Friday, June 22, 2018
'Going through hell' at the border: parents split from children tell of anguish
Oliver Laughland
For five long weeks Evelin* had no idea where her two children were. She was apprehended with them at the US border on 19 May – after fleeing violence in Guatemala – and her family was ripped apart under the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” immigration policy.
Evelin was prosecuted and sent to the Don Hutto immigration detention centre in central Texas. Her two children – Eddy, 17, and Lilian, nine – were left behind at a processing centre and then flown to foster care in Grand Rapids, Michigan. They were held in separate homes. Lilian cried for her mother all the time; she remembers and relives being in detention in Texas, where she said she was once woken up at 3am, pulled by her hair, and forced to shower.
Evelin, over a thousand miles away, suffered migraines and was sick with anxiety. “She went through hell,” said Elmer, recounting his family’s story publicly to the Guardian for the first time. “[My wife] has high blood pressure. She was so sick. She was devastated.”
Elmer, who is also seeking asylum in the US, had fled Guatemala two years ago, after he received death threats from a local gang, and said his wife and children fled after their lives were also put in danger.
“They wanted to kill me and the kids,” he said.
Two days ago the children were reunited with their father in Massachusetts, after their case was picked up by an advocacy group in the Texas capital, Austin. He broke down in tears when they were reunited at Logan airport in Boston. But Evelin remains detained.
“I hope that maybe she’ll come soon,” Elmer said, his voice cracking. “I’m hoping that the United States will help me, help my family because all we want is to live together.”
Their story is just one in an mass of suffering in Donald Trump’s policy of forced family separation, which was abruptly halted on Wednesday after international outcry and bipartisan criticism.
And in some ways this Guatemalan family are luckier than others. Thousands of children remain separated from their families, many already dispersed to locations across the country. Here in south Texas, where the winding Rio Grande separates the US from Mexico, advocates and lawyers warn that some parents could be deported before they are reunited with their families. There remains little, if any, coordination between government agencies to bring families back together. Officials are also struggling to determine which elements of Trump’s “zero-tolerance” immigration policy – that attempts to criminally prosecute as many migrants illegally crossing the border as possible – they can continue to implement without separating families. “There is no plan for reunification. They have no idea how they’re going to do this,” said Michael Bochenek, a senior counsel to the children’s rights division of Human Rights Watch.
Bochenek was among a delegation of legal observers at two customs detention facilities in McAllen last week. He witnessed a girl between the ages of two and four, separated from her aunt, being tended to by older, unaccompanied migrant children who were forced to change the toddler’s diapers themselves as no customs staff intervened.
Many of the pro-bono attorneys here are only just coming to terms with what they have witnessed over the past few months.
Efrén Olivares has led a team of lawyers from the South Texas Civil Rights Project to document every separated family member prosecuted through the federal magistrates court in McAllen. Out of about 150 defendants in court each day – all charged with the minor crime of illegally entering the US – about 30 were parents separated from their children. Among them Olivares documented a Salvadoran mother separated from her brain-damaged pre-teenage son; a Guatemalan mother so distraught to be taken away from her daughter, she threatened suicide multiple times; and another mother who was separated from her teenage child who had survived rape. “Many of them break down, crying halfway through the interview,” he said. “A father told me that if he’s deported without his son, his son is going to die of sadness. I was holding back tears when he told me that.”
On Thursday, there was mixed evidence that Trump’s executive order to end the separations had taken full effect. While federal prosecutors in McAllen dismissed charges against 17 parents who had been separated from their children, their counterparts, 59 miles away in Brownsville, exercised no such discretion. Jenifer Johana Fuentes-Maradiaga, 18, stood before Judge Ignacio Torteya III as the court heard how she had been separated from her 14-year-old brother. They travelled together from Guatemala, but had been apprehended by customs officials two days before and she had not seen him since. She was prosecuted and pleaded guilty.
These mass plea hearings, like in McAllen, occur on a rigid timetable. At 10am every morning in Brownsville about 50 migrants are led into court, shackled at the ankles, handcuffed and chained across their backs. Court sources told the Guardian that about five each day are separated parents.
En masse, the defendants are asked to raise their right hands – impossible given the restraints they are in– and promise to tell the truth. Almost all of them plead guilty.
On Tuesday, just hours before the Trump administration withdrew from the UN human rights council, Ramón Villata, a migrant from El Salvador begged Judge Torteya to reunite him with his two-year-old son Milton. “I want to be with my family again,” he told the judge as pounding rain outside led to flash flooding across the Rio Grande valley. “For the way they separated us, I want to be reunited again. That is all.”
