‘Willful Recklessness’: Trump Pushes for Indefinite Family Detention As Sanitary Crisis Mounts

By Renée Feltz. First published on Rewire.News

At the Greyhound bus station in San Antonio, Texas, you can easily spot the mothers and children who were released by immigration authorities from a facility run by the private prison company CoreCivic. The women wear what amount to prison uniforms: dark-wash jeans, pastel or red t-shirts or sweatshirts, and generic tennis shoes. Their sons and daughters, ranging from infants to tweens, all wear similar shirts and shoes with maroon sweatpants.

One mother, named Corina, ran her fingers through her 10-year-old son’s hair as he leaned on her shoulder this past Saturday and waited for a bus to Oklahoma, where their sponsor lives. It was the next step of their journey to escape violence in Guatemala. Earlier in June they had been taken into custody by U.S. Border Patrol agents in South Texas, and crowded into an outdoor pen known as a perrera or “kennel,” where they were fed baloney sandwiches twice a day and slept on the ground. Then they were bussed to the sprawling 2,400-bed South Texas Family Residential Center in the small town of Dilley, and held 11 days in a room with two other families.

“Compared to the border, it was much cleaner,” she said Saturday, through an interpreter. “We had food and we were able to sleep,” even though at night dozens of lights illuminate what is currently the largest family detention center in the United States.

When pressed to describe what she might change about their time at the facility, she said only that she wished they had been held there for “menos tiempo”—“less time.”

But with the 2020 election approaching, the Trump administration is taking steps to extend the detention of migrant families despite documented concerns from the medical community—including two doctors under federal contract to monitor the facilities where migrant families are held. This comes just five years after President Barack Obama first opened three family detention centers in a failed attempt to deter an initial surge of Central American asylum seekers, even as studies show more humane alternatives like case management are just as effective for processing parents with children.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Acting Director Mark Morgan confirmed Wednesday that families who have already received removal orders would be targeted and put in detention after Trump tweeted Monday night that agents would begin removing “millions of illegal aliens” next week.

The Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) has been tracking about 40,000 expedited family cases “regardless of whether they reflect a priority designation” in order to ensure they are completed “without undue delay” at ten immigration courts in Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New Orleans, New York City, and San Francisco. Nearly 8,000 of those cases have already ended with removal orders. These are some of the migrants ICE agents could now target.

The administration has buttressed its push to detain more families by arguing that few of them show up for their immigration court hearings if they are released. At a U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on June 11, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Acting Secretary Kevin McAleenan said “family units” accounted for two-thirds of migrants processed at the Southwest border in May, and that 90 percent of families the EOIR was monitoring didn’t appear for court hearings. Several reports contradict this claim.

One case-by-case study of immigration court records showed “as of the end of May 2019 one or more removal hearings had already been held for nearly 47,000 newly arriving families seeking refuge in this country. Of these, almost six out of every seven families released from custody had shown up for their initial court hearing.”

The study further noted that “multiple hearings are [usually] required before a case is decided. For those who are represented, more than 99 percent had appeared at every hearing held.”

As part of the study, Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse also examined each indication that a family had failed to appear at their initial hearing, and found that in 83 percent of “in absentia” cases it was “unclear whether or not a hearing had actually occurred” since an immigration judge had already ruled. “Yet they were marked absent,” the authors note. “A puzzling conundrum.”

A photo published on May 16, 2019 by RAICES Texas, one of the largest aid organizations working on the border crisis.

Lifting the Limits on Child Incarceration

To build its case for indefinite detention, the administration has also pushed to end the 1997 FloresSettlement Agreement between the government and immigrant rights’ activists that outlines standards for incarcerating children and limits how long they can be held.

“Currently, due to a single district-court order, we cannot obtain effective immigration-enforcement results for the families arriving at our border—instead they cannot be held for longer than 21 days and they do not receive rulings from immigration courts for years,” McAleenan told lawmakers earlier this month.

McAleenan and Morgan support Republican South Carolina Sen. Lindsay Graham’s Secure and Protect Act, which would end the 1997 Flores Settlement Agreement and would raise the limit to 100 days. The bill would also give the DHS secretary “sole discretion to determine standards for detention related to migrant children,” according to the National Immigration Forum.

