We have confirmation that after several weeks the Congregation of the Resurrection has indeed concluded its hearings and investigation of the accusations directed against Father Phillips.
An independent Review Board of three public-spirited leaders from the Chicago area, who are not members of St. John Cantius Church, was constituted. Thereafter, the Review Board interviewed the detractors and several witnesses, persons who personally know the accusers, and other individuals who came forward to testify in defense of Father Phillips’ integrity. In accordance with directives given by Card. Cupich the members of the Canons Regular were not interviewed.
The Review Board has concluded that Fr. Phillips has not violated any secular criminal, civil or canon law.
Fr. Phillips, having been exonerated thusly, and this in turn confirmed by the votum of The Rt. Rev. Gene Szarek, C.R., Ph.D. Provincial Superior of the Congregation of the Resurrection upon receipt of the Review Board Report. We now prayerfully await the response of His Eminence, Blase Cardinal Cupich, Archbishop of Chicago, for the return of our pastor.
While recalling the words of Pope Francis on the occasion of the 52nd anniversary to commemorate the World Day for Social Communications [13th May 2018], exhorting us as Christians to be the number one media capable of truth and an efficacious enunciation of good. False news is always « evil », because it impacts relationships between persons, violating the dignity of those same persons, and sometimes entire peoples. A Christian, instead, never divides the truth from good. Just as Jesus of Nazareth did, when He affirmed: “the truth will make you free.”
We therefore remain confident that in this process, justice and truth will prevail over the mendacity, falsehoods, spitefulness and malevolent connivance from which this unpleasant episode originates; and that the accusers, who recklessly have besmirched their own reputations in this matter, will too choose to make themselves “free”, by each of them individually presenting an unconditional retraction.
Church sources tell us, the above cited conclusions and votum have not been made public, inasmuch as further legal action could be taken to fully restore Fr. Phillips’ good name.
We turn to the Blessed Virgin Mary as our advocate and plead for her maternal help and guidance.
Laura Bush needs a remedial course in history and immigration policy.
The Bush family has a famously adversarial relationship with English. It became clear this week that at least one of them is also illiterate where U.S. history and immigration policy are concerned. This was demonstrated when former First Lady Laura Bush took to the pages of the Washington Post to denounce President Trump for enforcing a statute signed into law by her own husband, George W. Bush. Even worse, she compared the HHS facilities where the children of illegal immigrants are briefly housed to the infamous internment camps where Democrat icon FDR imprisoned 110,000 American citizens of Japanese descent.
This comparison not only played into the hands of the very Democrats and partisan journalists who remorselessly savaged both her and her husband for eight solid years, it is wildly inaccurate. Mrs. Bush clearly knows very little about the plight of children caught up in the illegal immigration crisis, and even less about the internment camps she so glibly evoked. It’s blindingly obvious that she has been suckered by the propaganda relentlessly pumped out by the “news” media, completely taken in by their lurid images of wailing children and “cruel” DHS officials. Laura Bush has thus become just another useful idiot.
Let’s look at some actual facts: According to the former First Lady’s opinion column, “I was among the millions of Americans who watched images of children who have been torn from their parents… the Department of Homeland Security has sent nearly 2,000 children to mass detention centers.” The facilities to which she refers are actually run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), a division of Health and Human Services. It has been in operation since 2003, at which time Mrs. Bush’s husband had been President for two years. Here are the evil doings that ORR has been up to for the subsequent fifteen years:
ORR has cared for more than 175,000 children, incorporating child welfare values as well as the principles and provisions established by the Flores Agreement in 1997, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 and its reauthorization acts, the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA) of 2005 and 2008.
The children in question have either entered the United States unaccompanied by adults (this accounts for the vast majority of the approximately 12,000 kids being housed by the agency) or with “parents” attempting to enter the country illegally. It should be obvious to anyone who has paid even a modicum of attention to the illegal immigration issue that many of the adults accompanying these children are not their parents or even distant relatives. Indeed, they are frequently criminals involved in human trafficking. What matters, as far as the separation issue is concerned, is whether the adult is detained for illegal entry.
In cases resulting in the arrest of the adult, the unaccompanied children are referred to ORR, which attempts to place them in the least restrictive setting consistent with the interests of the child. Sometimes that means foster care, which Mrs. Bush weirdly conflates with “warehousing.” If foster care isn’t possible, ORR may use temporary shelters in what she describes with horror as “converted box stores,” insinuating that there is little difference between a Walmart building and Auschwitz. Mrs. Bush doesn’t seem to get that the media have crafted the images to which she is responding for the specific purpose of creating that illusion.
