Vol. 49 No. 10
June 28, 2018 - July 4, 2018
This publication is a Certified DBE/ SBE / MBE in the State of California CUCP #43264 Metro File #7074 & State of Texas File #802505971 Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what people will submit to and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them and these will continue till they have resisted either with words or blows or words or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they suppress. —Fredrick Douglass (1849)
The Generational Trauma of Separating Families The roots of Trump’s child-detention policy are in American history. By Patricia J. Williams
A Salvadoran migrant and his sons outside a shelter in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, on June 19, 2018, after the father decided to stay with his children in Mexico because of President Trump’s family-separation policy. (Reuters / Jose Luis Gonzalez) As recently as last year, Republican Congressman Steve King was considered an outlier when he opined that “we can’t restore our civilization with someone else’s babies.” Now the Trump administration has endorsed this politics of blood and soil, full bore. “They’re not innocent,” says our president of children torn from their parents at the border. “These aren’t people” is how he describes adolescents about whom he knows nothing but their nationality. Immigrants “are animals, and we’re taking them out of the country at a level and a rate that’s never happened before,” Trump adds. Their children will be put in “foster care or whatever,” according to the White House chief of staff, Gen. John Kelly. Those children may come from abroad, but they are our babies. They represent the legacy of American policies that go back decades. After all, it was the United States that financed the infamous US Army School of the Americas and trained genocidal warlords, such as Efraín Ríos Montt, who went on to destabilize all of Central America. If countries like Guatemala and Honduras have fallen into chaos since the 1980s, it’s partly be-
cause those wars took a toll on their social structures: the trauma of families wiped out and entire villages disappeared. The refugees at our southern border are part of the blowback from the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people still seeking safety from US-financed violence. War is one way to kill children; putting them in concentration camps is another. “Casa Padre” is where some of these children have been taken. Once a Walmart in Brownsville, Texas, the building has been converted to house nearly 1,500 boys under the age of 18. In the hallway is a huge graffito of Donald Trump’s head, oddly disembodied, looming larger than a minuscule image of the White House, above which he floats, godlike, in the sky. The mural includes a quote from The Art of the Deal: “Sometimes by losing a battle you find a new way to win the war.” Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III has tried to wrap this barbarity in the sheep’s clothing of not just law but God’s law, invoking the Pauline Epistle of Romans 13. Sessions, whose very name summons two of the most notorious slaveholders of the Confederacy, uses a feint common in the ante-
bellum South: It is God’s law, divine will, the “natural” order of things—not a policy dreamed up by President Trump and enacted at his command—that compels US government agents to treat immigrants like inventory. Over decades, slavery hardened Americans to the tears, pleas, terror, and grief of a trade that put human beings on the auction block, took babies from their mothers and sold them to strangers. That system relied on rationalizations we encounter still: Certain classes of human beings are not “really” human; they do not feel pain to the same degree as “more civilized” classes; these “others” are incorrigibly predisposed to prevarication (or “acting,” as Ann Coulter recently dismissed the images of bereft toddlers). Above all, “they” are always kept at a distance. This “they”-making obliterates due process, equal protection, and individual justice. It justifies racial and ethnic profiling, and punishes people in the plural. We fail to recall America’s dark history at our peril. After the Civil War, juvenile-reform policies encouraged the removal of children from people deemed unfit, “feeble-minded,” “promiscuous,” or epileptic. These parents were disproportionately Irish immi-
grants, people of color, or unmarried women. During the first part of the 20th century, policy-makers championed not only the removal of “defective” black children from their equally “defective” parents, but also the confinement of those children in adult prisons. Until recently, states sterilized thousands of women—and some men—for reasons that included ridding their tax rolls of the undeserving poor. Today, our government has grown indifferent to the cruelties of the so-called school-to-prison pipeline, arresting kindergartners and routinely sentencing very young teenagers as adults. The legacies of these policies are all around us. Still, our government argues that the deliberate separation of parents and children will serve as a disincentive to others seeking to cross the border. That alone is a crime against humanity. The United States is the only member of the United Nations that has not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child—a text worth reading for anyone who wonders why the world has condemned the Trump administration in recent weeks. Moreover, the construction of detention camps has been
Editor in Chief’s Corner Email: sbamericannews@gmail.com Clifton Harris Publisher of The San Bernardino AMERICAN News
