binford of Willamette University, described the conditions for children: “Many of them are sleeping on concrete floors, including infants, toddlers, preschoolers. They are being given nothing but instant meals, Kool-Aid and cookies — many of them are sick. We are hearing that many of them are not sleeping. Almost all of them are incredibly sad and being traumatized. Many of them have not been given a shower for weeks. Many of them are not being allowed to brush their teeth except for maybe once every 10 days. They have no access to soap. It’s incredibly unsanitary conditions, and we’re very worried about the children’s health.”

News of the conditions at the Clint facility was first reported last week by The Associated Press based on initial interviews with Binford and other lawyers who were conducting inspections under the terms of the Flores settlement, a legal agreement that spells out how the government is supposed to treat detained migrant children. The AP reported: “A 2-year-old boy locked in detention wants to be held all the time. A few girls, ages 10 to 15, say they’ve been doing their best to feed and soothe the clingy toddler who was handed to them by a guard days ago. Lawyers warn that kids are taking care of kids, and there’s inadequate food, water and sanitation for the 250 infants, children and teens at the Border Patrol station.”

Under the Flores settlement, children detained by the Border Patrol are supposed to be turned over to the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, an arm of the Department of Health and Human Services, within 72 hours. Some children said they had been kept at the Clint facility for weeks.

Congress is expected to vote today on a supplemental spending bill to send money to agencies working to address the needs of migrants arriving at the U.S. Border with Mexico. Last-minute requirements were added to the $4.5 billion legislation that would obligate CBP to establish hygiene and medical standards for children and a 90-day limit on keeping kids in temporary emergency shelters.

[NPR]

Canada resettled more refugees than any other country in 2018

Canada resettled the largest number of refugees out of 25 countries in 2018, according to the UN’s refugee agency. The country accepted just over 28,000 refugees last year, with the United States coming in second with 22,900.

An influx of asylum seekers crossing at the US-Canada border has also become a political issue after approximately 40,000 people “irregularly” crossed into Canada between 2017 and 2018.  Canada currently is struggling with a backlog of almost 74,000 asylum claims with applicants waiting almost two years for a hearing.

According to the US-based Pew Research Center, which looked the UNHCR data, 2018 was the first time the US, under the Trump administration, did not lead the world in refugee resettlement since 1980.

More than two thirds of all refugees worldwide came from Syria, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Myanmar and Somalia. Globally, 92,400 refugees were resettled in 2018, fewer than 7% of those awaiting resettlement worldwide.

Out of the 25 countries that resettled refugees in 2018, Australia, the UK, and France also resettled high numbers, according to UN figures.

[BBC]

I pray for refugees because I was one

I walked for nine days in my slippers in the deep forest. My father carried all the food. My mom carried my one-year-old brother. I carried all the cookware, some blankets, and clothes for them. After seven days, we reached the Tenasserim River and crossed on a big boat. As we were climbing the mountain, I heard the gunfire again.

I was very tired carrying my brother while climbing the mountain, so I spoke to myself, “Sunday, you cannot die here. You must finish your high school, go to college, speak for your people, and tell the world what you have been through and who you are.”

I am an ethnic Karen, one of more than 10 ethnic minority groups in Burma. My parents became Christians when I was born. The place where I was born and grew up had no electricity, no hospital, and no clinic. We carried water from the river to our house. We ate the fruits from our tree on the farm. My parents passed only grade three.

After I finished grade four at a Karen school, my parents sent me to the Burmese school far away from my home. Because my parents were so poor, they could not support me with money. I stayed in the home of family friends, a pastor’s family in a sister village. I looked after their cows, did the housework, while they gave me free room and board.

In 1997, I was away from home in another village, taking my fifth-grade final examination. I heard gunfire from far away. About an hour later, our principal asked us to stop immediately and go home to find our family for our safety. When I got home, my family had already hidden in the forest. My father brought me to my mother and my younger brothers and sister, and we moved from place to place every day for our safety. A few months later, the Burmese army came and set up their camp at my village while we were still living in the forest. Since that day, I have never gone back to my village, and the Burmese army camps are still there.