Even if the false narrative of Nazi-like cruelty were true, naïve opinion columns in left-leaning media outlets are not the way to handle the problem. It can, in fact, be resolved without much difficulty by Congress. Indeed, Texas Senator Ted Cruz has already proposed just such a bill. The Texas Tribune reports that the provisions of the legislation would include doubling the number of federal immigration judges, authorizing new temporary shelters to keep families together, requiring immigrant families to be kept together in the absence of criminal conduct, and providing for expedited processing of legitimate asylum cases.
The bill has the support of prominent Republicans, and there is no doubt that the President would sign it into law without hesitation. It would not merely solve a variety of practical problems encountered at the border and stop most separations of children from genuine parents. It would calm down the hysteria surrounding this issue. But the Democrats aren’t willing to support it. Why? Because they don’t really give a rat’s posterior about “the children.” What they want is an issue that they can leverage into a majority in at least one house of Congress in the midterms. If this problem is resolved, they’re toast. Thus, as the Hill reports:
Senate Democratic Leader Charles Schumer (N.Y.) on Tuesday dismissed a legislative proposal backed by Republican leaders to keep immigrant families together at the border.… Asked if that meant Democrats would not support a bill backed by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to keep immigrant families together while seeking asylum on the U.S. border, Schumer said they want to keep the focus on Trump.
In other words, given the choice between helping the children over whom they and the media have shed so many crocodile tears, and damaging Donald Trump, the Democrats went for Trump’s jugular. And the media are worse. Slate, for example, ran a typically dishonest articletitled, “Ted Cruz’s Proposal to Fix Child Separation Is a Cynical Ploy.” The primary premise of this absurd piece is that Senator Cruz has introduced his bill only to fend off a challenge by Democrat Beto O’Rourke. Cruz leads by 9 points. Nonetheless, seeing that the Democrats had no intention of doing the right thing, President Trump handled it.
Meanwhile, what about those Japanese ‘internment camps’? They were indeed “one of the most shameful episodes in U.S. history.” It occurred because a Democratic president signed Executive Order 9066, resulting in the illegal incarceration of 110,000 loyal Japanese Americans. This is consistent with that party’s long catalogue of racialist crimes. For Mrs. Bush to conflate that atrocity to the current border situation is utterly irresponsible.
It’s not about Child/Parent Separation, but Child Abuse, Smuggling & possibly Sex Trafficking by Parents handing their Children to “Human Smugglers” & Drug Cartels
Most Americans don’t realize how dangerous and corrupt the Mexican border towns are:
When I visited a Mexican border town about 8 years ago to visit a relative of a in-law, the town mayor had just been killed probably by the local Mexican drug cartel.
A friend and relative of mind were attacked and beaten by the border townspeople when they protested about being cheated. Luckily, the Mexican police arrested them and they were able to bribe their way back to the USA.
Even Wikipedia admits that those who traffic in bringing people over the borders called “Coyotes” or “human smugglers” have a “growing association with drug cartels.”
What kind of parents would allow their children to be involved with “human smugglers” and drug cartels or hand them over to them?
“”10,000 of the 12,000 [ children “in the care of HHS right now”] were sent here alone by their parents.”
If anyone in the US handed their children over to “human smugglers” and drug cartels, they would be arrested for child abuse.
Child abuse is when parents or caregivers through actions or failing to act, causes injury, death, emotional harm or risk to the underaged boy or girl.
Freedomoutpost.com, today, noted:
The “footage recently released by the HHS…[is] only boys ages 10 and up. Where are the girls?”
What do drug cartels do besides sell drugs and do human smuggling?
Prostitution is usually another business of drug cartels.
What kind of child abusing parents would hand over their sons and daughters to “human smugglers” and drug cartels who possibly are, also, dealing in sex trafficking and prostitution?
“Where are the girls?”
Pray an Our Father now for the poor children of such parents.
The Catholic bishops met in Fort Lauderdale a few days ago. The dominating topic of discussion was politics, specifically, their official guide to Catholic voters, Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship.The Pope Francis faction, led by Cardinal Blase J. Cupich of Chicago, called for a complete rewriting of the document since it no longer represented “the new body of teaching” as taught by the present pontiff, specifically mentioning climate change, poverty, and immigration.
Bishop Robert McElroy of San Diego went a step further saying the present document doesn’t represent “Catholic teaching as it is now.”
These two are not the only ones who believe that in the space of five years, since Bergoglio’s 2013 election, the moral and social teaching of the Church has been so fundamentally altered Faithful Citizenship no longer speaks with the true voice of the Church. So much for an institution considered slow to change.
Other leading bishops, however, including Archbishop Gomez of Los Angeles, opposed writing a new document, arguing what was needed was a more straightforward, significantly redacted version of Faithful Citizenship along with an accompanying video for YouTube, etc.
