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#femmes #harcèlement_sexuel

Familias rotas, familias vaciadas

Es delgada y pequeña. No rebasa el 1.60. La habitación en la que duerme —en el segundo piso del albergue para veteranos deportados que creó Héctor Barajas— tiene una cama con un oso de peluche que ella misma confeccionó y una mesa para cuatro personas. La sonrisa que a veces asoma en su rostro nunca llega a sus ojos, oscuros y con marcadas ojeras. Se llama Yolanda Varona y tiene prohibido, de por vida, entrar a Estados Unidos, el país donde trabajó 16 años y donde viven sus dos hijos y tres nietos.

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Taking Migrant Children From Parents Is Illegal, U.N. Tells U.S.

The Trump administration’s practice of separating children from migrant families entering the United States violates their rights and international law, the United Nations human rights office said on Tuesday, urging an immediate halt to the practice.

The administration angrily rejected what it called an ignorant attack by the United Nations human rights office and accused the global organization of hypocrisy.

The human rights office said it appeared that, as The New York Times revealed in April, United States authorities had separated several hundred children, including toddlers, from their parents or others claiming to be their family members, under a policy of criminally prosecuting undocumented people crossing the border.

That practice “amounts to arbitrary and unlawful interference in family life, and is a serious violation of the rights of the child,” Ravina Shamdasani, a spokeswoman for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, based in Geneva, told reporters.

Last month, the Trump administration announced a “zero tolerance” policy for illegal border crossings, saying that it would significantly increase criminal prosecutions of migrants. Officials acknowledged that putting more adults in jail would mean separating more children from their families.

“The U.S. should immediately halt this practice of separating families and stop criminalizing what should at most be an administrative offense — that of irregular entry or stay in the U.S.,” Ms. Shamdasani said.

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The United States ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki R. Haley, clearly showed American irritation with the accusation in a statement released a few hours later.

“Once again, the United Nations shows its hypocrisy by calling out the United States while it ignores the reprehensible human rights records of several members of its own Human Rights Council,” Ms. Haley said. “While the High Commissioner’s office ignorantly attacks the United States with words, the United States leads the world with its actions, like providing more humanitarian assistance to global conflicts than any other nation.”

Without addressing the specifics of the accusation, Ms. Haley said: “Neither the United Nations nor anyone else will dictate how the United States upholds its borders.”
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The administration has characterized its policy as being about illegal immigration, though many of the detained migrants — including those in families that are split apart — enter at official border crossings and request asylum, which is not an illegal entry. It has also said that some adults falsely claim to be the parents of accompanying children, a genuine problem, and that it has to sort out their claims.

On Twitter, President Trump has appeared to agree that breaking up families was wrong, but blamed Democrats for the approach, saying that their “bad legislation” had caused it. In fact, no law requires separating children from families, and the practice was put in place by his administration just months ago.

The Times found in April that over six months, about 700 children had been taken from people claiming to be their parents.

The American Civil Liberties Union says that since then, the pace of separations has accelerated sharply. Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the group’s immigrant rights project, said that in the past five weeks, close to 1,000 children may have been taken from their families.

Last year, as Homeland Security secretary, John F. Kelly raised the idea of separating children from their families when they entered the country as a way to deter movement across the Mexican border.

Homeland Security officials have since denied that they separate families as part of a policy of deterrence, but have also faced sharp criticism from President Trump for failing to do more to curb the numbers of migrants crossing the border.

For the United Nations, it was a matter of great concern that in the United States “migration control appears to have been prioritized over the effective care and protection of migrant children,” Ms. Shamdasani said.

The United States is the only country in the world that has not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child, she noted, but the practice of separating and detaining children breached its obligations under other international human rights conventions it has joined.

“Children should never be detained for reasons related to their own or their parents’ migration status. Detention is never in the best interests of the child and always constitutes a child rights violation,” she said, calling on the authorities to adopt noncustodial alternatives.

