These Are The Children: A Child Raped By Law Enforcement

This is intended to be a a first look at how undocumented immigrants with children come to the attention of ICE. This new series is not limited to documenting only children and parents who are separated from each other, and cannot guarantee that separation occurred for all the families mentioned. Instead, this series seeks only to illustrate how many families come to the attention of ICE and what a child-isolation policy might mean in those contexts.

I was struck by a particularly horrifying story today. It’s not unique. They’re never unique. But it’s one human example of how a woman and her child came to the attention of ICE.

A 47-year-old deputy with the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office was arrested Sunday on allegations he repeatedly raped the 4-year-old daughter of an undocumented immigrant, threatening to deport her if she dared report him to the authorities.

It is not clear how long the mother was aware of the rapes, ….

Investigators say the deputy may have been raping the girl for months, if not years.

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American Academy of Pediatrics is Not Down

The AAP is not down with what’s been happening to immigrant children of immigrants (both those who seek to cross within the law and those who seek to evade it). In addition to putting out a statement,

Dr Colleen Kraft, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, visited a shelter for children under the age of 12 that runs along the Texas border with Mexico.

And what did Kraft find?

The shelter in question held 60 beds and had a little playground for children. Rooms are equipped with toys, books and crayons. …

But the child who caught the paediatrician’s attention during a recent visit was anything but happy. This little girl – no older than two – was screaming and pounding her fists on a mat. Yet staff members could not comfort the infant because of the rules prohibiting physical contact.

That’s right: no hugs for toddlers is the law, because Democrats and their awful, no good, very bad refusal to capitulate to everything the Orange Tyrant wants, forever.

Or at least, I guess that what the Rs are saying today.

Ishtar fucking Inanna with the Strap-On of Birth Control, there are no words.

Stealing Children Is Who We Are

I don’t know Laura Parrott Perry, but I’m loving Perry already.

 

Not sure a country that has a history of selling babies away from their parents in slavery, sending native children to "boarding schools," & separating families in Japanese internment camps gets to clutch its pearls and cry, "this is not who we are." It's who we've always been.

 

True fax.

 

ETA: There’s a good blavity post up about this, and there are probably a great many more. The blavity post itself includes copies of others’ work. I hadn’t seen any “Handmaid’s Tale” references in the critique of Trump’s Steal-The-Children policy, but apparently there have been some. In response, Reagan Gomez tweeted:

Kinda weird that folks keep bringing up the Handmaidens Tale and not like…the real history of this country forcibly separating children (/Native/First Nations/African) from their parents for centuries.

If you send me links in the comments to any more good takes about the US history of separating children from their parents, I’ll add them to the OP.

ICE Hit & Run vs Members of the Tohono O’odham Nation

There’s a relatively slow-motion hit-and-run occurring on Tohono O’odham Nation land that’s been recorded and now viewed several hundred thousand times. It’s bad enough, though the victim Paulo Remes is reported to be recovering reasonably well by Tuscon.com. The SUV that hit Remes was an Immigration & Customs Enforcement vehicle that drove down the road approaching Remes’ house, turned around, then came back toward Remes who had just walked across the road and was still on the edge of it when struck. This has all the makings of a felony:

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Bill Maher Gets One Right

RawStory is saying that Maher did a segment on police brutality tonight (Friday). In it he said:

“We need to stop saying most cops are good like we know that to be true,” Maher said. “I hope that’s true, but I need some evidence—unlike cops.”

I think that the most troubling thing about this is how few of these incidents come to light through police body cams. With so many interactions recorded on body cam, how is it that the majority of brutality incidents reach the public eye through the video taken by some witness pulling out a cell phone?

I don’t think that the majority of cops have committed unnecessary and illegal violence. I think the majority have certainly committed unnecessary violence, though, and I think that the ratio of bystander videos to body cam videos in these situations shows that law enforcement as an institution is engaged in a massive coverup. What does it mean to be a “good cop” when so many of these incidents are covered up by cops? Can you still be a “good cop” while ignoring the problems too big to change by yourself? How would that square with arresting a murderer when you know you don’t have the skills to prosecute them?

