April 19, 2017
Page 7
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O PINION
Trump’s War on Urban ‘Carnage’ was a Ruse
Moves spell
trouble for
police reforms
e bony s laughter -J ohnson
One of President
Trump’s
favorite
themes is what he calls
“American
carnage”
— typified by “the vio-
lence” and “the gangs.”
To that end, he’s re-
peatedly
highlighted
the violence in Chicago.
A few days after he was inaugu-
rated, he even issued this warning
via Twitter: “If Chicago doesn’t fix
the horrible ‘carnage’ going on… I
will send in the Feds!”
Trump, a vocal supporter
of stop-and-frisk, additionally
by
pledged that his administration will
“stop the gangs and the violence”
and “stop the drugs from pouring
into our communities” by empow-
ering police offers.
To be sure, Chicago is facing a
uniquely violent moment in its his-
tory: The city witnessed
762 murders and 4,331
shooting victims in 2016
— more than in New
York and Los Angeles
combined. The homi-
cide rate was the highest
it’s been since 1996.
Yet the police are a
critical component of this violence.
A 2016 Justice Department inves-
tigation revealed scores of abuses
by Chicago police, from racial dis-
crimination to witness intimidation
to endangering civilians.
In a particularly memorable
anecdote from 2013, an off-duty
Chicago cop watched a man enter
a vacant building. Deeming him
suspicious, the officer pursued the
man. When confronted, the man
produced a shiny object, prompt-
ing the officer to fire his weapon,
killing the man on the spot.
As for the shiny object, it wasn’t
a gun: It was the man’s watch.
Despite not waiting for backup
and initiating a deadly confronta-
tion, the officer was put back on
the beat. Last November, the same
cop killed another man he claimed
had brandished a gun. No gun was
found.
Under the Obama administra-
tion, the federal government played
a key role in exposing abuses like
these in scores of local police de-
partments.
Yet Trump’s attorney gener-
al, Jeff Sessions, has promised to
“pull back on” suits against police
departments over civil rights viola-
tions. He recently ordered a review
of all reform arrangements the De-
partment of Justice reached with
local police under Obama, which
could imperil programs that have
been shown to produce enduring
positive changes.
Why? “It is not the responsibil-
ity of the federal government to
manage non-federal law enforce-
ment agencies,” Sessions insists.
All this exposes Trump’s prom-
ises to curb violence in America’s
cities to be what many suspected
all along: a meaningless ruse. After
all, when it comes to civil rights,
he’s actually pulling the feds out.
Need more evidence? The ad-
ministration has also proposed
depriving the Department of Jus-
Help Our Immigrant Brothers and Sisters
Harrowing
narratives of
detention
m arian W right e delman
The just concluded
holy season of Lent and
Easter in the Christian
calendar was a time to
reflect and act to help the
most vulnerable in our
midst.
With harsh assaults
on undocumented immigrants
and refugees who must fear every
knock on their door, many Amer-
ican citizen children are afraid to
go to school, afraid of being bul-
lied, and afraid to leave their par-
ents who might be arrested at any
moment.
In Texas, these real fears are in-
tensified with stories about build-
ing new walls on the border and
about children, like their brothers
and sisters, refugees from the vi-
olence of poverty and gangs and
drug lords, locked in residential
detention centers in their state.
A ban on crayons. That’s what
it came to at the visitors’ center
at the Karnes County Residential
Center in Karnes City, Texas, one
of three immigration detention
centers that Immigration and Cus-
toms Enforcement (ICE) currently
uses to house mothers and chil-
dren who’ve been stopped seeking
asylum in the United States.
Six volunteer lawyers who
work with detained families wrote
a letter to ICE explaining why
they liked to bring crayons when
by
they met with clients: “Having
children color and draw provides
a distraction for children while
their mothers relate incidents of
trauma, violence and abuse. Other
children sit outside the interview
rooms and draw at the tables, so
they are not forced to
listen to their mothers’
harrowing narratives
nor witness their moth-
ers’ fragile emotional
states during these in-
terviews.
But ICE determined
some of the children were doing
“damage” to tables and walls in
the visitors’ center while coloring.
The crayon ban was just another
blow to children already essential-
ly being housed as prisoners by
the federal government. The lat-
est memos from the Department
of Homeland Security outlining
plans for enforcing the executive
orders on immigration issued by
President Donald Trump mean the
numbers of children and mothers
being detained this way (in Amer-
ica) will only swell.
Family detention centers are
just one way current immigration
policies hurt children. The Karnes
County center is managed by ICE
but owned and operated by the
GEO Group, a $2 billion for-profit
private prison company that seeks
to double the number of people
it can hold there from its current
capacity of 532 beds. Across the
state, the Southwest Texas Fam-
ily Residential Center in Dilley,
Texas can hold 2,400 people. Also
managed by ICE, that center is
owned and operated by Correc-
tions Corporation of America, also
known as “CoreCivic,” a for-prof-
it company that makes upwards of
$260 million a year housing moth-
ers and children at a rate of $300 a
Providing Insurance and Financial Services
Home Office, Bloomington, Illinois 61710
Ernest J. Hill, Jr. Agent
4946 N. Vancouver Avenue,
Portland, OR 97217
503 286 1103 Fax 503 286 1146
ernie.hill.h5mb@statefarm.com
24 Hour Good Neighbor Service R
State Farm R
day, per detainee.
In December a Texas court
struck down a regulation that
would have allowed these two
for-profit detention centers to
obtain state child care licenses.
Children’s Defense Fund–Tex-
as Associate Director Dr. Laura
Guerra-Cardus, a medical doctor,
was among those who testified
that family jails are not child care
facilities and that children held
there with their mothers are not
physically or mentally safe. Bree
Bernwanger, managing attorney
of the Dilley Pro Bono Project,
commented, “Yet another court
has found that locking up children
and their parents is not a form of
‘child care.’ It’s time for ICE to
recognize that detaining fami-
lies is illegal and these facilities
should be closed.”
Following that ruling 460 wom-
en and children were released from
tice of over $1 billion in funding,
including major cuts to the Civil
Rights Division, which is in charge
of managing police reform. And
it’s attempting to vacate another
reform arrangement with the Bal-
timore Police Department, where
the last administration found many
similar civil rights abuses.
It’s no great surprise that
choosing an attorney general like
Sessions, another stop-and-frisk
proponent who’s complained that
civil rights protections undermine
police officers, spelled trouble for
police reform. Now trouble has
come — and it seems like more is
on its way.
Ebony Slaughter-Johnson is a
freelance writer whose work cov-
ers history, race, and the criminal-
ization of poverty. Distributed by
OtherWords.org.
the two Texas detention centers,
flooding immigrant support net-
works in a surprise move officials
said was unconnected to the loss
in court. Many of those women
and children had to be immedi-
ately hospitalized due to chronic
conditions and other health prob-
lems resulting from their detention
treatment. The centers have been
the source of a number of contro-
versies, including several alleged
sexual assault and abuse cases and
alleged use of solitary confinement
as punishment for hunger strikes at
the Dilley center. At the third ICE
family center, owned and operated
by Berks County, Penn., a group of
22 mothers imprisoned with their
children between 270 to 365 days
wrote a letter last year explaining
why they were starting a hunger
strike:
“We are already traumatized
from our countries of origin. We
risked our own lives and those of
c ontinued on p age 15
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