A five-year-old who’d been separated from her family at the border gave up her right to a bond hearing while in the government’s custody by signing a form she likely didn’t fully understand, The New Yorker reported Thursday.
Helen, who’s last name was withheld by the magazine, was detained at the border with her grandmother, from whom she was separated a month after President Donald Trump claimed he’d ended the family separation policy.
After the separation, Helen’s grandmother and her grandmother’s teenage son were released with GPS-fitted ankle bracelets to await their court dates. Helen was transferred to the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement, under whose care she was eventually transferred to a foster home.
While in the government’s custody, the New Yorker reported, Helen was given a form by an “unknown official” which — “with assistance from officials” — she filled out (pictured above). She signed her first name next to the statement, “I withdraw my previous request for a Flores bond hearing.”
That, the New Yorker reported, likely cost Helen time away from her family.
Eventually, after months apart and with a concerted legal and public relations push organized by the nonprofit community union La Unión Del Pueblo Entero and several other groups, Helen and her family were reunited.
Read the full story here.
The poor child, being separated must have made him cranky.
For years, we watched while the people who think this is great became the Republican Party. And all the while, the MSM tut-tutted and swore it wasn’t true. The Revolutionary War cos-play idiots and with the misspelled racist signs, Orly Taitz, Joe Arpaio, Steve King, the foulness of Fox “opinion,” Limbaugh. They showed us who they were at every level and still the MSM didn’t see it.
The one, single, most important fact of politics in America is that power must be wrested from the hands of these people and then, somehow, kept out of their hands until the sheer force of defeat and the advance of time drives them out of the system like volatile poisons. Nothing is more important than that. Nothing can, or ever should, take priority over that.
And yet, the only people who can do that are the very people who are constitutionally incapable of grasping the military concept known as “priority of fire,” the utter necessity of the harsh disaster protocol called “triage” or the simple reality that it’s stupid to call meetings to criticize the generalship when the barbarians have breached the goddamn gate and are looting, burning and raping everyone and everything in sight.
Not for more than a couple of cycles, they can’t. Because that’s how we got here.
I just wonder how any of them live with themselves, because at this point doing this kind of shit they must be hollow. Just following orders ma’am.
This official needs to be found and fired. There is no way a 5 year old can properly comprehend and consent to giving up their rights without a parent or lawyer involved.
Honestly, every child who has had their asylum claims rejected by the Trump administration needs to be reviewed by a neutral and independent judge outside of the administration kangaroo immigrant courts.
There’s no way a 5 year-old can understand this kind of document, and no government official should be able to substitute for her parent or legal guardian in “helping” her to understand and sign it. That our immigration system sees this as an acceptable approach should be all the proof anyone needs that the whole system needs to be rebuild from the bottom up.