The Trump administration has also proposed updated regulations to replace Flores with a new program that allows ICE to detain families for the duration of their immigration proceedings.

“We are very worried about a return to indefinite family detention,” said Katy Murdza, advocacy coordinator for the Dilley Pro Bono Project, which helps prepare mothers and children for their credible fear interviews while they are locked up. “Our project was formed with the goal of shutting it down, and it is unfortunate that five years later we are still here.”

In April ICE confirmed the number of families held at the South Texas Family Residential Center had fallen to 709, even as families were held in overcrowded conditions at the border, prompting critics to suggest the agency had manufactured a crisis in order to generate support for funding more family detention capacity.

“It is probably part of political show … to make people think there is a crisis at the border that can’t be managed,” said Andrea Meza, director of family detention services for RAICES. She noted many families were released by border agents with notices to appear for their court hearing that listed no date or location, allowing the administration to “build its own rigged case for why we need more detention centers, and a wall, and to end asylum.”

An ICE spokesperson told Rewire.News that the Karnes County Residential Center was now only holding adult women “through at least July,” but that as of June 18 the population at Dilley had risen to “1,628 (members of family units).”

Whistleblowers Push Back

While a debate ensues over whether to call immigrant detention centers “concentration camps,” two of the most outspoken critics of their impact on children have been government whistleblowers who were hired in 2014 to serve as experts for DHS’ Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. Dr. Scott Allen and Dr. Pamela McPherson were shocked at what they observed in 2014 when they visited the isolated desert town of Artesia, New Mexico, where DHS first held mothers and children in temporary buildings erected in the vacant field of a federal law enforcement training center.

“There was a lot of weight loss among the children there, and it struck us because you’d think that after their perilous journeys they would gain weight when given access to food,” Dr. Allen said Monday in a phone interview. “We would not expect this to happen if they were in a safe and healthy environment.”

Their concerns helped prompt officials to close Artesia by the end of 2014, but by then ICE had contracted with private prison company GEO Group to open another family detention center in a retrofitted medium-security men’s prison in Karnes County, Texas. During a visit there, the doctors found “the spring-loaded heavy steel doors of the cells resulted in dozens of serious finger injuries to children.”

After the South Texas Residential Center opened that December, they documented how “HQ and facility staff at Dilley failed to develop an adequate plan for typical parenting challenges like two-year-old’s biting or hitting peers and instead placed toddlers (with parent) in medical isolation for days.”

The American Medical Association, American Psychiatric Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, and American College of Physicians have all condemned family detention, but the facilities in Dilley and Karnes—as well as a smaller family detention center in Pennsylvania—remained open when Trump took office in 2017. The next year they were used to hold migrant parents who had been reunited with their children after outrage forced Trump to halt his “zero-tolerance” policy of separating them and charging the parents with illegal entry.

As the Trump administration urged the public to accept family detention as a solution to family separation, Allen and McPherson went public with their in-house reports and contacted key lawmakers in the U.S. House and Senate’s Judiciary and Homeland Security committees to raise concern.

“DHS’s expansion of family detention, which runs counter to the recommendations of its own subject-matter experts and the consensus of the medical community, not only constitutes knowing endangerment of children but has resulted in real harm,” according to the doctors.

Allen and McPherson are still under contract with DHS to monitor conditions in family detention centers, but have not been invited back since 2017.

In February, Trump declared the number of families arriving at the border a “national emergency,” decrying “an inability to provide detention space for many of these aliens while their removal proceedings are pending.” He has since requested funds for 10,000 family detention beds in his proposed annual budget, up from the current 3,000.

“It is really discouraging to me that our expertise is totally ignored,” Dr. Allen told Rewire.News. “It is a willful recklessness that I find deeply disturbing.”