When the votes were tallied, 77 percent of the bishops voted for the creation of shorter materials — a letter, video, and other “resources” to supplement Faithful Citizenship.
During this discussion there was no mention of Trump being the most pro-life president in our nation’s history. It should not surprise us at that omission since the intent behind the beefing up of Faithful Citizenship is to deny Trump a second term in office.
The bishop’s present silence about the president’s achievement is only another iteration of their attempt during the campaign itself to camouflage Hillary Clinton’s pro-abortion stance by arranging with moral indictments Trump about “The Wall.”
The strategy didn’t work. Faithful Catholics would not be bullied into seeing moral equivalence between killing the unborn and insisting on secure national borders.
As it stands, the 2015 version of Faithful Citizenship is a flawed document. A close reading of it offers the Catholic voters several loopholes allowing them to ignore a candidate’s abortion stand if other “morally grave reasons” prevail. It remains to be seen, whether the new supplements will magnify these flaws or keep them buried in theological mumbo-jumbo where they belong.
We can fully expect, however, the redacted version of Faithful Citizenship to put the immigration issue front and center. This placement will create the impression of a de facto moral equivalence with settled life issues such as abortion. The bishops approved language that virtually guaranteed these new shorter materials will “apply the teachings of Pope Francis to our day.”
But just as in 2016 when the bishops pressed the immigration issue, it won’t work in 2020. For one thing, Pope Francis has spent all the capital of good will created by his election and his successful U.S. visit. Pope Francis, as it were, has no ‘coattails.’
If the bishops produce election materials that recast Faithful Citizenship to fit the Pope’s vision, it will only create greater distance between the bishops and their faithful. They will be relegating themselves to becoming just another cadre of grumpy Never-Trumpers.
At the very least, the bishops could have expressed common ground with the Trump administration on his efforts to defuse the nuclear threat posed by North Korea. After all, doesn’t this come under the rubric of “world peace”?
The bishops, instead, focused on the president’s decision to exit the Paris Climate Agreement. The USCCB itself has been asked to sign the Paris declaration by its own Catholic Climate Covenant created in 2006. How much money will it cost Catholics if the bishops decide to play in European politics on that issue?
Meeting in Fort Lauderdale, the bishops ignored the opportunity of voicing solidarity with the president’s pro-life agenda and his the quest for peace between North and South Korea. Instead they prepared to sharpen their knives for the 2020 election. Is this what we now call “evangelization”?
Dr. Deal W. Hudson took over Crisis Magazine in 1995, leaving in 2010 to become president of Catholic Advocate. While at Crisis, Hudson led the Catholic voter outreach for President George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004, and later advised the campaigns of both John McCain and Donald Trump on Catholic outreach. In 2014, he began his weekly two-hour radio show, “Church and Culture,” on the Ave Maria Radio Network, and launched http://www.thechristianreview.com in 2015. His books include “Happiness and the Limits of Satisfaction” and “Onward Christian Soldiers: The Growing Political Power of Catholics and Evangelicals in the United States.” To read more of his reports — Click Here Now.
13 Facts the Media ‘Pros’ Don’t Want You to Know About ‘Family Border Separation’
Alex Wong/Getty Images
The fire hose of fake news from the establishment media this week on the issue of illegal immigrant families separated at the border is designed to mislead the American people — and to distract from Trump’s recent successes.
Here are the facts — 13 truths the media do not want you to know about President Trump’s legal, humane, and moral handling of adults and childrenwho enter our country illegally.
Trump Is Only Enforcing the Law
The establishment media’s manufactured narrative about the necessary and moral separation of illegal alien parents from their children is designed with the specific purpose of spreading the fake news that, only as a means to be cruel, President Trump is somehow making all of this up as he goes along.
In truth, Trump is only complying with and enforcing the law, which is his constitutional duty and responsibility.
When the media claim Trump has a “choice,” what they mean is he has a choice to ignore the law as Obama did when he illegally released untold numbers of illegals into America.
Trump’s “zero tolerance policy” is merely his administration treating all lawbreakers as lawbreakers, because the only other option is to let them loose into America with nothing but a court summons.
Trump’s Only Choice Is to Separate Illegal Alien Families
When an illegal alien crosses the border into the U.S., he is a lawbreaker, and, like any lawbreaker (including American citizens), he is put into the criminal justice system.
This is the law.
Obviously, when an illegal alien is in custody, he is housed in an adult detention center. For obvious reasons, it would be illegal for Trump to “reunite” this family by allowing children to live in adult detention centers.
Keep in mind that when we are this early in the process, we do not even know if this is a real family unit. It is not uncommon for illegal aliens (including criminals) to pretend the children they are traveling with are their own. They do so in the hope this special family status will result in them being released (this madness is known as “catch and release”) into America with nothing more than a court date — a date many never show for, most especially those with criminal intent.