The A.C.L.U. has filed a class-action lawsuit in federal court in San Diego, calling for a halt to the practice and for reunification of families.

▻https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/05/world/americas/us-un-migrant-children-families.html

U.S. policy of separating refugees from children is illegal, horrific

Somewhere in #Texas, a 3-year-old is crying into her pillow. She left all her toys behind when she fled Guatemala. And on this day the U.S. government took her mother away.

When we read about the U.S. administration’s new policy of trying to stop people from crossing its borders by taking away their children, we too had trouble sleeping.

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I work with children separated from caregivers at the border. What happens is unforgivable.

The policy has a devastating emotional impact on kids.

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Separating Children From Their Parents Is a New Low for Our Immigration System

The Trump administration has been systematically dividing families, opening traumatized migrants to greater distress.

▻https://www.thenation.com/article/separating-children-parents-new-low-immigration-system

What’s Really Happening When Asylum-Seeking Families Are Separated ?

An expert on helping parents navigate the asylum process describes what she’s seeing on the ground.

Everyone involved in U.S. immigration along the border has a unique perspective on the new “zero tolerance” policies—most notably, the increasing number of migrant parents who are separated from their children. Some workers are charged with taking the children away from their parents and sending them into the care of Health and Human Services. Some are contracted to find housing for the children and get them food. Some volunteers try to help the kids navigate the system. Some, like Anne Chandler, assist the parents. As executive director of the Houston office of the nonprofit Tahirih Justice Center, which focuses on helping immigrant women and children, she has been traveling to the border and to detention centers, listening to the parents’ stories. We asked her to talk with us about what she has been hearing in recent weeks.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Texas Monthly: First, can you give us an overview of your organization?

Anne Chandler: We run the Children’s Border Project, and we work with hundreds of kids that have been released from ORR [Office of Refugee Resettlement] care. We are not a legal service provider that does work when they’re in the shelters. To date, most of our work with that issue of family separation has been working with the parents in the days when they are being separated: when they’re in the federal courthouse being convicted; partnering with the federal public defenders; and then in the adult detention center, as they have no idea how to communicate or speak to their children or get them back before being deported.

TM: Can you take me through what you’ve been seeing?

AC: The short of it is, we will take sample sizes of numbers and individuals we’re seeing that are being prosecuted for criminal entry. The majority of those are free to return to the home country. Vast majority. We can’t quite know exactly because our sample size is between one hundred and two hundred individuals. But 90 percent of those who are being convicted are having their children separated from them. The 10 percent that aren’t are some mothers who are going with their children to the detention centers in Karnes and Dilley. But, for the most part, the ones that I’ve been working with are the ones that are actually being prosecuted for criminal entry, which is a pretty new thing for our country—to take first-time asylum seekers who are here seeking safe refuge, to turn around and charge them with a criminal offense. Those parents are finding themselves in adult detention centers and in a process known as expedited removal, where many are being deported. And their children, on the other hand, are put in a completely different legal structure. They are categorized as unaccompanied children and thus are being put in place in a federal agency not with the Department of Homeland Security but with Health and Human Services. And Health and Human Services has this complicated structure in place where they’re not viewed as a long-term foster care system—that’s for very limited numbers—but their general mandate is to safeguard these children in temporary shelters and then find family members with whom they can be placed. So they start with parents, and then they go to grandparents, and then they go to other immediate family members, and then they go to acquaintances, people who’ve known the children, and they’re in that system, but they can’t be released to their parents because their parents are behind bars. And we may see more parents that get out of jail because they pass a “credible fear” interview, which is the screening done by the asylum office to see who should be deported quickly, within days or weeks of arrival, and who should stay here and have an opportunity to present their asylum case before an immigration judge of the Department of Justice. So we have a lot of individuals who are in that credible fear process right now, but in Houston, once you have a credible fear interview (which will sometimes take two to three weeks to even set up), those results aren’t coming out for four to six weeks. Meanwhile, these parents are just kind of languishing in these detention centers because of the zero-tolerance policy. There’s no individual adjudication of whether the parents should be put on some form of alternative detention program so that they can be in a position to be reunited with their kid.