We hid in the jungle for a few months. Other families from another village came to live with us. Then we decided we would travel to the border to seek refuge in Thailand. After we crossed the Tenasserim River and the mountain beyond it, we arrived safely in Thailand at a temporary place. A few weeks later, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) moved us to Tham Hin refugee camp in a truck. Around 9,000 refugees lived in our camp. Another nine refugee camps were established along the Thailand-Burma border.

There were no school buildings. At first, we had to study at our teacher’s house, and sometimes in the community building. Before we got a donation for our school, one of our teachers used pieces of cardboard and charcoal for teaching because we did not have chalk or a chalkboard. I finished high school there in 2003.

I prayed and sought my way out of the refugee camp and started learning to use a computer, the internet, English, and news reporting with my Karen news group. I left the camp illegally and was arrested by Thai police two times before I made it to Chiang Mai, the second biggest city in Thailand. I enrolled in a journalism course in Chiang Mai. This is where I met my husband. He was from another refugee camp trying to earn his GED diploma at another school in the same city. We got married in the refugee camp on September 4, 2006, after finishing at our school.

My husband and I encountered a new problem. Our daughter did not have the Refugee Registration Document, issued by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), because she had not been born in the camp. It was the only document that took refugees to the United States and other resettlement countries. We did not give up praying. My husband’s refugee camp leaders helped, so our daughter got her UNHCR registration card with my husband. That meant that she could resettle with him, but I would have to go back to my own camp. We would resettle apart.

After two years, we got the chance to move to Indiana and reunite with my parents and siblings.

[Excerpt of CT article by Sunday Htoo, a refugee from Burma (Myanmar)]

African migrants a new face of the US border crisis

The crisis on the southern border has been driven by a surge of migrants from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. Now there’s a new face of the crisis: Hundreds of African migrants have crossed the border in recent weeks, many to seek asylum.

Filipe and Mireille took their four young children and fled violent militias and civil unrest in the Democratic Republic of Congo nearly five months ago. They flew to Ecuador, then traveled on foot across Central America to reach the U.S.-Mexico border, where they waited for weeks in a long line of asylum-seekers before being allowed to cross and make the last leg of their journey. Finally, they reached their destination: a makeshift emergency shelter in Portland, Maine — a converted minor-league sports arena now filled with cots. Filipe describes it as “paradise.”

Border Patrol agents in the Del Rio sector of South Texas recently took into custody more than 500 migrants in just one week, mostly families from the Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola. Central Africans are also drawn to the U.S. because the boat trip across the Mediterranean can be treacherous. In fact, many don’t even make it to the sea but are swept up in refugee camps in North Africa.

Now many of these migrants fly to South America. And when they get there, they find well-traveled roads to follow north.

[NPR]

Trump’s problem isn’t Mexico but Central America

When US President Donald Trump demands that Mexico “fix” its immigration problem, he should really look to the spiraling collapse of Central America. The limitless flow of people towards the US-Mexico border begins with the tortured descent of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador into the abyss.

And it is this very place that the Trump administration has announced it will cut aid to, rather than boosting it.

For many in the region, getting out has understandably become a matter of survival. The nations of the Northern Triangle jostle for the ugly position as the world’s murder capital, both because of the gang violence spawned by the drug trade and because of a lack of solid government.

The Northern Triangle is also one of the foremost and earliest victims of the climate crisis. At least 1.4 million people in Central America and Mexico could be on the move by 2050, the World Bank has estimated, in a place where a third of jobs are dependent on agriculture. Studies have suggested rainfall may get sparser in Honduras, yet it will see flooding increase in some places by 60%, the Guardian reported. El Salvador could lose up to 28% of its coastline by the end of the century. Drought could spread in Guatemala, and this has damaged the coffee crops in the past. Temperatures have risen 0.5C since 1950 and could rise up to 2C by 2050. Communities will see the life that they know now change immeasurably.