And so, while the illegal adult is held in an adult detention center, the migrant child is cared for in shelters run by the Department of Health and Human Services.
Generally, the adult illegal is processed quickly, sentenced to time served, and the family is quickly reunited during the deportation process.
In other words, in order to keep the family unit together, we can either put children in adult detention centers (unthinkable), put adults in child detention centers (unthinkable), or hold no one, which means “catch and release,” which means letting even more illegal immigrants loose to live in our country illegally.
The only moral and legal option here is to temporarily separate families while the criminal justice system runs its course.
The Left Wants Illegal Aliens to Enjoy Privileges Denied to American Citizens
If an American citizen breaks the law and is funneled into the justice system, he is separated from his family and children. This American citizen is not allowed to keep his family with him in a detention center.
Once again, our media want illegal aliens to enjoy special rights and privileges American citizens do not enjoy.
One more point…
These migrants are guilty of walking minor children through miles and miles of desert with the intent of committing a crime (crossing a border illegally).
If you or I walked a child through miles and miles of desert with the intent of committing a crime, child protective services would take our children away (and should).
Asylum Seekers Not Breaking the Law are Not Being Separated
If you cross the border illegally and claim asylum, you are still a lawbreaker. Regardless of your intent, crossing the border illegally automatically puts you in the criminal justice system, where you will obviously be separated from family.
These asylum seekers are choosing to break the law, are choosing to be separated from family.
Asylum seekers who respect our laws, by turning themselves in at legal points of entry, are not being separated. Over-crowding due to the abuse of this policy might eventually make this impossible, but it is up to Congress to allocate more funds.
Trump Is Correct About the Loophole
In 1997, a consent decree called the Flores Settlement made it illegal for America to hold migrant children for longer than 20 days. Meaning, in order to keep the family together after 20 days of detention, we can either reunite the family by letting them loose to live illegally in America, or we can keep the parent in detention and place the child in a foster home or with a relative who lives in America.
Trump is wisely choosing to do the latter (for a number of moral reasons I will explain later).
A case involving an illegal border crosser not seeking asylum is usually adjudicated before the 20 days are up, which means the family unit is reunited during deportation and no foster care is needed. This, obviously, is the best case scenario.
Those who cross the border illegally and then claim asylum status (an important distinction from asylum seekers who obey the law) are another story, because the asylum process almost always exceeds the 20 days, and this is the law the Trump administration wants changed.
By speeding up the asylum process, the family unit can be reunited faster, either in the deportation process (if asylum is not granted — and this process is frequently abused) or in the resettlement process (if asylum is granted).
Another option is to end the 20-day limit so foster care does not become necessary. Parent and child can remain in the detention centers until the asylum process is settled.
“Reuniting” Families Would Be a Disaster for Countless Children
Again, the only way to “keep a family together” is to allow illegals to pour into our country.
This policy would be a total disaster, especially for the children.
If word gets out that America automatically allows illegal border crossers with small children loose into America just because they have minor children, this would only further incentivize those who engage in the child abuse of dragging children along on the unbelievably dangerous trek across the border — or, even worse, both exploiting them for catch-and-release and then trafficking them after making it into the country.
No one who truly cares about these children wants to further incentivize that kind of abuse.
Obama and Democrats Incentivized This ‘Family Separation’
Until Obama came along, illegal border crossings primarily involved young, single men. Obama incentivized the idea of dragging minor children along on this dangerous journey (where many children are sexually assaulted) through his policy of “catch and release.”
Once word got out that illegals with small children would be let loose into America, the number of children crossing the border exploded.
Again, the last thing decent people want is for the American government to further incentivize the cruel act of bringing small children along on this brutal trip across the border, which is exactly what Trump is hoping to stop with his zero tolerance policy.
Barack Obama Separated Illegal Alien Families, Media Said Nothing
Under Obama, when illegal border crossers were put into the criminal justice system, families were indeed separated. Obama, of course, rarely prosecuted, even though the law calls for it.
Neither Democrats nor the media cared about family separation then, which proves this manufactured and coordinated uproar is only about politics.
The only reason the media suddenly came to care about family separation is as a means to fabricate a controversy, as a tactic to distract voters from three legitimate news stories from last week that benefit Trump: 1) our economy is booming, 2) Trump had a successful summit with North Korea, and 3) the Inspector General report exposed James Comey’s FBI as a swamp of corruption out to exonerate Hillary Clinton and frame Trump.
IMPORTANT:The ONLY Way to Unite Families Is to Release Them into America
Obviously, we cannot have children living in adult detention centers. Obviously, we cannot have adults living in child detention centers. Therefore, the only way to “reunite” these families is to release these illegals into our country.