TM: So, just so I make sure I understand: the parents come in and say, “We’re persecuted” or give some reason for asylum. They come in. And then their child or children are taken away and they’re in lockup for at least six weeks away from the kids and often don’t know where the kids are. Is that what’s happening under zero tolerance?

AC: So the idea of zero tolerance under the stated policy is that we don’t care why you’re afraid. We don’t care if it’s religion, political, gangs, anything. For all asylum seekers, you are going to be put in jail, in a detention center, and you’re going to have your children taken away from you. That’s the policy. They’re not 100 percent able to implement that because of a lot of reasons, including just having enough judges on the border. And bed space. There’s a big logistical problem because this is a new policy. So the way they get to that policy of taking the kids away and keeping the adults in detention centers and the kids in a different federal facility is based on the legal rationale that we’re going to convict you, and since we’re going to convict you, you’re going to be in the custody of the U.S. Marshals, and when that happens, we’re taking your kid away. So they’re not able to convict everybody of illegal entry right now just because there aren’t enough judges on the border right now to hear the number of cases that come over, and then they say if you have religious persecution or political persecution or persecution on something that our asylum definition recognizes, you can fight that case behind bars at an immigration detention center. And those cases take two, three, four, five, six months. And what happens to your child isn’t really our concern. That is, you have made the choice to bring your child over illegally. And this is what’s going to happen.

TM: Even if they crossed at a legal entry point?

AC: Very few people come to the bridge. Border Patrol is saying the bridge is closed. When I was last out in McAllen, people were stacked on the bridge, sleeping there for three, four, ten nights. They’ve now cleared those individuals from sleeping on the bridge, but there are hundreds of accounts of asylum seekers, when they go to the bridge, who are told, “I’m sorry, we’re full today. We can’t process your case.” So the families go illegally on a raft—I don’t want to say illegally; they cross without a visa on a raft. Many of them then look for Border Patrol to turn themselves in, because they know they’re going to ask for asylum. And under this government theory—you know, in the past, we’ve had international treaties, right? Statutes which codified the right of asylum seekers to ask for asylum. Right? Article 31 of the Refugee Convention clearly says that it is improper for any state to use criminal laws that could deter asylum seekers as long as that asylum seeker is asking for asylum within a reasonable amount of time. But our administration is kind of ignoring this longstanding international and national jurisprudence of basic beliefs to make this distinction that, if you come to a bridge, we’re not going to prosecute you, but if you come over the river and then find immigration or are caught by immigration, we’re prosecuting you.

TM: So if you cross any other way besides the bridge, we’re prosecuting you. But . . . you can’t cross the bridge.

AC: That’s right. I’ve talked to tons of people. There are organizations like Al Otro Lado that document border turn-backs. And there’s an effort to accompany asylum seekers so that Customs and Border Patrol can’t say, “We’re closed.” Everybody we’ve talked to who’s been prosecuted or separated has crossed the river without a visa.

TM: You said you were down there recently?

AC: Monday, June 4.

TM: What was happening on the bridge at that point?

AC: I talked to a lot of people who were there Saturdays and Sundays, a lot of church groups that are going, bringing those individuals umbrellas because they were in the sun. It’s morning shade, and then the sun—you know, it’s like 100 degrees on the cement. It’s really, really hot. So there were groups bringing diapers and water bottles and umbrellas and electric fans, and now everyone’s freaked out because they’re gone! What did they do with them? Did they process them all? Yet we know they’re saying you’re turned back. When I was in McAllen, the individuals that day who visited people on the bridge had been there four days. We’re talking infants; there were people breastfeeding on the bridge.

TM: Are the infants taken as well?