Heading in the Wrong Direction

The Trump administration’s push for more family detention comes as a new study by the Women’s Refugee Commission shows how ICE’s short-lived Family Case Management Program was able to support hundreds of families in finding stability in their communities, meeting their immigration requirements, and preparing them for the outcomes of their case. Researchers found this alternative to detention “achieved a 99% compliance rate with ICE and immigration court requirements at a fraction of the cost.”

Next month a 90-day waiting period is set to expire on U.S. Attorney General William Barr’s directive to deny bond hearings to migrants while their asylum claims are pending. The hold was put in place to allow time to arrange additional detention capacity, and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has sued to block the measure.

“If the policy takes effect it could lead to the long-term detention of children if Flores protections are lifted,” ACLU attorney Michael Tan told Rewire.News.

Meanwhile, the Senate Appropriations Committee approved a bipartisan $4.6 billion emergency supplemental funding bill on Wednesday that Republicans say will support a more humanitarian response to the migrant surge at the border in part by providing additional funds for holding families, ostensibly in better conditions. Democratic leaders like Sen. Chuck Schumer (NY) and Rep. Steny Hoyer (MD) have said they hope to pass it by the Fourth of July recess.

“Now is the moment for Democrats to boldly hold the line and say we shouldn’t be detaining anyone in family detention centers,” said Bob Libal, director of Grassroots Leadership. The Austin, Texas-based nonprofit is appealing a court decision which allowed Texas to issue child-care licenses to facilities that hold parents and children and could open the door for ICE to detain them indefinitely under the terms of the Flores agreement.

Last month the group hosted survivors of Japanese internment camps during World War II when they came to Dilley to protest outside the South Texas Residential Center.

“One of our themes was that it should not take 70 years to recognize when something is a moral shame,” Libal said. “I hope it does not take us that long to recognize this round of family detention and family separation at the border is a moral tragedy.”

How Teach for America Evolved Into an Arm of the Charter School Movement-Pt 1

As part of Teach for America Week, Treasurer Rosie Rios was a guest teacher at Springarn Senior High School in Washington, D.C. via US Treasury.

By Annie Waldman for ProPublica.

When the Walton Family Foundation announced in 2013 that it was donating $20 million to Teach For America to recruit and train nearly 4,000 teachers for low-income schools, its press release did not reveal the unusual terms for the grant.

Documents obtained by ProPublica show that the foundation, a staunch supporter of school choice and Teach For America’s largest private funder, was paying $4,000 for every teacher placed in a traditional public school — and $6,000 for every one placed in a charter school. The two-year grant was directed at nine cities where charter schools were sprouting up, including New Orleans; Memphis, Tennessee; and Los Angeles.

The gift’s purpose was far removed from Teach For America’s original mission of alleviating teacher shortages in traditional public schools. It was intended to “generate a longer-term leadership pipeline that advances the education movement, providing a source of talent for policy, advocacy and politics, as well as quality schools and new entrepreneurial ventures,” according to internal grant documents.

The incentives corresponded to a shift in Teach For America’s direction. Although only 7% of students go to charter schools, Teach For America sent almost 40% of its 6,736 teachers to them in 2018 — up from 34% in 2015 and 13% in 2008. In some large cities, charter schools employ the majority of TFA teachers: 54% in Houston, 58% in San Antonio and at least 70% in Los Angeles.

Established nearly 30 years ago to tap idealistic graduates of elite universities to teach at traditional public schools in high-poverty areas, Teach For America has evolved into an informal but vital ally of the charter school movement. Not only does it place a disproportionate number of its teachers in charter schools, but the organization and its affiliated groups also have become reliant on the support of the Walton Foundation and other school choice advocates, including a daughter of billionaire Michael Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor. As board members of Teach For America’s offshoot leadership organization, which gives to the political campaigns of former TFA teachers, Emma Bloomberg and a Walton family member have supplemented the organization’s contributions to charter school proponents with their own donations.

“There’s no question that Teach For America as it evolved became joined at the hip to a large degree with the national education reform movement. I suspect that some of this was coordinated in part with funders who are active in the Teach For America funding and the charter and reform activities,” said Jeffrey Henig, a professor at the Teachers College, Columbia University, and author of a book about education research and charter school policy. “These billionaire school reformers and the foundations with which they are allied really have become much more sophisticated in the way they strategically use their funding.”