Victims of Sexual Abuse at Notorious Hutto Immigration Center in Texas Demand PREA Audit National News (SAN ANTONIO, TX) – Two women who say they were sexually abused by guards while detained at a Texas immigration center are demanding an investigation into the mishandling of their cases, according to civil rights attorneys. MALDEF (Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund) sent a letter today to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on behalf of Laura Monterrosa-Flores, and S.G.S, both of whom allege that they suffered abuse while held at the T. Don Hutto Residential Center in Taylor, Texas, according to the letter. The women reported the abuse to officials in late 2017, but the employees were allowed to remain working among the immigrants at the facility despite the complaints. “With the ongoing efforts and successes of the ‘me too’ movement, we must ensure that those in immigration detention are protected as well,” said Thomas A. Saenz, MALDEF president and general counsel. “In detention facilities that are consciously secluded from significant public view, immigrant women face serious threats, and our nation must act to ensure that they are protected from predators with significant power to intimidate and violate.” In its letter to DHS, MALDEF says Hutto officials ignored detention standards and the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA), a law imposing standards on jails and federal detention centers as a way to detect, prevent, and respond to sexual abuse. The violations outlined in the letter include the failure to prevent or adequately address the sexual abuse, and the failure to take appropriate steps to prevent sexual abuse of other detainees. MALDEF is demanding that DHS re-open the cases and conduct a PREA audit of the facility. “Hutto has no business remaining open as long as our govern-
ment continues to detain women that it is unwilling or unable to protect,” said Celina Moreno, MALDEF’s interim Southwest Regional Counsel. “Not only is the Trump administration terrorizing mothers by tearing them apart from their children, it is locking them up in facilities like Hutto that have a long history of abuse.” Monterrosa-Flores, an asylum seeker, was detained at Hutto from May 2017 to March 2018. She said an employee at the facility engaged in a sexual act with her and then threatened her into maintaining her silence, according to the letter. S.G.S., a woman who did not want her name used, was detained at Hutto from June to October 2017. She was repeatedly subjected to unwanted sexual comments and actions by an employee, the letter states. After she reported the abuse, she was transferred to another facility but never provided information about U visas available to victims of crimes. Hutto has a notorious history of mistreating detainees. A former state prison, it was repurposed as a family detention center that was the subject of a lawsuit for failing, among other claims, to provide adequate health care and educational opportunities for children. That suit resulted in a settlement, and Hutto was later converted to house only adult women. However, the abuse of detainees continued at Hutto. A federal immigration agent was fired in 2007 for having sex with a female detainee in her cell, and widespread allegations of sexual assault surfaced after a guard was charged in 2009 with assaulting women he was transporting. MALDEF has filed similar complaints against other Texas detention centers. In 2014, attorneys demanded an investigation into sexual abuse complaints filed by mothers and children against employees at a detention facility in Karnes City, Texas.
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Youth Action Project Receives $30,000 Grant From Bank Of America Community News
San Bernardino, CA –Youth Action Project will be able to provide increased job training opportunities to our youth. “I’m happy to accept a $30,000 contribution from Bank of America, on behalf of Youth Action Project (YAP). The contribution will allow YAP provide education & employment opportunities to more than 100 “out of school youth”, helping to drive economic opportunity for the most vulnerable in the Inland Empire.” Said Joseph Williams, chief executive officer. Youth Action Project was one of eleven San Bernardino area organizations to receive funding from Bank of America. Funds from Bank of America will be used to match a recent workforce development grant awarded to YAP by the San Ber-
nardino County Workforce Development Board. YAP will help the County implement the GenerationGo program by providing work-based learning opportunities to out of school youth, ages 16 to 24. Youth will have access a variety of career and educational services through Youth Action Project. YAP workforce services are designed to help enhance job skills, develop leadership qualities, explore career options, participate in adult and peer mentoring opportunities, and take advantage of work experiences. Bank of America aims to remove the barriers to economic mobility and likes to partner with organizations that are really having an impact in the region”, said Al Arguello, Inland Empire Market President for Bank of America. “Bank of America is
Our Values, Mission, & Vision Statement
Reena Mitchell, Bank of America representative; Matt Burns, Bank of America representative; Joseph Williams, CEO Youth Action Project; Al Arguello, Bank of America Inland Empire Market president; Stephanie Drago, Alejandro Escobar, Leslie Cubias, Clarisse Austria (YAP Site Coordinators) committed to working with organizations that put those who have served on the path to economic self-sufficiency.”
Bank of America made the check presentations at its San Bernardino branch during a short ceremony on Tuesday, June 19.
Our Values: Treat all people with care, respect, honor, and dignity. Tell it as it is with love, truth and integrity. Promote the interests of advertisers and sponsors along their strategic interest for the betterment of the community and beyond. Speak truth to power. Our Mission: To continuously improve communication between all people of the world. Our Vision: To be the best community newspaper in our region and the nation. Provider of: A voice for the poor, the underserved, those that are marginalized, Positive and edifying news about people, places and businesses. Keep San Bernardino, Riverside, and Los Angeles Counties informed about global trends while retaining the consciousness of local events and processes. Memberships and Associations: The San Bernardino American Newspaper is a member of the California Newspaper Publishers Association, National Newspaper Association and addociated with California Black Media.