AC: Every border zone is different. We definitely saw a pattern in McAllen. We talked to 63 parents who had lost their children that day in the court. Of those, the children seemed to be all five and older. What we know from the shelters and working with people is that, yes, there are kids that are very young, that are breastfeeding babies and under three in the shelters, separated from their parents. But I’m just saying, in my experience, all those kids and all the parents’ stories were five and up.

TM: Can you talk about how you’ve seen the process change over the past few months?

AC: The zero-tolerance policy really started with Jeff Sessions’s announcement in May. One could argue that this was the original policy that we started seeing in the executive orders. One was called “border security and immigration enforcement.” And a lot of the principles underlying zero tolerance are found here. The idea is that we’re going to prosecute people.

TM: And the policy of separating kids from parents went into effect when?

AC: They would articulate it in various ways with different officials, but as immigration attorneys, starting in October, were like, “Oh my goodness. They are telling us these are all criminal lawbreakers and they’re going to have their children taken away.” We didn’t know what it would mean. And so we saw about six hundred children who were taken away from October to May, then we saw an explosion of the numbers in May. It ramped up. The Office of Refugee Resettlement taking in all these kids says that they are our children, that they are unaccompanied. It’s a fabrication. They’re not unaccompanied children. They are children that came with their parents, and the idea that we’re creating this crisis—it’s a manufactured crisis where we’re going to let children suffer to somehow allow this draconian approach with families seeking shelter and safe refuge.

TM: So what is the process for separation?

AC: There is no one process. Judging from the mothers and fathers I’ve spoken to and those my staff has spoken to, there are several different processes. Sometimes they will tell the parent, “We’re taking your child away.” And when the parent asks, “When will we get them back?” they say, “We can’t tell you that.” Sometimes the officers will say, “because you’re going to be prosecuted” or “because you’re not welcome in this country” or “because we’re separating them,” without giving them a clear justification. In other cases, we see no communication that the parent knows that their child is to be taken away. Instead, the officers say, “I’m going to take your child to get bathed.” That’s one we see again and again. “Your child needs to come with me for a bath.” The child goes off, and in a half an hour, twenty minutes, the parent inquires, “Where is my five-year-old?” “Where’s my seven-year-old?” “This is a long bath.” And they say, “You won’t be seeing your child again.” Sometimes mothers—I was talking to one mother, and she said, “Don’t take my child away,” and the child started screaming and vomiting and crying hysterically, and she asked the officers, “Can I at least have five minutes to console her?” They said no. In another case, the father said, “Can I comfort my child? Can I hold him for a few minutes?” The officer said, “You must let them go, and if you don’t let them go, I will write you up for an altercation, which will mean that you are the one that had the additional charges charged against you.” So, threats. So the father just let the child go. So it’s a lot of variations. But sometimes deceit and sometimes direct, just “I’m taking your child away.” Parents are not getting any information on what their rights are to communicate to get their child before they are deported, what reunification may look like. We spoke to nine parents on this Monday, which was the 11th, and these were adults in detention centers outside of Houston. They had been separated from their child between May 23 and May 25, and as of June 11, not one of them had been able to talk to their child or knew a phone number that functioned from the detention center director. None of them had direct information from immigration on where their child was located. The one number they were given by some government official from the Department of Homeland Security was a 1-800 number. But from the phones inside the detention center, they can’t make those calls. We know there are more parents who are being deported without their child, without any process or information on how to get their child back.

TM: And so it’s entirely possible that children will be left in the country without any relatives?

AC: Could be, yeah.

TM: And if the child is, say, five years old . . .?

AC: The child is going through deportation proceedings, so the likelihood that that child is going to be deported is pretty high.

TM: How do they know where to deport the child to, or who the parents are?

AC: How does that child navigate their deportation case without their parent around?

TM: Because a five-year-old doesn’t necessarily know his parents’ information.

AC: In the shelters, they can’t even find the parents because the kids are just crying inconsolably. They often don’t know the full legal name of their parents or their date of birth. They’re not in a position to share a trauma story like what caused the migration. These kids and parents had no idea. None of the parents I talked to were expecting to be separated as they faced the process of asking for asylum.