The media will not tell you this because the media do not want you to know that flooding America with non-citizens is their true agenda. The rich and powerful love to exploit and abuse these individuals, as they can leverage their immigration status for illegally low wages, and politicians are salivating at the chance to bestow voting rights on them — and thus entrench their power.
But when you hear the media call for these families to be reunited, remember that is coded language that means only one thing: releasing illegal aliens into our country with nothing more than a court summons.
Incentivizing the Act of Bringing Minor Children Across the Border Is Evil
The media do not want to inform Americans of one crucial fact: the dangers inherent in crossing the border from Mexico into America, most especially the dangers faced by minor children. Sadly, these dangers too often involve sexual abuse.
Decent people who truly care about these children, like President Trump, want to do everything in their power to end this abuse — either by building a wall, or through this zero tolerance policy that will hopefully curb this abusive practice.
Evil people want these children dragged across the border, want this abuse incentivized by “keeping the family unit together,” because flooding the country with future indebted voters is more important to them than the safety and well-being of small children.
Those Who Come to America Legally Face ‘Family Separation’
Many people who come to America legally from other countries are separated from family. A big part of America’s LEGAL immigration policy involves family separation when one or two family members come over before the rest are legally or financially able.
And so, once again, we have the media and Democrats demanding special treatment for illegal immigrants that legal immigrants do not enjoy. Once again we are incentivizing lawbreaking and treating the line-jumpers better than those who follow the rules.
“Family Reunification” Is an Invitation to Human Traffickers
Because of “catch and release,” because of this dumb and destructive loophole carved out for families, the number of illegal aliens using children to enter the U.S. increased by 315 percent between October 2017 and February 2018.
Trump understands what is happening and this is why he has moved to a zero tolerance policy.
Anything other than zero tolerance only serves as an incentive for human traffickers and other criminals to use these children as their free pass into America.
Incentivizing such a thing is monstrous:
Media Do Not Give a Shit About American Families Separated by Criminal Illegal Aliens
Illegal alien families are choosing to be separated by voluntarily engaging in lawbreaking. These illegal alien families, if they so choose, can stay together, simply by obeying the law.
This is not hard.
Those who do not have a choice in family separation are the legions of American families permanently separated from family members when that family member is killed at the hands of an illegal alien.
As Steve Bannon accurately pointed out over the weekend, “I don’t see the mainstream media and the liberal left embracing the Angel Moms, those people who were permanently separated from their children because of illegal aliens who came over here and committed crimes and killed people. You’re being very selective.”
The word “ideology” first appeared in French. In the 1790s, a gentleman with the wonderful name of Antoine Louis Claude Destutt, Comte de Tracy used it. Marx and Engels in 1846 wrote a manuscript called The German Ideology that never found a publisher till 1932 at the German-English Institute in Moscow.
The word itself circles around the issue of whether our minds have any contact with the world that is. Much is at stake here. If no connection exists between what is out there and our minds, then all we know or can know is our own thoughts. And since our minds have no connection with things, we can formulate whatever world that we would like to have. Everybody lives in his own separate world. Our minds have no reality check.
Revelation is often said to be an “ideology”; that is, an arbitrary system of ideas that have no relation to reality. Ideology and fantasy, however, are not necessarily the same things. Fairy tales and fantasy usually have some grounding in a reality that once was or is yet to be. Ideology is rather a set of ideas imposed on or taken to be reality whereby what is seen and done takes place exclusively within the mind.
Revelation contains an account of actual events with their ultimate explanation rooted in an existing transcendent order. Revelation can be treated as a fantasy, as Tolkien did. But it cannot be considered an ideology. For those who insist that our minds have no relation to things, however, their only option, on hearing it, is to claim that revelation must be just fantasy or another ideology.Revelation does not profess to be skeptical about the existence of an ordered world.
Why bring up any reconsideration of ideology? The world that most people now live in is an ideological world. It is a world whose limits and configuration are assembled from their desires of what they would like to be, not to what is.
A reason for this preference of ideology can be proposed. To be a consistent ideologue, we must first figure out a way to disconnect our minds from things.Much of modern thought from Descartes on has assisted us in this doubt that we can really know things that are. The trouble with existing things, including especially human things, is that, left to themselves, they are already definite kinds of things. They do not themselves configure what they are, but something did.
It is to this latter reality of what things are to which our minds are normally directed and which they know once they have encountered and identified them. Today those who hold revelation to be true are told that they must bring their “ideology” up-to-date. What is meant is that the revelation that is directed to things must be replaced by the ideology that sees no relation between things and mind.