Teach For America cautioned its public school teachers against participating in recent teacher strikes in Oakland, California, and Los Angeles. Ava Marinelli, one of just 35 Teach For America teachers in the Los Angeles traditional public schools, joined the picket line anyway.

“With the level of divisiveness between charter and public schools, Teach For America has aligned with the charter school agenda,” she said in a recent interview. “This shows with their donors and who their partners are.” Teach For America said that it took no stance on whether its teachers should strike, but that the terms of their AmeriCorps funding prohibited involvement with organized labor.

Teach For America CEO Elisa Villanueva Beard said that donors don’t sway its approach. “We don’t have any one funder that is more than 5% of our overall budget,” Beard said. “We are very focused on what are our objectives, what is our mission, what are our values and what are the needs of the community.” She said that current grants to Teach For America from the Walton Foundation and other organizations don’t favor charter schools over traditional public schools.

She said that the organization does not have a national placement strategy and that where corps members teach is determined by the needs of regional partners. “Every last strategy question is answered locally,” Beard said. “Our interest is just to make sure that we are working to ensure that we meet our partners’ needs, are serving the students who need us most and are able to advance the needle for opportunity for them.”

Both push and pull factors have fostered Teach For America’s shift in direction. Since 2016, school districts in San Francisco; Jacksonville, Florida; and Houston have decided to end their contracts with Teach For America, citing, among other reasons, its teachers’ relatively low retention rate. At the same time, Teach For America and the charter school movement share a similar goal: promoting innovation by streamlining bureaucracy. Teach For America’s alumni have started some of the nation’s largest charter networks, including KIPP, Rocketship Education, IDEA and YES Prep.

Whichever type of school they serve in, Teach For America’s teachers devote their intelligence and energy to helping low-income and minority students and closing the nation’s unrelenting achievement gap. But its metamorphosis reflects a broader trend: As nonunion charter schools have gained acceptance in the past 20 years, political support for traditional public schools and teacher unions has eroded.

While both the Obama and Trump administrations have backed charter schools, the appointment of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who once called the traditional public education system a “dead end,” fractured the political consensus. The issue divides candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination. Bernie Sanders has called for a moratorium on federal funding of charters until a national review of their growth is conducted. Sanders, Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren have criticized for-profit charter schools, with Sanders advocating an outright ban.

Other candidates, such as Cory Booker and Beto O’Rourke, are sympathetic to charters. As Newark’s mayor, Booker raisedmillions in private funds for education reforms, including the expansion of charter schools. O’Rourke, whose wife started a charter school, has called them a “good idea” for encouraging competition and innovation.

As a Princeton University senior in 1989, Wendy Kopp had a radical idea to curb the teacher shortages plaguing America’s least resourced public school classrooms: Send them the country’s brightest college graduates.

“We take all of these promising future leaders and have their first two years be teaching in low-income communities, instead of working in banks,” Kopp said. “I thought that would change everything. It would change the consciousness of the country.”

Within a year, Kopp’s idea became Teach For America, which recruits new graduates from top colleges, trains them for five weeks, places them in schools nationwide and mentors them during a two-year classroom commitment.

Fueled by Kopp’s prolific fundraising, the nonprofit grew quickly. In 2000, it raised $25 million from private donors, government grants and foundations, which supported about 1,600 new corps members a year. By 2016, its contributions and grants rose to $245 million with an endowment of about $208 million, enough for 3,500 new members a year. Today, Teach For America ranks among the 100 largest nonprofits in the country.

The charter school movement, which arose soon after Teach For America’s founding, was booming as well. Publicly funded but privately managed, and regarded by some proponents as a way to fix a failing education system weighed down by unions and bureaucracy, charter schools nearly tripled in enrollment from 2006 to 2016.

Christina Animashaun/Vox for Billionaires are spending their fortunes reshaping America’s schools. It isn’t working.