TM: I would think that there would be something in place where, when the child is taken, they’d be given a wristband or something with their information on it?

AC: I think the Department of Homeland Security gives the kids an alien number. They also give the parents an alien number and probably have that information. The issue is that the Department of Homeland Security is not the one caring for the children. Jurisdiction of that child has moved over to Health and Human Services, and the Health and Human Services staff has to figure out, where is this parent? And that’s not easy. Sometimes the parents are deported. Kids are in New York and Miami, and we’ve got parents being sent to Tacoma, Washington, and California. Talk about a mess. And nobody has a right to an attorney here. These kids don’t get a paid advocate or an ad litem or a friend of the court. They don’t get a paid attorney to represent them. Some find that, because there are programs. But it’s not a right. It’s not universal.

TM: What agency is in charge of physically separating the children and the adults?

AC: The Department of Homeland Security. We saw the separation take place while they were in the care and custody of Customs and Border Protection. That’s where it was happening, at a center called the Ursula, which the immigrants called La Perrera, because it looked like a dog pound, a dog cage. It’s a chain-link fence area, long running areas that remind Central Americans of the way people treat dogs.

TM: So the Department of Homeland Security does the separation and then they immediately pass the kids to HHS?

AC: I don’t have a bird’s-eye view of this, besides interviewing parents. Parents don’t know. All they know is that the kid hasn’t come back to their little room in CBP. Right? We know from talking to advocates and attorneys who have access to the shelters that they think that these kids leave in buses to shelters run by the Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement Department of Unaccompanied Children Services—which, on any given day there’s like three thousand kids in the Harlingen-Brownsville area. We know there are eight, soon to be nine, facilities in Houston. And they’re going to open up this place in Tornillo, along the border by El Paso. And they’re opening up places in Miami. They’re past capacity. This is a cyclical time, where rates of migration increase. So now you’re creating two populations. One is your traditional unaccompanied kids who are just coming because their life is at risk right now in El Salvador and Honduras and parts of Guatemala, and they come with incredible trauma, complex stories, and need a lot of resources, and so they navigate this immigration system. And now we have this new population, which is totally different: the young kids who don’t hold their stories and aren’t here to self-navigate the system and are crying out for their parents. There are attorneys that get money to go in and give rights presentations to let the teenagers know what they can ask for in court, what’s happening with their cases, and now the attorneys are having a hard time doing that because right next to them, in the other room, they’ve got kids crying and wailing, asking for their mom and dad. The attorneys can’t give these kids information. They’re just trying to learn grounding exercises.

TM: Do you know if siblings are allowed to stay together?

AC: We don’t know. I dealt with one father who knew that siblings were not at the same location from talking to his family member. He believes they’re separated. But I have no idea. Can’t answer that question.

TM: Is there another nonprofit similar to yours that handles kids more than adults?

AC: Yes: in Houston it’s Catholic Charities. We know in Houston they are going to open up shelters specific for the tender-age kids, which is defined as kids under twelve. And that’s going to be by Minute Maid Stadium. And that facility is also going to have some traditional demographic of pregnant teenagers. But it’s going to be a young kid—and young kids are, almost by definition, separated. Kids usually do not migrate on their own at that age.

TM: That’s usually teens?

AC: Teens. Population is thirteen to seventeen, with many more fifteen-, sixteen-, and seventeen-year-olds than thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds. They’re riding on top of trains. You know, the journey is very dangerous. Usually that’s the age where the gangs start taking the girls and saying “you’re going to be my sex slave”–type of stuff. I’ve heard that it’s going to be run by a nonprofit. ORR does not hold the shelters directly. They contract with nonprofits whose job it is to provide essential food, mental health care, caseworkers to try to figure out who they’re going to be released to, and all those functions to nonprofits, and I think the nonprofit in charge of this one is Southwest Key.

