AOC says migrants forced to drink toilet water after tense border visit

[Absentee Voting Ghost of Ruin]

Tbh sh**tty conditions but I wouldn't be shocked by some lying and exaggerations.

Border war of words: Trump, right-wing media are eager to muddy the waters. That means it's bad

The reports are so bad that even the most strident racist has trouble rationalizing this away. But all this is happening behind closed doors, in facilities in relatively remote places like El Paso and McAllen, Texas. So the right-wing spinmeisters have their angle, which is to recast this as a "he said, she said" situation where the real truth is unknowable, and therefore anyone who would like to dismiss the complaints as liberal hysterics is free to do so.

"Who is telling the truth?" Martha MacCallum of Fox News intoned dramatically at the top of a Monday segment covering the issue, setting the frame of unknowability for her largely conservative audience.

[Absentee Voting Ghost of Ruin]

Is ever so telling that conservatives primary defense of this is arguing over semantics whether these camps are concentration camps like Auschwitz as opposed to merely internment camps like we locked Japanese people in the 1940s. Raw disgust is my only reaction here.

Well I wouldn't really say that it's appropriate to call them "concentration camps" given that that's going to make people immediately think of Nazis gassing millions of people despite the literal meaning and you shouldn't just flippantly lump things in with the Holocaust. But I don't really consider that a "defense" and these places are still awful. Not being as bad as the Nazis is a very low bar.

What Did the World Know?

on December 13, 1942, Edward R. Murrow of the CBS radio network bluntly reported, “What is happening is this. Millions of human beings, most of them Jews, are being gathered up with ruthless efficiency and murdered. The phrase ‘concentration camps’ is obsolete, as out of date as economic sanctions or non-recognition. It is now possible only to speak of extermination camps.”

[Absentee Voting Ghost of Ruin]

What a Pediatrician Saw Inside a Border Patrol Warehouse

MCALLEN, Texas—Inside the Border Patrol warehouse on Ursula Avenue, Dolly Lucio Sevier saw a baby who’d been fed from the same unwashed bottle for days; children showing signs of malnutrition and dehydration; and several kids who, in her medical opinion, were exhibiting clear evidence of psychological trauma. More than 1,000 migrant children sat in the detention facility here, and Sevier, a local pediatrician, had been examining as many as she could, one at a time. But she wasn’t permitted to enter the area where they were being held, many of them in cages, and find the sickest kids to examine. Instead, in a nearby room, she manually reviewed a 50-page printout of that day’s detainees, and highlighted the names of children with a 2019 birth date—the babies—before moving on to the toddlers.

When it was almost time to leave, Sevier asked to see a 3-year-old girl, and then two other children. But by that point, the friendly and accommodating Border Patrol agent assisting her earlier in the day had been replaced by a dour guard, wearing a surgical mask, who claimed that he couldn’t find the toddler. “We can wait,” Sevier said, as she recalled to me in an interview. Her tone was polite but firm; she knew that she had the right under a federal court settlement to examine whomever she liked.

“She’s having a bath,” Sevier recalled the guard as saying, a luxury one official told her is available only to babies removed from their guardians. In the facility’s standard cages, there is no soap or showering for the kids. Though 72 hours is the longest a minor can be legally confined in such a facility, some had been there almost a month. Sevier waited.

[Absentee Voting Ghost of Ruin]

In any case, those are horrible conditions. The only question is how widespread they are. And the only possible answer is not abolishing ICE or whatever, but increasing funding so migrants can actually be processed in humane conditions.

That's not really a solution when Trump and his supporters WANT the conditions to be as bad as possible as some kind of "deterrent."

(And unlike our dear friend, I'm not just making up a motivation for the other side and declaring it to be fact. Trump has actually said this.)

As you say, the horrible conditions in the Republicans' concentration camps are a feature, not a bug. We do not need to spend more money to end them - mass incarceration is the most expensive option here, and it is being chosen deliberately.

Reminder: Trump doesn’t need to keep migrants in detention camps

Requesting asylum is not against the law, so there’s no legal requirement to jail them like criminals. Under past administrations, the Department of Homeland Security has usually chosen to lock up both asylum seekers and those who cross the border without a visa, but the agency also created several effective alternatives to detention. The White House could prioritize these programs instead of keeping migrants in such inhumane conditions.

To understand just how expensive it is for DHS to house, shelter, and feed immigrants, all you have to do is look at the agency’s own numbers. In its budget request for fiscal year 2018, DHS said that it cost about $133.99 per day to hold an adult immigrant in detention and $319.37 for an individual in family detention. Meanwhile, the agency said the average cost of placing someone in an alternative program is $4.50 per day.

Recent estimates from the Department of Health and Human Services show that housing immigrants in tent cities would cost a whopping $775 a day per detainee, according to documents reviewed this summer by reporters at NBC News.