Patterico's Pontifications

6/21/2018

RIP Charles Krauthammer

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 7:23 pm



I haven’t watched much TV in general, or Fox News in particular, for quite some time. But the death of Charles Krauthammer still touched me because I used to be an avid fan of Special Report with Brit Hume and enjoyed watching Mr. Krauthammer on “the panel” many a night.

So while there are a lot of tributes out there, there’s nobody I’d rather hear from than Brit Hume. And here he is.

[Cross-posted at The Jury Talks Back.]

AP: Trump Trump Unrelated Alleged Abuse of Immigrant Children Trump Trump Trump

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 7:16 am



The AP reports on allegations of abuse of immigrant children at a federal detention center, making sure to draw a connection between the allegations and President Trump’s crackdown on illegal gang members:

Immigrant children as young as 14 housed at a juvenile detention center in Virginia say they were beaten while handcuffed and locked up for long periods in solitary confinement, left nude and shivering in concrete cells.

The abuse claims against the Shenandoah Valley Juvenile Center near Staunton, Virginia, are detailed in federal court filings that include a half-dozen sworn statements from Latino teens jailed there for months or years. Multiple detainees say the guards stripped them of their clothes and strapped them to chairs with bags placed over their heads.

“Whenever they used to restrain me and put me in the chair, they would handcuff me,” said a Honduran immigrant who was sent to the facility when he was 15 years old. “Strapped me down all the way, from your feet all the way to your chest, you couldn’t really move. … They have total control over you. They also put a bag over your head. It has little holes; you can see through it. But you feel suffocated with the bag on.”

In addition to the children’s first-hand, translated accounts in court filings, a former child-development specialist who worked inside the facility independently told The Associated Press this week that she saw kids there with bruises and broken bones they blamed on guards. She spoke on condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to publicly discuss the children’s cases.

In court filings, lawyers for the detention facility have denied all allegations of physical abuse.

Many of the children were sent there after U.S. immigration authorities accused them of belonging to violent gangs, including MS-13. President Donald Trump has repeatedly cited gang activity as justification for his crackdown on illegal immigration.

Damn that Donald Trump and his mistreatment of immigrant children! This never would have happened under President Ob — say, when did all this stuff allegedly happen? 19 paragraphs down, we are given a hint:

The complaint filed by the nonprofit Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs recounts the story of an unnamed 17-year-old Mexican citizen apprehended at the southern border. The teen fled an abusive father and violence fueled by drug cartels to seek asylum in the United States in 2015.

After stops at facilities in Texas and New York, he was transferred to Shenandoah in April 2016 and diagnosed during an initial screening by a psychologist with three mental disorders, including depression. Besides weekly sessions speaking with a counselor, the lawsuit alleges the teen has received no further mental health treatment, such as medications that might help regulate his moods and behavior.

As a reminder, President Donald J. Trump was inaugurated on January 20, 2017 (to the biggest crowds ever!!!!!1!).

I should add that a reading of the complaint itself does not make it clear when these things allegedly happened — nor, frankly, does the identity of the President much matter, if they did. The allegations typically begin with vague phrases like “on one occasion….” These are only allegations, and the things the lawsuit alleges may have happened and they may not have. If they happened, they likely happened under both Obama and Trump — not just Obama, and not just Trump.

Perhaps more importantly, as the 10th paragraph of the article tells you, this has basically nothing to do with Trump’s family separation policy — oh wait, he doesn’t have a family separation policy, that’s just too much Big Media reading kicking in (wink) — with Trump’s policy of zero tolerance for immigration lawbreakers:

Most children held in the Shenandoah facility who were the focus of the abuse lawsuit were caught crossing the border illegally alone. They were not the children who have been separated from their families under the Trump administration’s recent policy and are now in the government’s care. But the facility there operates under the same program run by the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement. It was not immediately clear whether any separated children have been sent to Shenandoah Valley since the Trump administration in April announced its “zero tolerance” policy toward immigrant families, after the lawsuit was filed.

It was also not “immediately clear” why the word Obama appears nowhere in the story.

(H/t to @JammieWF via Allahpundit.)

UPDATE: The AP has since added a line to the story stating: “The incidents described in the lawsuit occurred from 2015 to 2018, during both the Obama and Trump administrations.” This was no doubt added after a conservative outcry over the way the story made it sound like a Trump administration issue. This is not how the story read this morning and I can prove it. Fortunately, the original version was still open in a tab on my computer when I got home today. You can read the text of the entire original version of the story here, where I cut and pasted it into a page. Here is what the relevant passage looked like this morning:

AP Story Original

And here is what it looks like now. Note the added language in the third paragraph, beginning with the words “In court filings”:

AP Story Revised

If you thought conservatives had simply overlooked that language, you were wrong. We hadn’t.

[Cross-posted at The Jury Talks Back.]


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