Climate change is the underlying malaise, but the present-day curse is the drug trade. It can feel like nearly every part of Central American life is caught some way or another in feeding drugs north to US markets. The sums of money involved, one official told CNN, are so utterly ridiculous that few other forms of economic activity make sense. And until the main market, the United States, stops taking in so much cocaine, the money will always be there.

News emerged last month that the DEA opened an investigation into the President of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernandez, in 2013 … for “large-scale drug-trafficking and money laundering activities relating to the importation of cocaine into the United States.” His brother, Antonio Hernandez Alvarado, was arrested in November 2018 by US investigators in Miami, accused of being a “large-scale drug trafficker.”

In Guatemala, a candidate for the presidential election, Mario Amilcar Estrada Orellana, was recently indicted by the DEA for allegedly conspiring with the Mexican Sinaloa Cartel. He was arrested in Miami in April.

Meanwhile, in El Salvador, 37-year-old President Nayib Bukele took office nearly a fortnight ago, facing a murder rate of about 50 per 100,000 — around 10 times that of the United States.

The threat of tariffs might have persuaded Mexico to try to stem the flow in the short term, but it won’t address the foundations of the tide of people.

[CNN]

Trial against humanitarian activist Scott Warren ends in hung jury

In Arizona, a case against a humanitarian aid volunteer who provided food, water and shelter to undocumented migrants ended in a mistrial Tuesday after a deadlocked jury was unable to deliver a verdict.

Scott Warren, from the groups No More Deaths and Ajo Samaritans, faced up to 20 years in prison after being charged with two counts of felony harboring and one count of felony conspiracy. Eight jurors found Scott Warren not guilty; four said he was guilty. Prosecutors have declined to comment on whether they would seek a retrial against Warren.

Scott Warren speaking to supporters and the press: “Since my arrest in January of 2018, at least 88 bodies were recovered from the Ajo corridor of the Arizona desert. We know that’s a minimum number and that many more are out there and have not been found. The government’s plan in the midst of this humanitarian crisis? Policies to target undocumented people, refugees and their families; prosecutions to criminalize humanitarian aid, kindness and solidarity; and now, where I live, the revelation that they will build an enormous and expensive wall across a vast stretch of southwestern Arizona’s unbroken Sonoran Desert.”

[Democracy Now]

New World Atlas of Desertification shows unprecedented pressure on our natural resources

The Joint Research Centre (JRC) published a new edition of the World Atlas of Desertification in 2018, which provides the first comprehensive, evidence-based assessment of land degradation at a global level and highlights the urgency to adopt corrective measures. 

Tibor Navracsics, Commissioner for Education, Culture, Youth and Sport, responsible for the JRC, said: “Over the past twenty years, since the publication of the last edition of the World Atlas of Desertification, pressures on land and soil have increased dramatically. To preserve our planet for future generations, we urgently need to change the way we treat these precious resources.”

The main findings show that population growth and changes in our consumption patterns put unprecedented pressure on the planet’s natural resources:

• Over 75% of the Earth’s land area is already degraded, and over 90% could become degraded by 2050.
• Globally, a total area half of the size of the European Union (4.18 million km²) is degraded annually, with Africa and Asia being the most affected.
• The economic cost of soil degradation for the EU is estimated to be in the order of tens of billions of euros annually.
• Land degradation and climate change are estimated to lead to a reduction of global crop yields by about 10% by 2050. Most of this will occur in India, China and sub-Saharan Africa, where land degradation could halve crop production.
• As a consequence of accelerated deforestation it will become more difficult to mitigate the effects of climate change
• By 2050, up to 700 million people are estimated to have been displaced due to issues linked to scarce land resources. The figure could reach up to 10 billion by the end of this century. 

 [EU Science Hub]