The reason why ideology has come to be legislated into the political reality of most so-called modern democratic states is that this ideology does not conform to reality. What has been rejected is reality. What has taken its place is a construct of the mind. In former times, we spoke of people who rejected a proper way of living as “sinners.” Today, we insist that no sin exists except the claim that “reality” contains an intelligible order that is given to us for our own good, an order that we can discover with our own minds.
We are, as a consequence, forced to lie to ourselves about reality. We have to insist that abortion is not the killing of an actual human life even though every bit of evidence shows that it is. We have to insist that two members of the same sex can “marry,” which is the one thing they cannot possibly do. The list goes on. One denial of an order in things leads to another. We now find it necessary to prevent people from even talking about some radical error that we have made in our understanding of things.
The logical consequence of replacing reality with ideology is that no one has grounds left to correct us in what we do or say. When we evaporate meaning from things, we are in effect insisting that things are not “created,” that they do not find their source in a Creator who is not part of this world, a Creator who, in creating the world, did so with the Logos, the Word, in mind,
It is from the fear of finding this “word” in things that forces modern men and women to fall back on themselves, to deny that anything but themselves exists. The ideological world does not conform to reality. It dare not. It must conform only to itself and strive with all its might to prevent anyone from even hinting that something objective is really out there, something we choose not to know in order that we can, without worry, do what we want.
James V. Schall, S.J., who served as a professor at Georgetown University for thirty-five years, is one of the most prolific Catholic writers in America. Among his recent books are The Mind That Is Catholic, The Modern Age, Political Philosophy and Revelation: A Catholic Reading, Reasonable Pleasures, Docilitas: On Teaching and Being Taught, and Catholicism and Intelligence.
-Many elements of Casa San Diego, an El Cajon facility for unaccompanied children who arrived at the southern border, seem like what one would expect from a boarding school.
There are classrooms, a play area with soccer goals and a medical clinic with superheroes like Wonder Woman, Superman and the Hulk on the walls.
On closer inspection, details about the California-licensed child care facility run by Southwest Key Programs reflect the situation of the children it serves.
It’s surrounded by fencing that is backed by privacy netting, and a sign at the gate warns visitors that it’s under video surveillance 24 hours per day. If someone opens the front door of the facility without first swiping a badge, an alarm blares through the hallway, warning of a potential escape.
According to staff there, about 10 percent of the children held in Casa San Diego were separated from their parents at the border — an issue that has led to massive protests across the country. The rest appeared on their own.
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When a child arrives at Casa San Diego, his teacher asks him to teach his new class how to say “Good morning” in his native language.
On Friday morning, a class of 15 boys recited all of the ways they had learned to greet each other — though most were Spanish speakers, they quickly moved through English, French, Italian, Portuguese, Mam, Arabic and many more before erupting into applause.
Staff process new arrivals in an intake room where they’re given fresh clothes and a hot meal. In a corner of the facility, children can make two 10-minute calls per week from a room with six telephones in red booths. A sign in the case manager room, where staff work to reconnect children with sponsors in the U.S., warns to watch out for signs that children might run away.
A bell hangs by the door for children to ring when they reunite with their sponsor. When the bell rings, the facility bursts into applause.
“This will be the sound of hope for all who take refuge with the family of Southwest Key,” a sign by the bell says in Spanish.
The Department of Health and Human Services Administration for Children and Families maintains about 100 facilities in 17 states for unaccompanied children, according to an agency official. Most children are eventually released to a sponsor, he said, and the average time a child spends in such a facility is 56 days.
Southwest Key operates 27 centers in California, Arizona and Texas. It has three in the San Diego area — Casa San Diego, Casa El Cajon and Casa Lemon Grove. Casa San Diego is the largest with 65 available beds for boys. The other two hold a combined 25 beds for girls.
Escondido rejected Southwest Key’s attempt to open another facility there, which led to a lawsuit that settled for $550,000.
The number of unaccompanied children referred to the Office of Refugee Resettlement tripled between fiscal 2012 and 2017 from 13,625 to 40,810, according to agency data. As a shorter term trend, arrivals dropped about 31 percent in fiscal 2017 from a peak the prior year of 59,170.
Last year, the majority of unaccompanied children in ORR custody were teenage boys with 11 percent under 13 years old. Just under a third of them are girls.
There are currently about 11,351 children in ORR facilities, according to an agency official. That’s about 95 percent of the agency’s current capacity of 11,956 beds though it has another 1,620 on reserve, he said.
An announcement is expected within the next week, he said, about additional facilities for migrant children. That influx from separated families has swelled under a new Trump administration policy that prosecutes everyone, even asylum seekers or parents with children, for crossing the border illegally.