While Teach For America has received more than $40 million annually in government grants, according to the recent tax filings, some of its largest private donors also bankroll charter schools. Over the years, these backers — including Greg Penner, Walmart’s board chairman and a Walton family member by marriage; Arthur Rock, a retired Silicon Valley entrepreneur; and Eli Broad, a Los Angeles philanthropist — have cycled through Teach For America’s board. Together, the three tycoons and their family foundations have doled out atleast $200 million to Teach For America.

“There are only so many donors and Teach For America is probably going after all of them, certainly whether they have a charter agenda or not, but many of them are very supportive of charters,” Kopp said.

Rock said in an email that he devotes almost all of his time and philanthropy to supporting K-12 education. “I support those organizations which have a proven record of helping children,” he said. Penner declined to comment, and Broad did not respond to questions related to his support of the organization.

Teach For America has long maintained that it does not prefer charter schools. “We believe in public education,” the organization states on a webpage devoted to combating criticism. “We’re not concerned about whether kids (or teachers) go to traditional district schools or public charter schools or innovative magnet schools, and TFA takes no institutional position on school governance.”

Marc Sternberg, a former corps member, now runs K-12 education for the Walton Family Foundation, which has given more than $100 million to Teach For America over the years. He said the foundation has a “bedrock partnership” with Teach For America. To Sternberg, the missions of the two organizations are intertwined: expanding educational opportunity, and options, for children.

“I was placed in a school that was pretty dysfunctional,” said Sternberg, reflecting on his Teach For America experience at a traditional public school in the South Bronx in the late 1990s. “It lacked a leadership thesis that is necessary for organizational success. The entrepreneur walks into that environment, and sees all the great things, and develops an understanding of the problem statement and then wants to do something about it.”

While Sternberg said that the Walton foundation is “agnostic” about the types of schools it funds, the foundation has been one of the most generous supporters of charter schools, having spent more than $385 million to help launch and sustain about a quarter of the nation’s charter schools since 1997. In 2016, the foundation announced that it would spend an additional $1 billion to support charter schools, expand school choice and develop “pipelines of talent.”

The foundation’s 2013-15 grant paid more for placing TFA teachers in charter schools, Sternberg said in an email, because “we wanted to ensure that the growing number of charter schools had access to high-quality educators given increased demand from communities.” Its current grants to TFA provide equal funding for teachers at charter and traditional public schools, he said.

Today, in most of the cities targeted by the 2013 grant, TFA partners with more charter schools than traditional public schools, according to AmeriCorps data. In Indianapolis and greater Los Angeles, about two-thirds of TFA’s partner schools are charters. In New Orleans, where nearly all of the schools are charters, all of TFA’s corps members are assigned to charter schools. In the past five years, the proportion of TFA teachers placed in charter schools has increased even as the raw numbers have gone down, reflecting an overall decrease in corps members.

Another major donor to both Teach For America and charter schools is the Doris & Donald Fisher Fund, created by the founders of The Gap. In 2009, the fund gave $10 million over five years “to continue Teach For America’s role as a pipeline of teachers and leaders in the charter school movement,” according to an internal agreement.

In 1994, two Teach For America alumni founded the Knowledge is Power Program, now one of the nation’s largest charter school networks. As chief executive of the KIPP Foundation, Kopp’s husband, Richard Barth, has overseen the network’s expansion.

“Leadership is critical, and so we have been very involved with Teach For America, which is an organization that has really given birth to KIPP and to many of the top charter school organizations around the country,” the Fishers’ son, John, said in a filmed 2012 interview. “The human pipeline — the pipeline of top talent — has really been accelerated through the success of Teach For America.”

As of 2012, a third of KIPP’s teachers were Teach For America corps members and alumni. KIPP did not provide more recent figures. “You look at the percentage of the principals and teachers at KIPP and it’s clear that it’s a pipeline,” Kopp said.

As school superintendents and state education directors, TFA alumni have pushed to expand charters. In 2011, former corps member John White became superintendent of the state-run Recovery School District, which oversaw most of New Orleans’ schools. He’s now the state superintendent of education. Over the same period, charter schools in the city and across the state have proliferated. The last traditional public schools in New Orleans are set to close or begin a transition to charter control by the end of the year, and by 2022, all of the city’s schools will be charters.