TM: So how long do the kids stay in the facility?

AC: It used to be, on average, thirty days. But that’s going up now. There are many reasons for that: one, these facilities and ORR are not used to working with this demographic of young children. Two, DHS is sharing information with ORR on the background of those families that are taking these children, and we’ve seen raids where they’re going to where the children are and looking for individuals in those households who are undocumented. So there is reticence and fear of getting these children if there’s someone in the household who is not a citizen.

TM: So if I’m understanding correctly, a relative can say, “Well, I can pick that kid up; that’s my niece.” She comes and picks up the child. And then DHS will follow them home? Is that what you’re saying?

AC: No. The kid would go to the aunt’s house, but let’s just imagine that she is here on a visa, a student visa, but the aunt falls out of visa status and is undocumented and her information, her address, is at the top of DHS’s files. So we’ve seen this happen a lot: a month or two weeks after kids have been released, DHS goes to those foster homes and arrests people and puts people in jail and deports them.

TM: And then I guess they start all over again trying to find a home for those kids?

AC: Right.

TM: What is explained to the kids about the proceedings, and who explains it to them?

AC: The Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement goes through an organization called the Vera Institute of Justice that then contracts with nonprofit organizations who hire attorneys and other specialized bilingual staff to go into these shelters and give what they call legal orientation programs for children, and they do group orientation. Sometimes they speak to the kids individually and try to explain to them, “This is the process here; and you’re going to have to go see an immigration judge; and these are your rights before a judge; you won’t have an attorney for your case, but you can hire one. If you’re afraid to go back to your country, you have to tell the judge.” That type of stuff.

TM: And if the child is five, and alone, doesn’t have older siblings or cousins—

AC: Or three or four. They’re young in our Houston detention centers. And that’s where these attorneys are frustrated—they can’t be attorneys. How do they talk and try to console and communicate with a five-year-old who is just focused on “I want my mom or dad,” right?

TM: Are the kids whose parents are applying for asylum processed differently from kids whose parents are not applying for asylum?

AC: I don’t know. These are questions we ask DHS, but we don’t know the answers.

TM: Why don’t you get an answer?

AC: I don’t know. To me, if you’re going to justify this in some way under the law, the idea that these parents don’t have the ability to obtain very simple answers—what are my rights and when can I be reunited with my kid before I’m deported without them?—is horrible. And has to go far below anything we, as a civil society of law, should find acceptable. The fact that I, as an attorney specializing in this area, cannot go to a detention center and tell a mother or father what the legal procedure is for them to get their child or to reunite with their child, even if they want to go home?

And my answer is, “I don’t think you can.” In my experience, they’re not releasing these children to the parents as they’re deported. To put a structure like that in place and the chaos in the system for “deterrence” and then carry out so much pain on the backs of some already incredibly traumatized mothers and fathers who have already experienced sometimes just horrific violence is unacceptable.

▻https://www.texasmonthly.com/news/whats-really-happening-asylum-seeking-families-separated

Mise en exergue d’un passage :

The child goes off, and in a half an hour, twenty minutes, the parent inquires, “Where is my five-year-old?” “Where’s my seven-year-old?” “This is a long bath.” And they say, “You won’t be seeing your child again.”

Why the US is separating migrant children from their parents

US Attorney General Jeff Sessions has defended the separation of migrant children from their parents at the border with Mexico, a measure that has faced increasing criticism.

The “zero-tolerance” policy he announced last month sees adults who try to cross the border, many planning to seek asylum, being placed in custody and facing criminal prosecution for illegal entry.

As a result, hundreds of minors are now being housed in detention centres, and kept away from their parents.
What is happening?

Over a recent six-week period, nearly 2,000 children were separated from their parents after illegally crossing the border, figures released on Friday said.

Mr Sessions said those entering the US irregularly would be criminally prosecuted, a change to a long-standing policy of charging most of those crossing for the first time with a misdemeanour offence.