The definition of “good cop” is going to vary from person to person, but from testilying to state certification boards to allowing corrupt cops to resign to avoid investigation & punishment so they can hop over to a job in the next jurisdiction, I think there’s more than enough evidence that a huge percentage of cops are corruptly ignoring the problems in their own departments even if they are decent and trying to do good when they go out on the streets. Some of those cops *might* be good if we didn’t ask them to work in corrupt agencies. But how many? It’s impossible to tell.

So, yeah: maybe most cops are good, but at this point they’re going to need to step up with some evidence.

 

 

Fox News On The Most Persecuted People In America: The Dukes Of Hazard

Oh, my. This really is too much. “Bo Duke” actor John Schneider just served 5 hours in jail for repeatedly failing to pay back alimony and child support. He was scheduled to serve 3 days, but the Los Angeles jails were overcrowded. To what does he attribute his good luck horrible persecution? Fox News will tell ya:

Schneider alleged that his conservative values may have hurt him in court, adding that it’s time for more of his fellow Hollywood stars to “come out of the Republican closet.”

“I do think there’s a bias against conservatives, Republicans, in Hollywood, but I think if you let that alter how you are, then I question how you are,” he said. “If you believe it, speak it, live it.”

Aww. I feel so bad for the 58-year old wealthy white guy. But wait! If that didn’t jerk you around by your heartstrings, check this out:

“Going to jail was nothing like I ever imagined it was going to be,” Schneider told us. “First of all, I was given no preferential treatment at all except they didn’t detain me with the general population.

“I was arrested, I was searched, I was handcuffed, I had my wallet and my phone and they took my belt and shoelaces and it was put into a plastic bag,” the 58-year-old recalled.

“It was totally life-changing,” he added.

What. The. Freud.

Seriously, white conservative guys, you need to catch some clues. As I understand it, there are a bunch of clues running loose in the Antarctic circumpolar current: you should head down there right now.

 

 

Kid Gets 5 Years For Friend’s Gun, Being Black

A teenager who was 15 years old when he ran off with some sneakers being sold on Facebook after trying them on, Dayonn Davis (who is 18 now) was tried as an adult and sentenced to 5 years in prison and 10 more on probation because the friend who accompanied him on this try-and-run shoe theft pulled a gun to cover Davis’ retreat. From CBS News:

Defense attorney Susan Henderson told Muscogee County Superior Court Judge Bobby Peters her client just wants to put the whole thing behind him and move on, the Ledger-Enquirer reported.

“He’s been extremely remorseful,” she said. “He’s got his life on track now.”

She insisted Davis didn’t know the other person would pull a gun. But the judge says that makes little difference in the eyes of the law.

If he wanted to commit non-violent violent crime as a “youth” and get away with less than 5 years, he should have joined the Stanford swim team. Not that there’s, y’know, anything significant about a Black kid getting 5 years in prison for running off with shoes while a juvenile when a white adult serves 90 days for rape. Just another day in the post-racial USA.

The Real Victim in the Brock Turner Rape Case: Aaron Persky

Aaron Persky, the judge who gave Stanford athlete Brock Turner 6 months after Turner was convicted of rape in a trial before Persky’s court, is facing a recall election today. As someone who cares deeply about the rule of law, I hope to fuck California voters throw him the hell off the bench. And while he deserved to be removed for his behavior from the bench, behavior dating back years, I couldn’t wait to comment until after the election because of the new interview in which he paints himself as the victim of uninformed masses who advocate mob rule in place of justice, starting with his own recall.

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Justice For Sale: Reality Winner, National Security, and Constitutional Rights

Reality Winner stands accused of illegally leaking a document written by the US intelligence community which assesses an important part of Russia’s efforts to change the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. The document leaked became the basis for a tremendous amount of reporting that, the Senate concluded, ultimately increased national security because internal warnings by the Intelligence community were getting insufficient attention at the policy level. Nonetheless, she’s being pursued with particular relentlessness and with an almost malicious indifference to justice. A year after her arrest, it’s time to look again at her case in its context.

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