ZERO TOLERANCE – THE ORLANDO TIMES

By Jalessa Castillo Due to the threat of drug cartels, extreme poverty, gang violence, and other safety concerns, tens of thousands of parents and children have crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally in recent years. Recently, former policies, the Trump administration, and other factors have led to a catastrophe that is the cause of over 2,300 children being separated from their …

WHAT’S HAPPENING WITH DETAINED MIGRANT CHILDREN? A PATCHWORK SYSTEM MAKES IT HARD TO FIND OUT. – TAMPA BAY TIMES

By Alex Leary and Steve Bousquet June 29, 2018 Florida’s key role in the national detention system wasn’t publicly known until news broke in mid-June that more than 1,000 children were housed in a dorm-like former job training center in Homestead, including at least 70 kids who were taken from their families. No one noticed. Five months ago, the federal government sent an …

FLORIDA ATTORNEYS LEND SUPPORT TO SEPARATED IMMIGRANT FAMILIES – DAILY BUSINESS REVIEW

By Catherine Wilson  June 27, 2018  Several Florida law firms have pledged to help reunify separated immigrant families and volunteered to represent asylum seekers on the U.S.-Mexico border. Akerman chairman and CEO David I. Spector and Bilzin Sumberg chairman John Sumberg are among the law firm leaders who joined a coalition effort by dozens of law firms nationally offering pro bono representation …

WE MUST NOT FORGET DETAINED MIGRANT CHILDREN – THE NEW YORKER

By Edwidge Danticat June 26, 2018 One of my earliest childhood memories is of being torn away from my mother. I was four years old and she was leaving Haiti for the United States to join my father, who’d emigrated two years earlier, to escape both a dictatorship and poverty. My mother was entrusting my younger brother and me to the care …

SEPARATED IMMIGRANT CHILDREN ARE ALL OVER THE U.S. NOW, FAR FROM PARENTS WHO DON’T KNOW WHERE THEY ARE – THE WASHINGTON POST

By Maria Sacchetti, Kevin Sieff and Marc Fisher June 24, 2018 Their mothers are missing, their fathers far away. They get pizza, maybe cold cuts. They are exhausted; they cannot sleep. There are other children around, but they had never seen those kids before, and those kids are crying or screaming or rocking or spreading the feeling that everything is not okay. The children …

TRUMP’S EXECUTIVE ORDER CREATES A NEW BORDER CRISIS – THE NEW YORKER

On Wednesday afternoon, President Trump traded one border crisis for another: instead of separating immigrant children from their parents, it appears that the U.S. government will now detain moms and dads indefinitely alongside their sons and daughters. New questions will now be asked. Can Trump really get the courts to dismantle the Flores agreement, a legal settlement from 1997 which enshrined …