Kiriakou writes: "An eight-year-old Guatemalan boy died in the custody of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) late Christmas Eve. His death came only two weeks after the death from dehydration of a seven-year-old Guatemalan girl also in the custody of CBP."
Customs and Border Protection officer. (photo: Getty)
A Dead Child on Christmas Eve
27 December 18
n eight-year-old Guatemalan boy died in the custody of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) late Christmas Eve. His death came only two weeks after the death from dehydration of a seven-year-old Guatemalan girl also in the custody of CBP. The Congressional Hispanic Caucus is demanding an investigation into what it calls CBP�s �systemic failure� to protect the health and welfare of children in CBP facilities. Apologies and promises of reforms aren�t going to cut it. Things have to change. But the problem is actually worse than what the major news outlets are telling us.
Since the surge of unaccompanied minors arriving in the United States began in 2014, according to ProPublica, migrant children have filed hundreds of police reports documenting sexual assaults inside children�s shelters, which have received $4.5 billion in funding for housing and security services. Most of those sexual assaults have been at the hands of guards and other CBP employees. Federal investigators warn further that the Trump administration has quietly waived fingerprint background checks of staff members and had allowed �dangerously few� mental health counselors at a notorious tent camp housing 2,800 children in Texas.
ProPublica wrote recently, �Just five days after he reached the United States, a 15-year-old Honduran boy awoke in his Tucson, Arizona, immigrant shelter � to find a youth care worker in his room, tickling his chest and stomach. When he asked the man, who was 46, what he was doing, the man left. But he returned two more times, rubbing the teen�s penis through his clothing and then trying to reach under his boxers. �I know what you want. I can give you anything you need,� said the worker, who was later convicted of molestation.�
Similarly, �In 2017, a 17-year-old from Honduras was recovering from surgery at the shelter when he woke up to find a male staff member standing by his bed. �You have it very big,� the man said, referring to the teen�s penis. Days later, that same employee brushed the teen with his hand while he was playing video games. When the staff member approached him again, the boy locked himself in a bathroom.�
Even worse, just a few months ago, a youth care worker at one Arizona shelter was arrested for molesting eight boys over the course of a year. The employee, Levian Pacheco, pleaded guilty to 11 sex offenses and had been working without a full background check. During the course of the investigation, he also admitted to being HIV-positive and to having forced himself on the boys.
ProPublica says that the hundreds of police reports of sexual molestation of migrant children come from at least 70 of the 100 detention facilities around the country where the children are being held and involve children as young as six. (The facilities are run by both Customs and Border Protection and the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement.) One child psychiatrist interviewed by ProPublica said that �If you�re a predator, it�s a gold mine. You have full access and you have kids that have already had this history of being victimized.�
The abuse of helpless, detained migrant children is not new, unfortunately. But the Trump administration�s harsh policy of separating children from their parents and of detaining literally every child trying to enter the country as an asylum seeker has increased pressure on the facilities, which are hard-pressed to provide adequate staffing for children, many of whom are already fleeing from personal trauma and who now find themselves in legal and personal limbo.
Goodness knows that we have a lot of problems in this country. Goodness knows that we have a president who is not engaged in policy except as it affects his own wellbeing. But we�re talking about children here. We�re talking about the safety and security of minors who are unable to fend for themselves. Republicans certainly can be opposed to undocumented migration and still not turn their backs on children. And Democrats can insist that money be appropriated to ensure the safety and physical wellbeing of these same children without being accused of being �weak on illegal immigration.� Forget the politics. We can�t lose our humanity.
John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act � a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration's torture program.
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In all of the cases I could find of cops being convicted and sent to prison for murder, the victim was white. But none of them were killed in prison.
Nobody will do any research on it, just keep on quoting Anderson Cooper and the grinning -- excuse me, GRIEVING -- parents about "Sandy Hook".
It's just sickening.
http://www.sandyhookjustice.com/
You can't rely on government officials or propaganda organs like CNN to be telling the truth since 9/11 and Saddam Hussein's WMDs. They have an agenda and it is not in the best interests of your liberty, truth, or justice to accept uncritically the version of events they are propagating.
My wife was a pediatric critical care nurse in Oakland, CA for almost 2 decades, and the thought of all those children, shot and bleeding out without any emergency medical professionals being permitted to try to save some is both heartbreaking and shocking.
Finally, more than an hour after police knew the shooter was dead, the Medical Examiner's Staff went in and simply declared each and every one of them dead.
The police knew the shooter was dead within 10 minutes of first arriving on the scene. The school was taken off lockdown and the children allegedly evacuated within a half hour. And yet, medical workers were not granted access.