The Trump administration has said that, under law, it has to separate families who cross without authorization. It has pointed to so-called “loopholes” for the situation, specifically a court settlement that restricts the amount of time that children can spend in detention centers to 20 days. That law provides protection for trafficking victims, the asylum process and a Supreme Court ruling that immigrants who for some reason cannot be deported cannot stay in detention indefinitely.
“If members of Congress do not like the laws they pass, they need to change them,” said Jonathan Hoffman, spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, on a recent call with reporters. “They should not ask DHS to look the other way. They should not ask DHS to abdicate our oath to enforce the law.”
Critics point out that there is no law that requires the separation of families and that the Trump administration has chosen to implement new policies at the border regarding families.
“This administration’s policies are resulting in another needless, self-made crisis,” a group of 113 organizations wrote in a letter to the president. “This policy traumatizes families, undermines our country’s once honored commitment to ensuring fairness and protection for those fleeing persecution, and only exacerbates the burdens already overwhelming our immigration system.”
There are three main reasons why the federal government separates children who arrive with family members at the southwest border.
The one that is sending an influx of children to ORR facilities is the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy on illegal border crossings. Though international agreements say that migrants shouldn’t be criminally punished for immigration offenses if they’re seeking asylum, the new policy means that arriving families — many of them Central American asylum seekers — are split so that the parents can go into the federal criminal system.
“It’s not a policy change to enforce the law,” said White House press secretary Sarah Sanders on Thursday when reporters questioned the morality of the family separations caused by the zero-tolerance policy.
Over a two-week time period in May, 658 children were separated from 638 parents because of the zero-tolerance policy, according to a DHS official.
Staff at Casa San Diego said they hadn’t been affected by the influx of now-unaccompanied children because the facility is almost always at capacity. They said the current number of arrivals is typical of the surges they see each summer.
On Tuesday afternoon, in San Diego federal court, Mitchell Dembin, a magistrate judge, accepted 18 guilty pleas from people who had been caught crossing the border illegally in mid-May. He sentenced them to time served — about three and a half weeks — and waived payment of fines.
They would then be transferred to Immigration and Customs Enforcement to handle their immigration cases in civil court.
Immigration officials split up just under two percent of families at the border between October 2016 and February of this year, according to DHS. That was before Sessions implemented the “zero-tolerance” policy of prosecuting illegal border crossings.
In some cases, a medical emergency meant that the parent needed to be hospitalized. For others, officials suspected that the adult was not actually related to the child and was using the minor to try to avoid being detained.
A DHS official cited a Brazilian smuggling ring operating near Laredo, Texas, that routinely used fake birth certificates to bring in 172 people with false family members.
Four men from Central America said that ICE used this reasoning in November to wrongfully separate them from their actual children.
A Congolese woman became a named plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union against the federal government after her then-six-year-old daughter was taken from her when she asked for asylum at the San Ysidro port of entry in November. After months apart, a DNA test proved that she was the mother, and the two were reunited in Chicago.
According to DHS, 237 of the 1,768 cases of family separation — or about 13 percent — between October 2016 and February of this year were because immigration officials couldn’t verify the relationship between adult and child.
ICE also separates parents from children at the border if they determine that the adult’s criminal history means that they cannot be released into the community. That’s what happened to Maria, a Salvadorian woman who came to the San Diego border with a recent migrant caravan.
“ERO officers were unable to place the family into an ICE Family Residential Center based on Ms. Serrano’s criminal history in El Salvador,” said Lauren Mack, a spokeswoman for ICE.
Maria, who preferred not to use her last name because of her pending asylum case, denied having criminal convictions in her home country. ICE declined to reveal the specifics of the criminal history that caused her to be separated from her two sons, ages seven and two.
Maria is at Otay Mesa Detention Center while her two boys, Antonio and Armando, are at an ORR facility in New York. She talks with them by phone for about 20 minutes on Thursdays, she said.
She vividly recalled the trauma of border officials telling her she had 10 minutes to say goodbye to her children.
“My older son knew they wanted to separate us, and he listened to everything and started to cry,” Maria said in Spanish. “‘No Mami,’ he said. ‘I don’t want them to take me away. They should let me stay here. I don’t want them to separate us.’”
Then her youngest, without understanding why, also started to cry, she said.
She left El Salvador in January. Traveling with two young boys to the U.S. border was “complicated,” she said.
“I had to do it to save the lives of my kids. Everything was so that we would have a better life,” she said. “I never thought that this would happen here.”
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Mike Huckabee: Where’s the Outrage Over Permanently Separating Families in Abortions?
NATIONAL MICAIAH BILGER JUN 18, 2018 | 3:15PM WASHINGTON, DC
Political commentator Mike Huckabee addressed the latest immigration outrage Sunday by asking why there is not similar anger about the permanent separation of families through abortion.
