Sunday Reads: Please @UNHumanRights investigate US for the inhumane treatment of children…missing, abused and imprisoned at the border…

I used the word US, for both the Country… the “U.S.” and the “us”…as in we people…this thing we call ourselves. Americans.

What a disgrace!

Thank you Kamala. For giving a voice to these lost and abused and imprisoned children. Because the silence around you is deafening.

From this Mashable link: We’ve become normalized to Trump’s tweets. Not this one.

Nowadays, it takes a lot for Americans to become incensed about Trump’s tweets. We need at least one World War threat or nuclear weapon tangent to wake up and realize we’re seconds away from doomsday.

The President still has that magical ability to completely eviscerate our joy. Take Saturday’s tweet, where Trump — in one of his worst lies yet — had the audacity to complain that Democrats were responsible for separating parents from their children at the border.

This is the tweet of which they speak:

That is an outright lie.

The Mashable article also points to this tweet by Amee Vanderpool:

This is a letter written to the Human Rights Branch of the UN, by the CEO of RINJ…an organization that:

…RINJ Women as a Civil Society Organization seek sustainable human development from a position of perceived feminine helplessness rudely imposed on women by a patriarch to which women traditionally acquiesced.So yes, we rise up above the misconception of weakness to love & support women and children, especially the most vulnerable. While we strive for all our rights we encourage others to joinus.

I am glad that this non-profit group is bringing this latest tRump administration atrocity to the attention of the UN. I just wish that there was some of those with more, and I am going to say it, power to move the UN to investigate the human rights crisis going on at our southern border. Where are the outcries and official demands for an investigation into human rights abuses from say, important Democrat congress people? Foreign policy wonks? Other nations? (As I write this, there has not been any commentary…btw, aside from Kamala Harris.)

Nothing.

(Well, I am calling for an investigation myself…)

Twitter has been busy, from the Mashable link up top:

Now, social media is asking: #WhereAreTheChildren? The hashtag was a constant presence on Twitter all day on Saturday as people demanded answers on the missing children.

https://twitter.com/Goss30Goss/status/1000482458381553671

That tweet there cites something of interest.

Take a look at this: How the Court works –International Criminal Court

Emphasis mine…

The crimes

The Court’s founding treaty, called the Rome Statute, grants the ICC jurisdiction over four main crimes.

First, the crime of genocide is characterised by the specific intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnic, racial or religious group by killing its members or by other means: causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; or forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

There is also this:

Second, the ICC can prosecute crimes against humanity, which are serious violations committed as part of a large-scale attack against any civilian population. The 15 forms of crimes against humanity listed in the Rome Statute include offences such as murder, rape, imprisonment, enforced disappearances, enslavement – particularly of women and children, sexual slavery, torture, apartheid and deportation.

The two other crimes the court can prosecute, war crimes and crimes of aggression can be found at the link above. I am mostly concerned with the first two. Genocide and crimes against humanity:

Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group-

Imprisonment, enforced disappearances, enslavement – particularly of women and children, sexual slavery…deportation-

Almost 1,500 Migrant Children Placed in Homes by the U.S. Government Went Missing Last Year

Federal officials lost track of nearly 1,500 migrant children last year after a government agency placed the minors in the homes of adult sponsors in communities across the country, according to testimony before a Senate subcommittee Thursday.

The Health and Human Services Department has a limited budget to track the welfare of vulnerable unaccompanied minors, and realized that 1,475 children could not be found after making follow-up calls to check on their safety, an agency official said.

Federal officials came under fire two years ago after rolling back child protection policies meant for minors fleeing violence in Central America. In a follow-up hearing on Thursday, senators said that the agencies had failed to take full responsibility for their care and had delayed crucial reforms needed to keep them from falling into the hands of human traffickers.

A few more examples to prove that tRump and his Administration, as well as anyone who does not officially speak out against this is complicit in crimes against humanity:

Border Patrol Kicked, Punched Migrant Children, Threatened Some with Sexual Abuse, ACLU Alleges

Migrant children under the care of United States Customs and Border Protection (CBP) were allegedly beaten, threatened with sexual violence and repeatedly assaulted while in custody between 2009 and 2014, according to a report released Wednesday from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the International Human Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School.

Based on 30,000 pages of documents obtained through a records request, the report includes gruesome, detailed accusations of physical and mental abuse at the hands of officers. The claims were filed by unaccompanied minors, most of whom hailed from El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico and Honduras. CBP officials have contested large swaths of the report, telling Newsweek that many of the allegations have been investigated and are “false.”

Border authorities were accused of kicking a child in the ribs and forcing a 16-year-old girl to “spread her legs” for an aggressive body search. Other children accused officers of punching a child in the head three times, running over a 17-year-old boy and denying medical care to a pregnant teen, who later had a stillbirth.

Mitra Ebadolahi, ACLU Border Litigation Project staff attorney, said the allegations describe a law enforcement system “marked by brutality and lawlessness.” The organization also accused Border Protection officials of failing to “meaningfully investigate” the allegations detailed in the public records.