That is troubling, especially to anyone who has experience in emergency medical care.
The police considered the scene secure enough to let hundreds of children walk down the halls, out of the building, through the parking lot and down the street, and yet refused to let medical staff in.
At the Aurora Theater scene, EMTs were allowed in even while the police were searching for the shooter's accomplice that many witness/survivo rs reported seeing.
For that matter, why are there no photos or videos of these hundreds of children walking to the Fire Station?
We all saw the one famous photo of a dozen or so kids in the parking lot, but that's all.
"Why do Americans always" believe whatever the corporate media tell them to believe?
Thank you!
I have another question. Why do so many of these comments sections have comment rating numbers that don't show how many pluses and minuses, but only the running total?
Totally ignoring the police gang murder of an innocent, unarmed man who was not breaking the law--and the fixed grand jury that refused to indict the killer cops.
And ignoring that raging injustice could set off extreme anger.
When the grand jury refused to act, I knew they were going to get cops hurt or killed. And they did.
Time to face the music. Bad cops have ignited national rage.
And NYPD and Giuliani, don't castigate the public or protestors as the enemy. You are just making the situation worse--and shredding any semblance of respect we once had for you.
fredboy, your posting is a good example of what our problem is in this country.In the 2nd paragraph you say he wasn't breaking te law but he had multiple priors for the same infraction...se lling loosies. And for the grand jury to act, they would had to find them at fault and they didn't.
Then you call it a raging injustice. Well if you start with that extreme anger, and the grand jury didn't, it follows that you would presume injustice and would only see what you wanted to see. And calling it racism stokes the flames even higher. I could ask why there isn't any uproar over Dillon Taylor, an unarmed white boy shot & killed by a black cop in Utah. That cop wasn't indicted either. The real problem isn't race but that we put guns in the hands of cops and depend on them to keep the law using their own judgement. You can mitigate this problem but it will not disappear because of the poor gun control in this country. And cops don't take chances. I remember a plumber being shot & killed by police when he crawled out from under a house where he was working. OOPS wrong guy.
My father fought against fascism in WWII. I'm sure as hell not going to start supporting it now.
Since there weren't, you're just hyping your fantasy.
These are not a "recent spate of killings." I find no evidence that the rate of police killing people (specifically black males) has increased this year. For some reason, the corporate media has made them "news" this year, and that is an interesting phenomena.
The Zimmerman case was not a police killing. Still, though many of us feel that the case was bungled, and justice was not served, there were not the types of protests you berate after the verdict.
I agree with your comments about actual trials but disagree that people would be satisfied with anything other than conviction. I brought up the Zimmerman case because protesters are still calling it no justice (as you just did). I'm not sure what you mean by "hyping my fantasy." All I said was that people are calling for justice but will not be satisfied with anything less than conviction and they should say what they mean.
That is hyping your fantasy.
They are trained to shot and kill. I think it is time to reevaluate that training along with teaching them not to draw their gun unnecessarily. If they are too scared to be in their assigned location without a gun in hand, they should not be cops.
The roots of the problems here go back generations, not months, and tracing those roots would take more time and space than is allowed here. It comes from the divisiveness inherent in the 'us versus them' that is the core of the issues at this time. And the disintegration of the application of the law even handedly to all citizens, regardless of color or economic status.
What most of the people are missing, who line up with the position that the police are justified in shooting blacks - or anyone, for that matter - when they are unarmed, is that they are afraid of the real possibility that if this 'us versus them' mentality continues, it will not neglect them, either. They won't be immune to such sanctioned violence. This is the potential end result of the degradation of our rights under the Constitution and Bill or Rights. These rights of citizens apply to all of us; white, black, anyone - or they can be abrogated at will by anyone who has been given the power to do so. As the police are who swore their oaths to 'defend and protect'; as the NSA, CIA, FBI, SCOTUS, Congress, and the Administration swore the same oaths.
This divisiveness enhanced by 'security' excuses that override the oaths, will destroy our democracy. Is doing so. Remember.
Wow. Ugly. But reality of history often looks that way when brought into the present.
And who was it that first said that those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it?
Any aliens who show up in invisible starships to assess humanity's suitability to be allowed out into the rest of the galaxy would most likely conclude that we should be contained on this one planet to see if we manage to avoid self-destructio n from sheer willful stupidity. That's assuming such aliens don't have a vested interest in helping us along to said self-destructio n. Who knows?
Also must cops are veterans taught to shoot first and think later in Basic Training video games