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Border Patrol detains adults with no end - until lawyers sue
Source: Associated Press
Border Patrol detains adults with no end - until lawyers sue
By NOMAAN MERCHANT
July 30, 2019
HOUSTON (AP) — In early June, twin brothers from Guatemala let their sister in California know they were about to cross the U.S.-Mexico border. Then they vanished for almost a month.
She couldn’t find them in online databases and the local Guatemalan consulate had no information. She feared they had been kidnapped or killed.
It took three weeks to find them: inside jam-packed U.S. Border Patrol cells in South Texas, with no access to phones or lawyers. One of them was inside the fenced-in pens that Vice President Mike Pence visited in July. Only after the lawyers sued were both brothers transferred out.
It’s a pattern that immigration lawyers say has repeated itself for several weeks: Adults are detained in packed Border Patrol cells — malnourished, poorly treated and incommunicado — only to be moved within hours once the government is sued on their behalf.
One group of lawyers has filed lawsuits on behalf of the spouses, siblings and relatives of 18 migrants — all of whom were removed from their cells almost immediately.
The lawyers believe the government is trying to avoid a federal judge issuing a sweeping order that would require the release of potentially thousands of people detained by the Border Patrol or changes to improve the conditions in cells that government inspectors and advocates have said are squalid.
-snip-
By NOMAAN MERCHANT
July 30, 2019
HOUSTON (AP) — In early June, twin brothers from Guatemala let their sister in California know they were about to cross the U.S.-Mexico border. Then they vanished for almost a month.
She couldn’t find them in online databases and the local Guatemalan consulate had no information. She feared they had been kidnapped or killed.
It took three weeks to find them: inside jam-packed U.S. Border Patrol cells in South Texas, with no access to phones or lawyers. One of them was inside the fenced-in pens that Vice President Mike Pence visited in July. Only after the lawyers sued were both brothers transferred out.
It’s a pattern that immigration lawyers say has repeated itself for several weeks: Adults are detained in packed Border Patrol cells — malnourished, poorly treated and incommunicado — only to be moved within hours once the government is sued on their behalf.
One group of lawyers has filed lawsuits on behalf of the spouses, siblings and relatives of 18 migrants — all of whom were removed from their cells almost immediately.
The lawyers believe the government is trying to avoid a federal judge issuing a sweeping order that would require the release of potentially thousands of people detained by the Border Patrol or changes to improve the conditions in cells that government inspectors and advocates have said are squalid.
-snip-
Read more: https://apnews.com/4a7225271a03434db2634c3ac95fdc60