“I don’t like immigrant children being temporarily separated from parents, but where is outrage over PERMANENT separation of a child and mother when the baby is ripped apart in the mother’s womb by knives of abortionists?” the former governor wrote Sunday on Twitter.
Several pro-abortion groups — including NARAL and Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion chain in America — have been blasting the Trump administration over allegations that it is separating immigrant children from their parents. The wide-spread outrage speaks to the vital importance of keeping families together, but, as Hucakbee said, pro-abortion groups are responsible for permanently separating hundreds of thousands of mothers and fathers from their children every year. Yet, there is very little outrage in the mainstream media about their deadly abortion work.
Many pro-life and pro-abortion supporters alike have expressed extreme concerns about the separation of refugee and immigrant families.
Gov. Huckabee’s tweet came as Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) pointed to “credible” media reports, in a letter to Nielsen and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar dated June 16, “describing instances where parents and children seeking asylum at a port of entry have been separated,” reports CNSNews.com.
According to CNSNews, “[i]n a series of tweets over the weekend, DHS Secretary Nielsen wrote:
‘We do not have a policy of separating families at the border. Period.
‘You are not breaking the law by seeking asylum at a port of entry.
‘For those seeking asylum at ports of entry, we have continued the policy from previous Administrations and will only separate if the child is in danger, there is no custodial relationship between ‘family’ members, or if the adult has broken a law.
‘This misreporting by Members, press & advocacy groups must stop. It is irresponsible and unproductive. As I have said many times before, if you are seeking asylum for your family, there is no reason to break the law and illegally cross between ports of entry.’”
Ten people who’d been arrested on murder charges were nonetheless granted permission to remain and work in the U.S. under the Obama-era DACA amnesty, according to new government data released Monday.
Thirty-one “Dreamers” had rape charges on their records, nearly 500 had been accused of sex crimes, and more than 2,000 had been arrested for drunken driving — yet were approved for DACA status.
All told, 53,000 people who have been approved for DACA — 7 percent of the total — had a criminal record when the government granted them status. Nearly 8,000 racked up criminal charges after they’d been approved, according to the data from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
DACA turned six years old on Friday and is back in the news as the House of Representatives begins to debate whether to grant a broad amnesty to Dreamers, and as courts across the country grapple with the legality of the 2012 program.
The new data will likely affect both the legislative and court action, since it gives some indications of the levels of screening, and waivers, the government is willing to offer for Dreamers who apply.
All told more than 888,000 people have applied for DACA status over the years. Of those, more than 770,000 were approved. Nearly 67,000 were rejected — and of those, about 31 percent had criminal records, the data show.
The new data looks at arrests.
DACA’s eligibility requirements, though, were written to focus on convictions.
Under the rules laid out by the Obama administration, which are unchanged under President Trump, someone with a felony conviction, a “significant” misdemeanor or three non-significant misdemeanors was supposed to be ineligible.
“You have to have a conviction. You can be arrested a whole lot of times and get DACA,” USCIS Director Francis Cissna told Fox News.
Many traffic offenses, including driving without a license, don’t count against someone applying for DACA.
In theory, any criminal history at all, even if it didn’t cross the conviction thresholds, could have led to a discretionary denial. But the number of people approved with lengthy records suggests that didn’t always happen.
Two dozen Dreamers won DACA despite having more than 10 arrests on their record. More than 1,200 others had been arrested between five and nine times.
The new data didn’t break down the arrests or approvals by year so it’s not clear how many Dreamers with major arrests were approved during the Obama administration and how many came under Mr. Trump
The House this week is slated to debate an immigration bill that would grant citizenship rights to those in the DACA program, as well as perhaps 1 million other illegal immigrants.
The bill, like the DACA program, relies on convictions rather than arrests, so the Dreamers with more than 10 arrests and those with rape, murder and sex crime arrests could be eligible.
The GOP bill also specifically allows illegal immigrants convicted of smuggling people into the U.S. — a felony charge — to claim citizenship.
The reason for that exception is not clear, though smuggling cartels had increasingly seemed to be recruiting DACA recipients as drivers to smuggle illegal immigrants, judging by a spate of arrests earlier this year.
In one case Alejandro Castro, guilty of smuggling in San Diego, was sentenced to time served.
The crime carries a penalty of up to 10 years.
In Arizona, Saul Rodea Castro pleaded guilty and was sentenced to time served for smuggling four men from Mexico. He was the pickup man for a cartel that had arranged for the Mexicans to be smuggled across the border, at a cost of up to $8,000 per person.
In Texas DACA recipient David Luna-Martinez is awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty in April to carrying two illegal immigrants from Mexico for a smuggler.
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ABYSSUS ABYSSUM INVOCAT / DEEP CALLS TO DEEP 
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