Did Trump back down?
- Thread starter Jarod
- Start date
Fentoine Lum
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Asylum-seeking women and children immigrants are welcomed like criminals
March 20, 2016
The immigration debate intensified a couple of years ago when a flood of women and children came across the U.S.-Mexico border. The federal government didn't know how to handle the influx, so they detained these women and children in three family centers: two in Texas; one in Pennsylvania.
Today (March 20, 2016) there are more than a thousand people in these centers, waiting to know if they'll be allowed to stay in the country.
Maria Rosa Lopez and her son were some of thousands of people who fled from Central America to the U.S. in 2014 to escape gang violence, drug wars, civil war, or in Maria's case, domestic abuse — which is considered a credible fear that can warrant an asylum claim.
From Guatemala City, she and her son crossed another border into Mexico and then took a bus north to Monterrey, close to the northern Mexico-U.S. border. "I paid someone to take us across on a boat. It was night time and we slept in the desert on the U.S. side. There were other moms and their kids there too. A Brazilian woman asked me if she could sleep next to us," Lopez says.
The next morning, immigration officers woke them and took them to the Karnes detention center outside of San Antonio, Texas.
Lopez wanted asylum so she and her son could start their lives over in the U.S. She didn't know what to expect when she got on American soil, but she didn't expect to be housed in this facility with no word on when she'd be released.
"I was desperate when we got there. It was hard to see my child crying and he was asking a lot of questions," she recalls. "He knew it was a detention center and he wanted to know how long we were going to be there."
But she didn't know either. "No one was answering questions. I talked with people who had been there for six, eight months, and it was very depressing." she says. "Often my son couldn't fall asleep, we had bunk beds. He was on top of me but he would crawl down and wanted to be with me."
Denise Gilman, one of Maria's former lawyers, says the Karnes detention facility "feels very much like a prison" with "cinderblock walls, clanging doors, X-ray machines all over the place, buzzers that you have to use to get in and out to go see your 9-year-old client and his mom."
Gilman, director of the immigration clinic at the University of Texas Law School, says these women and children are seeking asylum, but they're treated like criminals. Oftentimes, they have family members who've already made it to the U.S., and she says these new immigrants should be able to stay with their families while their cases proceed.
https://www.npr.org/2016/03/20/471148251/when-asylum-seeking-women-and-children-immigrants-are-welcomed-like-criminalsillegal-immigrant-parents-can-be-detained-children/
Yup, that's america.
"Best" isn't always an option, Ms. Stretch.
Aren't you the lying idiot that recently complained on another thread about foul language? STFU asswhipe.
Exactly. Or hell, make it even easier for themselves and apply at a U.S. Consulate.
Exactly.
Sadly not many people in this country realize with the current partisan hatred we are experiencing, our country itself is not far from this itself. I have seen it before in other countries. I can sense it now, here.
Some of us do as well. These are frightening times we live in.
We're 200 miles from Canada by water, if you want to come along when we seek asylum. Oh, and they just legalized recreational weed.
That's right.
I still haven't gotten a single response from the Wallites today about how we're supposed to come up with $10-15 billion for this wall. I have a real good guess though -- cutting the crap out of social welfare programs.
It’s a little progress.
And, I don’t think the Courts will allow it, Rump lost this one!
canceled.2021.1
#AMERICAISDEAD
You can’t think of any reasons?
That’s against the law.
canceled.2021.1
#AMERICAISDEAD
I listened all day long to the talking heads and all they cried about was the kids not being with their parents.
They said Trump can put them with their parents with the stroke of a pen
He gave you what you want. The kids won’t be separated from Mommy and daddy. You should be rejoicing.
They will still be deported but at least it will be together which is what you wanted.
Congrats on a hard fought win