Quote of the Day

[Content Note: Nativism.]

"We asked [ICE agents] what happened and they simply told us that they had canceled the trip. What everybody was hoping was they supposedly were taking us to see our kids, that they were going to reunite us with our kids. That's what we all imagined. We were all happy."" — Carlos, a Honduran man who has been in ICE custody with other migrants forcibly separated from their children at the southern border, telling the Texas Tribune about recently being awakened in the middle of the night, told to collect their things, being loaded onto a bus at 4 AM "with about two-dozen other migrants," only for the bus to abruptly return "to the Joe Corley Detention Facility outside Houston without explanation...after an hour driving in pitch darkness."

It was probably nothing more than incompetence and miscommunication that caused the aborted trip, but what a vile cruelty irrespective of whether malice was the intention. The impact was the same either way: Parents expected to be reunited with their children, and instead they were returned to detention.

Jay Root and Shannon Najmabadi at the Texas Tribune also spoke with Bethany Carson, who is "an immigration researcher and organizer with Grassroots Leadership, an advocacy organization critical of 'mass incarceration' and deportation," after she spoke to some of the migrants detained at the Port Isabel facility, which is "designated by the government as the primary removal and reunification center for separated migrant families."

Carson told them that the migrants are "being told they're in a transitory state — 'not detained in that place anymore,' but not yet moved to a church or family detention center with their children."

"They're treating them like they're processed out of the facility already but they're still there," Carson said. "They're still locked up. They're still detained. They can't leave. So all they've done is take away their communication and all of the other things that, according to detention standards, they have rights to."

I am so fucking angry and so fucking sad. This is not right. It is intolerable.