Border Patrol detains adults with no end - until lawyers sue

By NOMAAN MERCHANT
July 30, 2019

HOUSTON (AP) — In early June, twin brothers from Guatemala let their sister in California know they were about to cross the U.S.-Mexico border. Then they vanished for almost a month.

She couldn’t find them in online databases and the local Guatemalan consulate had no information. She feared they had been kidnapped or killed.

It took three weeks to find them: inside jam-packed U.S. Border Patrol cells in South Texas, with no access to phones or lawyers. One of them was inside the fenced-in pens that Vice President Mike Pence visited in July. Only after the lawyers sued were both brothers transferred out.

It’s a pattern that immigration lawyers say has repeated itself for several weeks: Adults are detained in packed Border Patrol cells — malnourished, poorly treated and incommunicado — only to be moved within hours once the government is sued on their behalf.

One group of lawyers has filed lawsuits on behalf of the spouses, siblings and relatives of 18 migrants — all of whom were removed from their cells almost immediately.

The lawyers believe the government is trying to avoid a federal judge issuing a sweeping order that would require the release of potentially thousands of people detained by the Border Patrol or changes to improve the conditions in cells that government inspectors and advocates have said are squalid.

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Hundreds of black deaths in Red Summer ignored century later

By JESSE J. HOLLAND
July 23, 2019

America in the summer of 1919 ran red with blood from racial violence, and yet today, 100 years later, not many people know it even happened.

It flowed in small towns like Elaine, Arkansas, in medium-size places such as Annapolis, Maryland, and Syracuse, New York, and in big cities like Washington and Chicago. Hundreds of African American men, women and children were burned alive, shot, lynched or beaten to death by white mobs. Thousands saw their homes and businesses burned to the ground and were driven out, many never to return.

It was branded “Red Summer” because of the bloodshed and amounted to some of the worst white-on-black violence in U.S. history.

Beyond the lives and family fortunes lost, it had far-reaching repercussions, contributing to generations of black distrust of white authority. But it also galvanized blacks to defend themselves and their neighborhoods with fists and guns; reinvigorated civil rights organizations like the NAACP and led to a new era of activism; gave rise to courageous reporting by black journalists; and influenced the generation of leaders who would take up the fight for racial equality decades later.

“The people who were the icons of the civil rights movement were raised by the people who survived Red Summer,” said Saje Mathieu, a history professor at the University of Minnesota.

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BUSINESS NEWS JULY 8, 2019 / 12:30 PM / UPDATED AN HOUR AGO

SunTrust to stop financing companies that manage private prisons

Imani Moise
3 MIN READ

NEW YORK (Reuters) - SunTrust Banks Inc (STI.N) said on Monday it will not provide future financing to companies that manage private prisons and immigration holding facilities, becoming the latest lender to distance itself from a sector that has become tied to the Trump administration’s immigration policies.

“This decision was made after extensive consideration of the views of our stakeholders on this deeply complex issue,” the Atlanta-based company said in a statement.

SunTrust is one of several banks that have underwritten bonds or syndicated loans for at least one of the major private prison operators in the United States, CoreCivic Inc and GEO Group Inc.

In 2018, banks, including Bank of America Corp (BAC.N) and Wells Fargo & Co (WFC.N), raised roughly $1.8 billion in debt over three deals for CoreCivic and GEO Group, according to Refinitiv data.

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Social security workers call new Trump administration contract ‘union-busting’

New contract will reduce the time allotted to employees for union activity from 250,000 hours annually to 50,000

Michael Sainato
Wed 3 Jul 2019 07.00 BST Last modified on Wed 3 Jul 2019 07.03 BST

Workers at the Social Security Administration (SSA) say that the Trump administration has imposed a new contract on their 45,000 workers that could effectively shut down their union and are warning that the same thing could be tried elsewhere in the federal government as part of a crackdown on the labor movement.

A federal panel, consisting mainly of Trump-appointed members, issued a decision in May to impose a new union contract for the 45,000 federal employees at the SSA. The move came despite a federal judge’s decision last year to strike down most provisions in similarly issued orders for violating collective bargaining rights for federal employees.

The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), says the new contract the panel decided to impose chronically hampers its work at the agency, which mainly pays out retirement and disability benefits. The SSA is the first major federal agency up for a union contract renewal since Donald Trump’s executive orders were issued last year, and it is the AFGE’s second-largest bargaining unit.

“If the agency is successful in implementing this panel order, it will decimate our ability to represent workers all over the country,” said Rich Couture, an agency employee for more than 30 years and the union’s chief negotiator.

The provisions in the new contract will reduce the time allotted to SSA employees for union activity from 250,000 hours annually to 50,000 hours and ban all workers from using government property to conduct union activities, such as office spaces and government emails and holding files on government computers or in offices. It will also grant management the discretion to eliminate remote work.

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Ocasio-Cortez says dispute with Border Patrol agents started after one tried to take a ‘stealth selfie’

By Katie Mettler July 2 at 10:42 AM

After a day spent tweeting about the behavior of Border Patrol agents and the facilities they manage, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) took to the platform again late Monday night to respond to accusations in a news report that she “screamed” at officers in a “threatening manner” while touring one Texas site with other members of Congress.

The report in the Washington Examiner quoted two unnamed witnesses who claimed that they, along with 40 other people, saw Ocasio-Cortez “crying and screaming and yelling” at a Border Patrol facility in El Paso. The report claimed that agents wanted to respond but were held back because she is a lawmaker.

“To these CBP officers saying they felt ‘threatened by me,’ ” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted in response. “ .?.?. They confiscated my phone, and they were all armed. I’m 5’4”. They’re just upset I exposed their inhumane behavior.”

In a statement Tuesday, the congresswoman’s communications office called the Examiner’s report an “inaccurate depiction of events.”

“The Congresswoman spoke sternly to a CBP agent that tried to take a stealth selfie with the Congresswoman in a mocking manner, despite the gravity of the situation,” the statement said.

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