Although the court had instructed lawyers for the government to locate the boy, Judge Torteya was not able to offer any guarantees. “Hopefully the authorities will reunite you with your family as soon as possible,” he told Villata, before the defendant, who had pled guilty and was sentenced to time served, was led out of court. Advocates now fear that the Trump administration’s alternative to family separation may be equally harsh. The justice department has launched a bidto alter a federal court settlement that limits the time migrant families can be detained together, in a bid to usher in an era of indefinite family detention. This harsh model of deterrence has been implemented by the Australian government during a crackdown on asylum seekers entering the country by boat. It has been described as institutional torture by the country’s former chief immigration psychologist.
But hardline punitive measures like these are unlikely to dissuade desperate asylum seekers, fleeing some of the world’s most violent communities in Central America, from making the journey. At the Catholic Charities respite center in McAllen, groups of families recently released from detention come together for a meal before they are dispatched to locations around the country to reunite with family living in the US. Juan Carlos, a 29-year-old Guatemalan who did not want to give his last name, said he knew about the zero-tolerance policy before he fled with his seven-year-old daughter, Karla, earlier in June. “It was a risk,” he admitted. “But life is hard anyway.”
Juan Carlos had begged customs officials to stay with Karla after they were apprehended, and the pair stayed in a windowless detention centre for a week before they were released together, without criminal charges being filed. “It was so difficult, but I had faith in God,” he said, pointing to the Bible he keeps in a small pouch.
Karla, clutching a Minnie Mouse doll dressed in a pink polka dot skirt, beamed.
“She wanted to study in an American school,” said Juan Carlos. “She watches Disney cartoons and dreams about being in America.”
He kissed her on the cheek. Their bus to New York was to depart in a few hours.
UK’s parliamentary group calls for an end to publication of hate content against Pakistani minorities
UK’s All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Pakistani Minorities has called for an end to publication of hate content against Pakistani minorities. For this reason, the group called on the Department for International Development to make sure that the aid given by UK is used efficaciously to end publication of textbooks that contain hate content against non-Muslim Pakistanis.
For this purpose the group passed a resolution during its recent meeting. The participants also discussed the education crisis hovering over the minorities in Pakistan. Jim Shannon, the Democratic Unionist Party’s MP who chairs this group, said: “these vulnerable and marginalised communities” should not be “ignored by the Pakistani and British governments”.
In this regard, the group urged the Government of Pakistan and the international agencies to give priority to the minority population in Pakistan. “Poverty, prejudice, and social unease are depriving a generation of young people from taking their proper place in Pakistan’s future because of the poor access to good education,” group’s chairperson said.
“We need to ensure that these vulnerable and marginalized communities are not ignored by the Pakistani and British governments, and that a part of billions of pounds of the UK taxpayers’ aid sent to Pakistan through the Department for International Development is used to ensure that students from the religious minorities are not left behind on the path to development.”
In this regard, a spokesman for Department for International Development stated: “The UK Government does not fund the production of textbooks in Pakistan, and we strongly condemn all forms of incitement to violence. UK aid is supporting provincial governments to improve school curriculum, and promotes values of inclusion, diversity, and religious tolerance.
“In a country where two-thirds of women cannot read or write, our support is crucial to giving the most vulnerable the skills they need to lift themselves out of poverty, and we have helped educate nine million primary-school children since 2011. A more prosperous and inclusive country will improve stability and security in Pakistan and the UK — which is firmly in our national interests.”
https://www.christiansinpakistan.com/uks-parliamentary-group-calls-for-an-end-to-publication-of-hate-content-against-pakistani-minorities/
Pakistan’s human sex trafficking - Rape without end
Zubeida Mustafa
OF all the crimes committed against children — especially the daughters of the poor in Pakistan — the most horrendous is the trafficking of girls. It is more agonising than rape. The sex trade amounts to torture. The girls who are snatched and taken away to be sold into forced prostitution have to live with this hideous evil night after night. Only a few lucky ones manage to escape or are rescued.
Yet this is our most well-known secret. It is a multi-million rupee (dollars for smugglers) business. No names are mentioned. Numerous international law instruments recognise the trafficking of girls as a violation of their rights, but these laws are weak in their implementation mechanisms and, hence, there is a general apathy towards this heinous crime. The few that are working on this issue say that even the police in general do not understand the legal implications of kidnapping, trafficking and smuggling. I add to this the general misogynist attitude that women are to blame.
Who is involved? There are not just the traffickers who mint money. The customers, many of them alleged to be men in positions of power and influence, provide the much-needed support that sustains this business. It is a beehive that no one dares to touch. To do so would amount to stepping on too many toes.
Confided in me by their mother, one case of two young girls has haunted me for months and prompted me to tell you this story. These girls certainly did not deserve this fate. Their only ‘fault’ was their gender, their tender age, their being fatherless and, above all, poverty. They were forcibly abducted two years ago.
Pakistan’s human sex trafficking racket is thriving in a culture of impunity.
