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Sunday, June 24, 2018

Those FEMA camps, being used for unaccompanied migrant children's detention; or whatever you call the facilities -- without understanding things fully and with media coverage high on rhetoric and short on actual fact -- wha's 'appening?

Start with Obama, 2014; and inattention to a situation urged then as news, by one Congressman, per CNN. No legs grown from that, then, Democrat critics of practices then being few if any. Unlike now.

An open invitation to readers to try on their own: Find another mainstream media coverage item online from around 2014 - not Alex Jones stuff among non-mainstream "FEMA camp speculations" which are replete on the web, but instead looking at the Obama administration coverage by the likes of NYT, HuffPo, WaPo, etc.

The CNN item is all that was found in Crabgrass searching, which admittedly was not tediously pursued.

NOW: Strib carrying a June 23, NY Times feed, a kind of follow the money thing, but hardly encompassing. Both links given in case a reader wants to do a compare/contrast look at possible editing decision making. NYT version, having this:

HARLINGEN, Tex. — The business of housing, transporting and watching over migrant children detained along the southwest border is not a multimillion-dollar business.

It’s a billion-dollar one.

The nonprofit Southwest Key Programs has won at least $955 million in federal contracts since 2015 to run shelters and provide other services to immigrant children in federal custody. Its shelter for migrant boys at a former Walmart Supercenter in South Texas has been the focus of nationwide scrutiny, but Southwest Key is but one player in the lucrative, secretive world of the migrant-shelter business. About a dozen contractors operate more than 30 facilities in Texas alone, with numerous others contracted for about 100 shelters in 16 other states.

If there is a migrant-shelter hub in America, then it is perhaps in the four-county Rio Grande Valley region of South Texas, where about a dozen shelters occupy former stores, schools and medical centers. They are some of the region’s biggest employers, though what happens inside is often highly confidential: One group has employees sign nondisclosure agreements, more a fixture of the high-stakes corporate world than of nonprofit child-care centers.

[...] President Trump’s order on Wednesday calling for migrant families to be detained together likely means millions more in contracts for private shelter operators, construction companies and defense contractors.

A small network of private prison companies already is operating family detention centers in Texas and Pennsylvania, and those facilities are likely to expand under the new presidential directive, should it stand up to legal review, analysts said.

The range of contractors working in the migrant-shelter industry varies widely.

BCFS, a global network of nonprofit groups, has received at least $179 million in federal contracts since 2015 under the government’s so-called unaccompanied alien children program, designed to handle migrant youths who arrive in the country without a parent or other family member.

[...] But several large defense contractors and security firms are also building a presence in the system, including General Dynamics, the global aerospace and defense company, and MVM Inc., which until 2008 contracted with the government to supply guards in Iraq. MVM recently put up job postings seeking “bilingual travel youth care workers” in the McAllen area of South Texas. It described the jobs as providing care to immigrant children “while you are accompanying them on domestic flights and via ground transportation to shelters all over the country.”

The migrant-shelter business has been booming since family separations began on a large scale last month along the southwest border.

For years, including during the Obama administration, contractors housed children who were caught illegally crossing the border unaccompanied by a parent or guardian. After the new policy, the contractors put in new beds and expanded beyond their licensed capacities to house the growing numbers of children the government separated from their families.

[...] Many of these contractors, including Southwest Key, whose president and chief executive, Juan Sánchez, has been a well-known and politically connected figure in South Texas for years, [...] Critics have released tax records showing Mr. Sánchez’s compensation — more than $770,000 in 2015 alone — and his organization’s usually under-the-radar efforts to open new shelters have become pitched public battles. In Houston, a number of Democratic officials, including Mayor Sylvester Turner, called on Mr. Sánchez to abandon plans to turn a former homeless shelter into a new migrant youth shelter near downtown. [...]

Okay, there is one guy making money as if he were a UnitedHealth senior executive, a fact. Beyond that, all heat, no light, is vexing. Chris Hayes on MSNBC blathering, or a guest talking head doing the same, while images of young dark haired people behind chain link are featured, is fear mongering without a conscience.

Again, Wha's 'appening?

Finally, those saying abolish ICE are doing a real glide and slide over the "C" part of: Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Surely the abolition argument is not aiming to want open borders for containers full of contraband grenade launchers and such.

Also, the more concentration on the "I" part, the less resources will be going to policing the "C" dimensions where arguably RFID and database stuff should be enhanced at ports to include, for example, radiation detection, at a minimum. If DEA only gets single digit interception percentages of meth shipments, at least there is some attention, but the point is how much is being spent and how effective is the spending? And illicit drug policing is kind of silly when Big Pharma has created an opioid crisis with no pharma executives yet into the slammer over it. Something is unbalanced that way; the expensive-suit drug pushers getting the "Get Out of Jail Free" Monopoly card. And Afghanistan occupation over the poppy fields by U.S. military, is that a part of the opioid crisis?

As headlined, "Wha's 'appening?"

Is there any cost/benefit analysis in the public domain on the money going into ICE, and the benefit return from it? Chris Matthews, a/k/a Chicken Little does not cut it. And how do you do "benefit" valuation for incarceration/detention, which ever it is and perhaps, just perhaps, different things at different sites?

So; 2014, Obama days, not big news then, because . . . hysteria needs imminent elections? Is there another, better answer? Steven Miller pushing Trump into pushing things to a head? Damn the expense, November is months away?

Then from January 2017, a perhaps premature TYT short item, which makes a fine closing of this post.

______________UPDATE_______________
On further search there was coverage during the Obama years, e.g., CNN again, here, but the frenzy seems more focused now under family separation practices as recently adopted. It goes a step beyond the unaccompanied minor migrant detention practice of the past. Actual number of separations seems absent from reporting, and lower ages of separations is unclear. What seems afoot is a situation where the can got kicked down the road. This report suggests partisan gridlock existed during Obama years.

With GOP control of both houses and the presidency, for a year and a half, nothing has happened beyond the situation worsening. This current item suggests GOP opinions in Congress is ranging in ways that make consensus uncertain. Cold feed lead to inaction, but kicking the can further down the road seems more difficult for the GOP majorities to get away with. As with healthcare, there is much bellowing with the in-control party, the Republicans incapable of governing things to a solution of any kind. Never mind one where Dem Reps could sign on a bipartisan basis.

Things are left hanging, twisting in the wind, and frenzy now might easily produce a greatly suboptimal resolution. As to what would be optimal, nobody seems to know and within the public there appears no consensus. SNAFU.

What seems clear, FEMA death camps are outside of the actual problems, more a distant worry among a segment, but not nearly a reality.

Emergency housing and housing detainees are necessary steps; but FEMA has jurisdiction over emergency relief, not border issues.

___________FURTHER UPDATE___________
What seems apparent is that the Mexican government is satisfied with transshipment of Central Americans from their southern border to their northern border, with little incentive for the Central Americans to want to stay in Mexico. Whether current NAFTA agreement, what is left of it at this point, provides immigrant terms and conditions is for others to answer; but relations between Trump and Mexico currently are not ideal, making Mexican agreement unlikely with anything Trump and Miller decide to want to ask. The term "Mexican standoff" from the past likely is not a current politically correct usage, but "impasse" seems too inadequate a term. Interestingly, the man is not bellowing, "Build me a wall." Fantasy that way being absent is good. It would be counterproductive at this point to resurrect that rhetoric, not that such an understanding would influence some quarters. It always was a counterproductive fantasy wall concept except for getting Trump elected because dumb people liked such a simplistic rhetorical device as was employed to motivate their votes.