I know this is a repeat…but follow this thread:

And don’t forget that ICE has requested to destroy the complaints of sexual abuse since last year:

ICE Plans to Start Destroying Records of Immigrant Abuse, Including Sexual Assault and Deaths in Custody | American Civil Liberties Union

Immigration and Customs Enforcement recently asked the National Archives and Record Administration (NARA), which instructs federal agencies on how to maintain records, to approve its timetable for retaining or destroying records related to its detention operations. This may seem like a run-of-the-mill government request for record-keeping efficiency. It isn’t. An entire paper trail for a system rife with human rights and constitutional abuses is at stake.

1,224 Complaints Reveal a Staggering Pattern of Sexual Abuse in Immigration Detention. Half of Those Accused Worked for ICE.

The reports obtained by The Intercept include 1,224 complaints filed between 2010 and September 2017, primarily about incidents that took place in ICE custody. But in earlier responses, officials with the DHS Office of Inspector General indicated that the office received some 33,000 complaints between 2010 and 2016 alleging a wide range of abuses in immigration detention. The OIG provided records documenting investigations for just 2 percent of the complaints it shared with The Intercept.

But the sheer number of complaints — despite serious obstacles in the path of those filing them, as well as the patterns they reveal about mistreatment in facilities nationwide — suggest that sexual assault and harassment in immigration detention are not only widespread but systemic, and enabled by an agency that regularly fails to hold itself accountable. While the reports obtained by The Intercept are only a fraction of those filed, they shed light on a system that operates largely in secrecy, and they help hint at the magnitude of the abuse, and the incompetence and complicity of the agency tasked with the safety of the 40,000 women, men, and children it detains each day in more than 200 jails, prisons, and detention centers across the country.

Not sure if they are actually destroying the complaints….The New ICE Age: An Agency Unleashed | by Tina Vasquez | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books

More stories of ICE’s growing powers and abuses continue to emerge. This includes ICE’s push to become an intelligence agency, which would grant the agency unprecedented access to vastly more information, and it request to destroy records of in-custody deaths and sexual assaults—both of which measures have received support from the Trump administration. There are growing signs that the agency is not just flexing its new muscles, but has gone rogue. In Philadelphia alone, according to reporting by ProPublica, there have been numerous allegations of ICE agents’ engaging in racial profiling, conducting warrantless searches, detaining people without probable cause, fabricating evidence, and, in one instance, soliciting a bribe.

The former senior DHS official I spoke with said his “overarching fear” is that, with Trump’s help, ICE is laying the groundwork for institutionalizing its independence, making it immune from Washington oversight: in essence, each ICE field office would operate as its own district with its own rules. If ICE acquires that sort of autonomy and power, it will be incredibly difficult to restore oversight, control, and accountability to the elected federal government in Washington, D.C.

“The American public needs to begin wrapping its head around the disproportionate political power that ICE wields,” said the former DHS official. “The most extreme environment isn’t extreme enough for them. Under Trump, ICE can do more damage than we’ve ever seen.”

The best thing would be for you to read that entire New York Book Review article…by Tina Vasquez. There is a lot of information there, from the immigrants point of view. Please take a look and read it.

I think that covers many of the crimes the ICC can prosecute…I would like to see some investigations into the Trump Administration…for crimes against humanity…and human rights abuses. It is too disgusting to go on with the post, the rest of today’s thread is cartoons.

That disgusting uh…disrespectful treatment of the US Flag are a men’s bathing suit found at my local Walmart.

Bruce Plante Cartoon: Harvey Weinstein gets arrested: 05/26/2018 Cartoon by Bruce Plante

05/26/2018 Cartoon by David Cohen

05/26/2018 Cartoon by Joel Pett

Fear and loathing : 05/25/2018 Cartoon by Ed Hall

05/25/2018 Cartoon by Signe Wilkinson

Finally, I want to end with this,

‘I’m not reading any more of these — they’re lies’: MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace refuses to read Trump tweets on air

MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace, said President Donald Trump’s lies are getting out of control and they are more like “fairy tales and fantasy” at this point.

On Friday afternoon, Wallace began catching up with Trump’s latest early morning tweet storm, reading them to her panel and viewers at home.

“It started with Donald Trump making up about the FBI spies implanted in his campaign,” Wallace said. “It exploded to the point where the Justice Department had to brief lawmakers about what actually happened. And finally today, after those classified meetings where the only public statements we’ve heard have shot down the original allegation, the conspiracy theory seems to have been largely debunked for everyone but Donald Trump and his allies.”

Wallace then read off President Trump’s tweets about Russia.

You can go to the link to read the lying sack of shit’s tweets.

However, before she could finish reading the tweets, Wallace paused and said: “I’m not reading anymore of this, these are bold face lies.”

I wish more media people would do exactly what she did.

This is an open thread.