The US is quietly opening shelters for babies and young kids. One has 12 children and no mothers.
The federal government is quietly expanding its use of shelters to house infants, toddlers and other young asylum-seekers. One Phoenix facility housed 12 children ages 5 and under, we have learned, some as young as 3 months old, all without their mothers.
As part of this expansion, the government has designated three facilities to house newborns and unaccompanied teen mothers. Records we obtained indicate a dozen children arrived at Child Crisis Arizona starting in mid-June, after it garnered a $2.4 million contract to house unaccompanied children through January 2022.
The kids, some of whom entered the facility as recently as Thursday and hail from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Ecuador and Brazil, each are living in Child Crisis without a parent.
It’s unclear where the children’s parents are. Child Crisis didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. The Office of Refugee Resettlement told us on Friday that it’s working on a response to our questions about the whereabouts of the children’s parents.
The revelations come as the government draws widespread and growing protest over the treatment of infants, children and adults in its care. As advocates and attorneys monitor overcrowding and inhumane conditions at existing locations, new government-financed facilities, run by three agencies within two federal departments, continue to pop up around the country.
Read the story.
The fallout from ‘To Protect and Slur’
In a multipart investigation released last month, we identified hundreds of current and former police officers from across the U.S. who were members of extremist Facebook groups. These groups contained blatant racism, Islamophobia and misogyny; some had names that showcased their bias: “Americans Against Islamic Filth” or “The White Privilege Club.”
Then, on July 1, ProPublica released a bombshell report showing that a private Border Patrol Facebook group with roughly 9,500 members also was a hotbed for racist and vulgar posts. Members discussed throwing burritos at Latino members of Congress; posted an explicit, digitally manipulated image of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; and openly mocked the deaths of migrant children.
Last week, The Intercept reported that several Border Patrol supervisors were part of the group, including, at one point, the agency’s chief, Carla Provost. Provost had responded to the revelation of the group’s existence by condemning its content as “completely inappropriate,” warning that “any employees found to have violated our standards of conduct will be held accountable.”
Meanwhile, the fallout from our reporting continues. On June 18, The Chicago Reporter found that one local lieutenant who had posted anti-Islamic and anti-transgender content had been named in two misconduct cases that resulted in a total payout of $118,000. The lieutenant, Richard Moravec, also has 70 complaints filed against him – more than 99 percent of Chicago police officers, according to the Citizens Police Data Project.
And in New Jersey, corrections officer Joseph Bonadio apologized for the plethora of anti-Islamic content he had posted on his own page, including one post calling the Prophet Muhammad a “goat FUCKER.” Our own reporting showed that Bonadio was a member of the Islamophobic Facebook group “Infidel Brotherhood Worldwide.” He continues to post anti-LGBTQ content on his own page, according to NJ.com’s report.
We’re staying on this story – and making information about police available to local reporters. If you’d like to dig into the issue in your community, please consider joining our Reveal Reporting Networks.
Silencing science
This week, we’re revisiting an episode from 2018 that examines the Trump administration’s efforts to silence scientists who are trying to study the dire consequences of global climate change. As an update to the episode, we’ve released an interactive map that calculates projected flooding at a collection of national parks across the U.S.
More:
- Read: Wipeout: Human role in climate change removed from science report
- Read: Democrats ask Interior to investigate climate change edits
- Read: Zinke grilled about edited science report
- Read: National parks report on climate change finally released, uncensored
- Read: Top Interior officials ordered parks to end science policy, emails show
- Read: National park officials were told climate change was ‘sensitive.’ So they removed it from a key planning report
- Read: Zinke’s unscientific reign over 500 million acres of public land
- Listen: Behind Trump’s energy dominance
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