Cami Anderson, a Teach For America alum and former employee, was a key adviser to Cory Booker in his unsuccessful 2002 campaign for mayor of Newark, New Jersey. In 2011, when Booker was mayor, she became Newark’s superintendent of schools. She reorganized the district, which led to mass layoffs of public school teachers and an increase in charter enrollment.

Under Teach For America alum Kevin Huffman, who served as Tennessee commissioner of education from 2011 to 2015, the number of charter schools there doubled. The state’s current commissioner, Penny Schwinn, was also a TFA corps member. In Washington, D.C., two charter-friendly Teach For America alumni have led the district over the past decade: Michelle Rhee and Kaya Henderson.

Eric Guckian, a former Teach For America corps member, headed the organization’s North Carolina chapter, and he later pushed for more charter schools as a senior adviser for education to the state’s governor. He said propelling TFA alumni into positions of power was always the plan.

“The promise of Teach For America, when I was pitching it to potential donors, was that all these kids are going to turn into leaders and that has manifested itself,” Guckian said.

President Barack Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan visit a classroom at the Pathways in Technology Early College High School (P-TECH) in Brooklyn, N.Y., Oct. 25, 2013. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Not all of Teach For America’s alumni leaders favor charter school expansion. After teaching for more than two decades in traditional public schools in Compton and Los Angeles, Alex Caputo-Pearl was elected to lead the local union, United Teachers Los Angeles.

“There are a lot of very good people who are attracted to the program and do good work,” said Pearl, who joined Teach For America in 1990. “I was in a classroom because nobody would be there if I wasn’t there.”

But, he said, Teach For America’s agenda has shifted. In Los Angeles, where about a quarter of students are enrolled in charter schools, Teach For America has become the “main contributor to the charterization and privatization of public schools, rather than helping to address the teacher shortage in public district schools,” he said.

At ICEF Inglewood Middle Charter Academy, in a low-income and predominantly black and Hispanic neighborhood in Los Angeles, five of the school’s eleven teachers are TFA members, including English teacher Joy McCreary. One morning in May, she peppered her seventh graders with questions about a passage they had read on the photographer Eadweard Muybridge.

“And what was Muybridge trying to find out by photographing a horse running?” she asked a student in the second row of her classroom, which was decorated with white lights strung against curtained windows, student projects and motivational messages promoting humility and determination.

“If a horse could fly,” the student responded. McCreary nodded.

McCreary grew up in the Los Angeles suburbs; both of her parents were teachers. In June 2018, she graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, with degrees in international development, political science and German studies, and joined Teach For America. Her five weeks of training included coursework and teaching at a summer school program. Unlike teachers at traditional public schools, who typically gain certification by completing a qualified prep program and passing a standardized test, charter school teachers and TFA corps members may not need traditional certification. Over the years, TFA has successfully lobbied state and federal legislators for a classroom fast track for its members.

“Teaching is very sink or swim,” McCreary said. “The best way to learn how to teach is just to teach.”

When McCreary joined Teach For America, she didn’t care what kind of school she ended up in. Now she’s glad it’s a charter school.

“Charter schools place a much higher focus on teacher development,” McCreary said. At traditional district schools in Los Angeles, she added, “You get these old, battle-ax teachers that have been there forever and are doing the same things every year and are not necessarily trying out new things or being challenged to try new things.”

Natalie Kieffer, the principal, also participated in Teach For America. After three years of teaching at a traditional public school in Los Angeles, Kieffer was laid off during the financial crisis and moved to a charter school. Within a decade, she rose from teacher to principal.

“There were opportunities for growth that I wouldn’t have been offered in [the Los Angeles Unified School District],” Kieffer said. “Being laid off was a blessing in disguise.”

The Inglewood school district recently revoked the academy’s charter due to low academic performance, forcing it to close at the end of the year. Kieffer, who did not respond to emailed questions about the closure, will become an assistant principal at a charter high school next year. McCreary will move to another Los Angeles charter chain, the Alliance College-Ready network.

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