Children

How U.S. Kids Are Welcoming The Central American Child Refugees

July 26, 2014 Christa Hillstrom, www.yesmagazine.org Create! Children, Immigrant Rights, Refugees, Religion

"You matter." "We are working hard to make sure you are able to stay in this country." "Come and live in California!" It's not exactly the incendiary rhetoric we've grown accustomed to in the last few weeks, as American leaders clash over the question of what to do with tens of thousands of child refugees fleeing violence and poverty in their home countries of El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. The messages above—along with more than 1,800 others—have flooded the website TheyAreChildren.com since it was launched last week by the California Endowment and partner organizations. The aim is to bypass severe political condemnation from those who are calling for the immediate, no-questions-asked deportation of the children (see Alabama Rep. Mo Brooks' proposal of buying them all one-way tickets for a $27 million bargain). Instead, letter-writers are sending kids messages of encouragement, compassion, and solidarity. Hundreds of notes submitted by ordinary people—many of them children and members of faith communities—will be translated and delivered through service providers to children in detention facilities "to make sure these children know that thousands of people are praying for them and extending support and compassion," said Anne Stuhldreher, the project's coordinator.

Treat Immigrant Children As Refugees?

July 15, 2014 Anna Lekas Miller, www.wagingnonviolence.org Organize! Children, Immigrant Rights, Refugees, Violence, War On Drugs, Wars and Militarism

Last week, the news broke that another wave of unaccompanied migrant children crossed the border, which brings the number of unaccompanied minors that have attempted to escape into the United States since October to more than 52,000. Most of them are fleeing escalated gang violence in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. Unlike many migrants from Central America and Mexico, coming to the United States to escape economic hardship, this new wave of migrants is escaping brutal drug-related violence plaguing the region. For this reason, both immigrant justice activists and the United Nations High Commission on Refugees are calling upon the U.S. government —which has already allocated $116 million to process the deportations and pay the transportation of the most recent wave of children — to treat these migrants as refugees, allowing them to seek temporary or permanent asylum in the United States. Political instability and corruption in Central America allows drug trafficking gangs fighting for control of key smuggling routes to grow unchecked. The resulting violence has been called an undeclared war, with murder rates in Honduras being the highest in the world.

Cameron Plans Strike Crackdown On 1 Million Public Workers

July 10, 2014 Patrick Wintour and Matthew Taylor, www.theguardian.com Organize! Children, Education, Labor, Unions, United Kingdom (UK)

David Cameron has been accused by union leaders of being a "Bullingdon bully" after he vowed that the Conservative election manifesto would tighten the screw on strike laws in response to what he regards as Thursday's illegitimate mass walkout of up to 1 million public-sector workers. Cameron attacked the low turnout thresholds in union strike ballots and challenged the validity of mandates to take industrial action derived from ballots conducted more than a year ago in some cases. The prime minister said: "I think the time has come for setting a threshold. It is time to legislate and it will be in the Conservative manifesto." In a sign of how the political battle may unfold, the education secretary, Michael Gove, will accuse the teaching unions of not standing up for education but for their pay and pensions. On Newsnight on Thursday, Gove said teachers who were joining the strike were a minority.

Israel’s Attack On Gaza Kills At Least 8 Children

July 10, 2014 Jon Queally, www.mintpressnews.com Educate! Children, Gaza, Israel, Palestine, Violence

At least eight children are among those who have been killed in the Gaza Strip over the last twenty-four hours, according to various reports, as the Israeli military continued to bombard the Palestinian enclave using naval ships, fighter jets, and aerial drones. According to a report from the Defense of Children International (DCI-Palestine), six children were killed when a building was leveled by a missile that may have been fired from an Israeli drone on Tuesday afternoon in the city of Khan Younis. According to the group: The five families that reside in the building evacuated immediately after an Israeli aerial drone fired a warning missile. A number of neighbors, however, gathered on the roof in an effort to prevent the bombing. Shortly after 3 p.m., an Israeli airstrike leveled the building, and killed seven people, including five children, on the spot and injured 28 others.

The US-Mexico Caravan For Peace Takes On The Drug War

July 3, 2014 Chris Moore-Backman, www.truth-out.org Resist! Children, Drug War, Immigrant Rights, Mexico, Prison

Like many people in the United States, I've had a vague notion that in recent years, things have gone from bad to worse in Mexico. A notion characterized by images of chaos and sporadic violence related to narco-trafficking. I've pictured skirmishing between competing drug cartels, with disorganized and corrupt law enforcement thrown into the mix. And I realize that the image of Ciudad Juarez with its reputation as the world's most murderous city, has somehow worked as a reference point for me as I've thought of Mexico, every now and then. A few months ago, I was talking with an old friend that I had been out of touch with for some time, and I was describing for him the radio documentaries I've been working on which focus on race, criminal justice and the drug war, and on the growing movement to end mass incarceration. He wasted no time in asking me if I was planning to do a show on the international aspects of the Drug War, and more specifically, he was wanting to know if I was going to do anything about what was happening in Mexico. He said that he thought the movement to end mass incarceration in the United States and the movement to end the drug war in Mexico were deeply connected, but that very few people were seeing it yet or talking about it. He told me that a bi-national caravan was about to travel the length of the US calling for an end to the drug war. He said that many of the people with the caravan would be family members of those who had been killed or disappeared in the drug war violence in Mexico.

Children’s Lives In The Balance

July 2, 2014 Pam Bailey and Medea Benjamin, www.codepink.org Educate! Children, Israel, Palestine

Children’s Lives In The Balance: Is One Child’s Life Worth More Than Another? With the news that the bodies of three missing Israeli teens had been found in a field not far from the stretch of road where they disappeared June 12, people everywhere reacted rightly with sorrow and anger. Eyal Yifrah, 19, Gilad Shaar, 16, and Naftali Fraenkel, also 16, were students who lived with their families in a Jewish-only settlement near the Palestinian city of Hebron in the West Bank. The settlement and others like it have been declared illegal by the International Court of Justice because they are located in occupied territory and impede Palestinians’ liberty of movement and right to employment, health and education. However, they were youth just starting out on life, sons and brothers whose families will forever grieve their horrific deaths. We must all condemn such violence. We must also condemn the collective punishment and violence unleashed by the government of Israel in response. To date, the Israeli police and military have broken into and ransacked 1,500 homes, businesses and schools in its rampage, arresting more than 550 residents. More than half of the abducted individuals are being held without charge or trial, more than 100 have been injured and at least six have died – including a 14-year-old boy who was shot in the chest at point-blank range and a 78-year-old woman who suffered a heart attack during a house raid.

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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