By the time President Trump stopped the separations on June 20, nearly 3,000 children had been separated from their parents.

Dr. Scott Allen and Dr. Pamela McPherson (right) being honored by Physicians for Human Rights in 2019.
Photo by Michael Loccisano/Getty Images

Two years ago, doctors working for the Department of Homeland Security spoke out against the family separations ([link removed]) that happened as a result of the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy at the border in the summer of 2018. By the time President Trump stopped the separations on June 20, nearly 3,000 children had been separated from their parents.

In a letter to Congress ([link removed]) that July, Dr. Scott Allen and Dr. Pamela McPherson wrote that the separations were “an act of state sponsored child abuse whose specific consequences will significantly threaten the children’s health and safety.”

Now, Allen and McPherson are speaking up again, this time against the administration’s plan to separate parents and children held at family detention centers. Last month, Judge Dolly M. Gee, who presides over the decades-old landmark Flores case that safeguards the rights of migrant children in U.S. custody, ruled that children held in the country’s three family detention centers must be released ([link removed]) promptly, either with their parents or to relatives living in the U.S.

In her order, she criticized the Trump administration’s haphazard compliance with coronavirus guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “The family residential centers are on fire and there is no more time for half measures,” Gee, who is usually measured in the tone of her court orders, wrote in her ruling.

But Gee’s ruling only requires the release of children ([link removed]) . That means that Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which runs these centers, has the discretion to continue detaining parents while their children are freed, ultimately leading to more family separations.

“In the face of threats to health and life, families who present no threat to the community should be released from detention,” Allen and McPherson, along with fellow whistleblower Dr. Josiah Rich, wrote for USA Today ([link removed]) . “There is no legitimate argument to justify placing families at further risk of harm. This unimaginable — and intentional — cruelty must stop. It’s well past time to end the detention of immigrant families. Another round of family separation is not the answer.”

Meanwhile, attorneys representing a few families in detention filed a motion ([link removed]) that criticized ([link removed]) lead Flores attorney Peter Schey for working with the government to create a “voluntary waiver” that would give parents the option to remain detained indefinitely with their children, or allow their children to be released to a sponsor.

“How a protocol would work is being discussed,” Schey told a reporter from Prism ([link removed]) . “The final decision will be made by the court, not the parties.”
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** DEVELOPMENTS WE’RE WATCHING
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Trump signs order to omit undocumented immigrants from being counted in U.S. Census. Under the new directive, signed by the president on Tuesday, millions of people ([link removed]) would be excluded from the once-a-decade census, meaning that Democratic states with large undocumented communities would likely lose House seats. The order reverses “the longstanding policy of counting everyone regardless of citizenship or legal status,” The New York Times reports ([link removed]) . “There used to be a time when you could proudly declare, ‘I am a citizen of the United States,’” Trump said in a statement. “But now, the radical left is trying to erase the existence of this concept and conceal the number of illegal aliens in our country.” But it’s unclear how undocumented immigrants would be identified.
Census forms were distributed in March and, thanks to a Supreme Court ruling ([link removed]) , did not ask respondents about their citizenship status. The order will likely be challenged in court, according to NPR ([link removed]) .

Whistleblowers speak out about conditions inside a Louisiana detention center. Two officers working at the Richwood Correctional Center, run by contractor LaSalle Corrections, detailed the facility’s attempts to downplay the threat of the virus and conceal a growing outbreak that led to the deaths of two guards ([link removed]) in late April. The watchdog group Government Accountability Project, which is representing the whistleblowers, sent a letter ([link removed]) to Congress outlining their concerns, according to Mother Jones ([link removed]) . One officer reported that LaSalle ordered him to manipulate the temperature of sick detainees
who had a temperature of 102 degrees by blasting the air conditioner and “freezing them out” so they could board deportation flights. They also provided accounts of guards who were waiting for test results but forced to report to work. LaSalle and ICE, they said, also provided no protocols on how to transfer detainees with COVID-19, and sick detainees in quarantine were not retested before being returned to their dorms.

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** 3 THINGS WE’RE READING
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1. Judges ordered ICE to release detainees in light of the pandemic. Instead, the agency transferred immigrants to other facilities. (Daily Beast ([link removed]) )

In response to lawsuits filed on behalf of immigrant detainees, judges in Florida and Arizona ordered immigration authorities in April to release detainees who were at greater risk of COVID-19 complications. Instead of complying, the agency transferred immigrants held in those two states to ICA Farmville, where medical staff and employees warned ICE not to take in new detainees. Now the facility is the site of the largest COVID-19 outbreak amongst ICE detention centers, with at least 268 testing positive for the virus.

The kicker: Former employees say the coronavirus has exposed longstanding failings at ICA Farmville—namely, a company that values making money over protecting either detainees or its staff. At least 22 guards have contracted the coronavirus; others have responded to desperate, panicked and agitated detainees with at least three incidents of violence between June 20 and July 1. “There was no reason to intake any more detainees,” one former employee said, “but it’s all about profit.”

2. Black people, many of them immigrants, have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19 in Maine, accounting for a quarter of the state’s cases. (The Washington Post ([link removed]) )

Immigrants and refugees make up much of the state’s workforce, “picking blueberries, packing meat and tending to the elderly far from the fancy resorts on Vacationland’s rocky coast.” Though Maine has one of the lowest rates of COVID-19 in the country, its Black residents have been severely impacted by the virus, “accounting for approximately 23 percent of the cases in a state where they are less than 2 percent of the population.”

The kicker: Workers at a red-brick factory called American Roots had to decide amid a pandemic whether to come back to work. Instead of the usual sweatshirts and knit caps, they would churn out masks to protect front-line workers from the novel coronavirus. Or they could take the safer route: Stay home and collect unemployment. Almost all were immigrants from Africa or the Middle East, and workers said none of them flinched when they gathered on the factory floor that morning in March. Everyone voted to keep stitching. “I’m not scared,” said Maria Lutina, 42, an asylum seeker from Angola and the factory’s head stitcher who helped design the masks. “Americans, they need it.”

3. A San Francisco community-led effort is working to address Latino workers’ fears of COVID-19 testing. (Los Angeles Times ([link removed]) )

Latinos make up a large portion of the essential workforce in California. They’re unable to work from home, placing them at risk of the virus. Many fear that getting a positive COVID-19 result could cost them their job. But a community-led task force in San Francisco’s Mission District has advocated for a citywide wage replacement program that would encourage workers sick with the coronavirus to recover at home while still getting a paycheck.

The kicker: At least once a week in the mornings, Elsa Hernandez walks the mile from her apartment to the Mission Language and Vocational School, sometimes falling in line behind hundreds of other Latinos picking up groceries from the Mission Food Hub. But on a recent Thursday afternoon, she stood in a different line near the hub. Wearing a mask, her red glasses propped on her head, Hernandez, 44, a longtime resident of San Francisco’s Mission District, took a COVID-19 test under a tent, while dozens of others waited their turn. “We, as Latinos, don’t have the opportunity to work from home,” said Hernandez, a housekeeper who was seeking her second test in part because the pandemic has hit her community so hard.
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