8/ First, the President tacitly admittedly that he was using detention of mothers and children as a deterrent. Days later, a federal court would find that policy likely violates the due process clause. aclu.org/cases/rilr-v-j. And rightly so, as powerfully demonstrated.
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9/ Detention as Deterrence of future migration works only if it’s unpleasant, and only if you can ensure that people don’t get out. You don’t just detain to deter. You detain to deport. You have to do it by sending a Gandalf message down the pipeline to the Northern Triangle.
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10/ What’s wrong with that? First, it doesn’t work. It assumes a parent would rationally chose to watch her daughter raped or murdered in Guatemala, El Salvador, or Honduras instead of helping her flee to seek the domestic and international legal protections of US law. Would you?
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11/ People in the Northern Triangle were (and are) fleeing for their lives. They’re looking to what we’ve held out as a shining city on a hill and following the beacon to safety. To convince them not to flee, you must convince them a worse fate awaits at the end of the journey.
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12/ Today’s DHS Kidnapping policy is the logical extension of yesterday’s family detention decisions. It’s the same mouthful of detention-as-deterrence mouthwash, just swished to the other side. Nothing, NOTHING in our law requires us to abuse and traumatize families and children
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13/ The reason otherwise friendly partisans on the left went to the mat with the Obama Admin is because we saw the utter inhumanity that happens inside these internment camps. Women aren’t allowed to let their children farther than 3 feet away from them. Imagine your toddler.
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14/ I remember holding back tears when I saw cutouts from Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar on the walls in the “kids’ area” of the legal trailer and thinking about how this would mean those kids will always associate the same book I was reading my child with this jail.
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15/ I remember hearing the constant, violent coughing and sickness of small children, and the worry of their mothers who stood in the sun outside the clinic all day only to be told their kids should “drink water.” I remember nearly doubling over when I saw the line of strollers.
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16/ if being in these cages ate away at our humanity, getting to know the people locked inside them helped restore it. They women We represented had been raped, beaten, or stalked in some of the most violent places on the planet. They carried on for their kids. They had hope.
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17/ And the detention policies of the last administration were set up to deter that hope. All the while yielding a hefty corporate profit. It was and is a moral failing that these places still existed when President Obama left office. It wasn’t for want of trying to close them.
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18/ I remember sitting down with my Member of Congress soon after I got back from the baby jail and trying to impress upon him the fierce urgency of taking immediate action to close these places down. I believed if people just knew, it would end. We as a nation would end it.
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18/ I’ll never forget what he told me, back in August of 2015. “Do you realize that Donald Trump — DONALD TRUMP!!! — is currently polling at nearly 40% in Tennessee? His point was that politically, I was probably wrong: People might not end up caring, even if they learned.
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19/ what I hope for us in this moment of critical mass, in this tipping point, is that we will collectively have the courage to hold our leaders accountable when they tell us putting families in for-profit cages to deter asylum-seeking is necessary to stop family separation.
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20/ To do that, we need smart, effective experts helping our leaders formulate the policy solutions. To me, that means helping and deploy their wealth of knowledge. It means helping and and and organize.
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21/ It means making sure and and and and have the resources they need to represent, visit, and document the abuses committed against human beings in cages. And it means showing up when we’re called to be present/
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Replying to
Using the term "baby jail" is spin. It's a detention facility, not a jail. These children are not serving sentences.
They are only there because of their parents actions and the laws on the books against illegal entry.
If they just legally entered, they would not be detained.
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Repeatedly said to be a deterrent by 45 brass. So, yeah, eat shit and keep standing with child abusers.
Also, you seem to think jail is a place people go only after they're found guilty. They're also used to hold innocent people awaiting trial who can't make bail.
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