Children

U.S. Reaction To Immigrant Influx Could Violate International Law

July 1, 2014 Michelle Tullo, www.ipsnews.net Educate! Children, Human Rights, Immigrant Rights, Prison

Rights advocates and lawmakers are expressing increased concern over the United States’ handling of the sudden influx of tens of thousands of undocumented child and female migrants from Central America. Last week, President Barack Obama announced that military bases would be converted to detention centres to house the nearly 50,000 unaccompanied minors that have arrived at the southern U.S. border in recent months. Recent data says some 3,000 are being apprehended daily, though the reasons for their arrival remain debated. Meanwhile, sentiment is building against the plan, with some suggesting the detention centres could violate international rights obligations. “We’re very disturbed to hear that the Obama administration plans to open more family detention centre spots, starting with a large facility in New Mexico,” Clara Long of Human Rights Watch, a watchdog group, told IPS. “There’s evidence that detaining children causes severe and sometimes lasting harm, including depression, anxiety and cognitive damage. That’s why detaining children for their immigration status is banned under international law.”

Pity The Children

July 1, 2014 Chris Hedges, www.truthdig.com Educate! Afghanistan, Children, Iraq, Wars and Militarism

For the United States, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will be over soon. We will leave behind, after our defeats, wreckage and death, the contagion of violence and hatred, unending grief, and millions of children who were brutalized and robbed of their childhood. Americans who did not suffer will forget. People maimed physically or psychologically by the violence, especially the Iraqi and Afghan children, will never escape. Time and memory will play their usual tricks. Those who endured war will begin to wonder, years from now, what was real and what was not. And those who did not taste of war’s noxious poison will stop wondering at all. I sat last Thursday afternoon in a small conference room at the University of Massachusetts Boston with three U.S. combat veterans—two from the war in Iraq, one from the war in Vietnam—along with a Somali who grew up amid the vicious fighting in Mogadishu. All are poets or novelists. They were there to attend a two-week writers workshop sponsored by the William Joiner Institute for the Study of War and Social Consequences. It is their voices and those of their comrades that have to be heeded now, and heeded in the future, if we are to curb our appetite for empire and lust for industrial violence. The truth about war comes out, but always too late. And by the time the drums begin beating, the flags waving and the politicians and press hyperventilating as they shout out their nationalist cant, once again we have forgotten what we learned, as if the debacles of the past had no bearing on the debacles of the future.

Resisting The ‘Humanitarian’ Solution To Child Migration

June 21, 2014 Staff, www.moratoriumdeportations.org Educate! Children, Immigrant Rights, Immigration

Recently, images of migrant prison warehouses on the US-Mexico border have been leaked to the media. These images are grotesque, illustrating the inhumane conditions of incarceration inside warehouses nicknamed “coolers” or “ice boxes”. This is where people who are captured while trying to cross the border are taken by Customs and Border Protection (CPB), one of the branches of Department of Homeland Security (DHS), before being transferred to other detention facilities around the country. The reactions to these images are of justifiable outrage — people are crammed into cold warehouses that are not fit to house human beings, with no mattresses to sleep on and with no legal rights, no access to health care or to basic needs such as toilet paper.

Ending Child Poverty In The US: Financially Prudent, Morally Just

June 21, 2014 Zach McDade, www.talkpoverty.org Create! Children, Poverty

More than one in five children in the US lives in poverty: that’s 790,000 children in New York, 429,000 in Chicago, and 125,000 in Washington, D.C. In all, there are 16 million poor children. Child poverty is also rising, up six percentage points since the turn of the century. Those numbers make it seem like a pretty intractable problem. After all, it’s literally millions of our children—living without adequate shelter, without healthy food, without adequate opportunities to play and learn and grow. If we’ve let things get this bad then surely child poverty must be nearly impossible to solve. But the fact is it isn’t difficult to end child poverty, or at least to dramatically reduce it. As Austin Nichols, an economist at the Urban Institute, wrote last year: If the United States offered cash benefits to children in poor families, we could cut child poverty by more than half. According to calculations using the 2012 Current Population Survey, poor children need $4,800 per year each, on average, to escape poverty. That’s $400 a month for each child.

Leaked Photos: Children Packed In Border Facilities

June 7, 2014 Kolten Parker, www.sfgate.com Educate! Border, Children, Immigrant Rights, Mexico

Photos leaked Thursday from a U.S. Border Patrol facility in the Rio Grande Valley show overflowing holding facilities of immigrants, many of whom are children. The photos, obtained by the conservative website Breitbart, show hundreds of immigrants believed to be in the country illegally from Central America and Mexico being held in crowded concrete rooms similar to a jail cell. Many of the children appear to be teenagers but some clearly are younger. The photos have a timestamp of May 27, 2014. A spokesperson for U.S. Customs and Border Protection said the agency has not “officially released any photos at this time in order to protect the rights and privacy of unaccompanied minors in our care.” “The influx of unaccompanied children across the southwest border has resulted in an urgent humanitarian situation,” the CBP spokesperson said. “It requires a whole of government coordinated and sustained response.” President Barack Obama has directed an effort, lead by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, to provide resources and “humanitarian relief to affected children,” which is a “priority,” the spokesperson said. It is unclear who leaked the photos to Breitbart.

7 Things About Homeless Kids You Probably Didn’t Know

May 27, 2014 Ann Brenoff, www.huffingtonpost.com Educate! Children, Homelessness

There are more than 1.6 million homeless children living in the United States, says The National Center on Family Homelessness. That's one in every 45 American kids who goes to sleep at night without a bed to call their own. Families with young children now account for about one third of the homeless population. And in case you are wondering why, the recession caused a 50 percent jump in the number of students identified as homeless in school districts throughout the country. Here are seven things about being a homeless kid that you probably didn't know: 1. Making friends is harder when you're homeless. Carey Fuller, who lives in her car with her 11-year-old daughter Maggie Warner in the Pacific Northwest, said she "cringed" when she recently took Maggie out to play in a park. Things were going fine until "someone asked her where she lived," Fuller explained. It's the death knell question, the one that throws the wet blanket on the playdate and it's usually just a matter of seconds before the other kid takes off in the direction of someone else.

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