All that the police now say is that the man (the girls’ stepbrother) who had snatched them then ‘sublet’ them to another man (probably an agent) for, it is believed, prostitution. For a man who has never held a steady job, this became a source of steady income. He was receiving Rs70,000 per month for his vile investment in trafficking. Stakes are high in the sex market, and one policeman described this as a ‘Dubai for a man of no means’. The others in the chain would be earning more. The network is big and its size provides protection to all. I have heard of millions changing hands in this ‘profession’ in the course of one night.
This is the reality of human trafficking and sex slavery. Advocates working for the recovery of such children — who end up in brothels, on the streets or as beggars — believe that this crime is on the rise. In 2010, 1,570 children went missing, were trafficked or kidnapped. In 2016, this figure had jumped to 2,452. Since no data is officially recorded, these are guesstimates.
A petition before the Supreme Court, which had its second hearing last week, names 37 respondents ranging from the IG Police and advocates general of all provinces to the numerous bodies dealing with women and children. Filed by lawyer Zia Ahmed Awan, the focus of the petition is on having the apex court order the government to create a mechanism to check human trafficking. The FIA, in its statement before the National Assembly in March, admitted its lack of capacity to cover the entire country. Inter-provincial coordination among the police can also be challenging, as was hinted to me by a ‘good police officer’ (to use one of my nine-year old students’ words, when I asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up).
Our police does not enjoy the public’s confidence, yet some members have been truly helpful like the SSP who is handling this case, for which I ran from pillar to post before I was introduced to him. I hope the petition will succeed in getting the apex court and police to recover all the victims of this horrendous crime, including the two girls I am fighting for.
The US State Department has shown extraordinary interest in the matter and has placed Pakistan on its watch list since 2014. Its 2017 report on human trafficking categorically states, “Pakistan does not fully meet the minimum standards for the elimination of human trafficking.” Hence, it remains on Tier 2 of the US watch list. What is most disturbing is the US’ allegation that “official complicity in trafficking crimes remained a serious problem”.
It was intriguing that, when all the provinces submitted reports of sex trafficking cases for the first time in 2016, the conviction rate was shown to be shockingly low. Of the 2,353 traffickers prosecuted, only 120 were convicted. The least convincing was Sindh’s record, where only 35 cases were investigated, 164 individuals were prosecuted and no one was convicted.
It has been observed by the NGO Madadgaar that the concerned officials have not been cooperative with the parents of missing children — they have not gone beyond performing formalities such as making entries in the roznamcha. Thereafter, the case goes into abeyance. Have a heart, sirs.
#Pakistan - #PPP - Only democracy of Benazir acceptable: Bilawal Bhutto Zardari
Pakistan Peoples’ Party (PPP) Chairman Bilawal Bhutto Zardari has said that they would not compromise on the concept of democracy given by his mother Benazir Bhutto.
Addressing party activists at Begum Nusrat Bhutto Memorial Hall here on Thursday on the occasion of the 65th birthday anniversary of his slain mother Benazir Bhutto, he said in the upcoming elections their competition is with the remnants of Zia and Musharraf.
He said if pressure was applied on candidates of his party’ and other parties then such a democracy would not be acceptable from them.
He said ‘political mosquitoes’ have once again attacked Sindh and every street is filled with such mosquitoes.
He said some of them are disloyal to their own benefactors.
He said sons and daughters of soil will defeat such mosquitoes.
He said a sort of censorship is in media and its voice is being suppressed. He said the PPP cannot accept such censored democracy.
Bilawal Bhutto Zardari said ‘Bhuttoism’ cannot be finished by those who want to finish Bhuttos. He said those who wanted to end Bhuttoism have already been defeated at the hands of history.
He said PPP gave a democratic system and basic rights to the people.
He said we do not believe in hate and torture but we do politics on the basis of principles and accountability. PPP Sindh President Nisar Khuhro Maula, Bux Chandio, Farhatullah Babar and Murad Ali Shah also spoke.
https://www.brecorder.com/2018/06/22/423967/only-democracy-of-benazir-acceptable-bilawal-bhutto-zardari/
#Pakistan - #PPP - PPP questions impartiality of caretaker government
Secretary General Pakistan Peoples Party Syed Nayyar Hussain Bukhari has taken notice of providing Imran Khan an army of Rangers officials to guard Banigala Palace.
Syed Nayyar Hussain Bukhari in a statement said Imran Khan has been provided unusual protocol and over three hundred Rangers jawans have been deployed at Banigala to protect Imran Khan from his own disgruntled workers. A large number of policemen have also been deployed at Banigala. He said that it seems that Interior Minister Azam Khan is behaving like a PTI worker. This amounts to pre-poll rigging, Nayyar Hussain Bukhari said.
SG PPP said that on one hand a politician who has soft corner for TTP and terrorists is being provided with fool proof security and on the other the politicians who have real threat to their security are left with no security. He demanded of the caretaker government to justify such disparity in security matters and restrain from being biased.
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