As the adults are being charged with a crime, the children that come with them are being separated and deemed unaccompanied minors.

Advocates of separations point out that hundreds of children are taken from parents who commit crimes in the US on a daily basis.

As such, they are placed in custody of the Department of Health and Human Services and sent to a relative, foster home or a shelter - officials at those places are said to be already running out of space to house them.

In recent days, a former Walmart in Texas has been converted into a detention centre for immigrant children.

Officials have also announced plans to erect tent cities to hold hundreds more children in the Texas desert where temperatures regularly reach 40C (105F).

Local lawmaker Jose Rodriguez described the plan as “totally inhumane” and “outrageous”, adding: “It should be condemned by anyone who has a moral sense of responsibility.”

US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials estimate that around 1,500 people are arrested each day for illegally crossing the border.

In the first two weeks of the “zero-tolerance” new approach, 658 minors - including many babies and toddlers - were separated from the adults that came with them, according to the CBP.

The practice, however, was apparently happening way before that, with reports saying more than 700 families had been affected between October and April.

Not only the families crossing irregularly are being targeted, activists who work at the border say, but also those presenting themselves at a port of entry.

“This is really extreme, it’s nothing like we have seen before,” said Michelle Brané, director of Migrant Rights and Justice at the Women’s Refugee Commission, a New York-based non-governmental organisation that is helping some of these people.

In many of the cases, the families have already been reunited, after the parent was released from detention. However, there are reports of people being kept apart for weeks and even months.

Family separations had been reported in previous administrations but campaigners say the numbers then were very small.
Whose fault is it?

Mr Trump has blamed Democrats for the policy, saying “we have to break up the families” because of a law that “Democrats gave us”.

It is unclear what law he is referring to, but no law has been passed by the US Congress that mandates that migrant families be separated.

Fact-checkers say that the only thing that has changed is the Justice Department’s decision to criminally prosecute parents for a first-time border crossing offence. Because their children are not charged with a crime, they are not permitted to be jailed together.

Under a 1997 court decision known as the Flores settlement, children who come to the US alone are required to be released to their parents, an adult relative, or other caretaker.

If those options are all exhausted, then the government must find the “least restrictive” setting for the child “without unnecessary delay”.

The case initially applied to unaccompanied child arrivals, but a 2016 court decision expanded it to include children brought with their parents.

According to the New York Times, the government has three options under the Flores settlement - release whole families together, pass a law to allow for families to be detained together, or break up families.

It is worth noting that Mr Trump’s chief of staff John Kelly - who previously served as the head of Homeland Security - said in 2017 that the White House was considering separating families as a means of deterring parents from trying to cross the border.
What do the figures show?

The number of families trying to enter the US overland without documentation is on the rise. For the fourth consecutive month in May, there was an increase in the number of people caught crossing the border irregularly - in comparison with the same month of 2017, the rise was of 160%.

“The trends are clear: this must end,” Mr Sessions said last month.

It is not clear, though, if the tougher measures will stop the migrants. Most are fleeing violence and poverty in Central American countries like El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras and staying, for many, could mean a death sentence.

Human rights groups, campaigners and Democrats have sharply criticised the separations, warning of the long-term trauma on the children. Meanwhile the UN Human Rights Office called on the US to “immediately halt” them.

But Mr Sessions has defended the measure, saying the separations were “not our goal” but it was not always possible to keep parents and children together.
What is the policy in other countries?

No other country has a policy of separating families who intend to seek asylum, activists say.

In the European Union, which faced its worst migrant crisis in decades three years ago, most asylum seekers are held in reception centres while their requests are processed - under the bloc’s Dublin Regulation, people must be registered in their first country of arrival.

Measures may vary in different member states but families are mostly kept together.

Even in Australia, which has some of the world’s most restrictive policies, including the detention of asylum seekers who arrive by boat in controversial offshore centres, there is no policy to separate parents from their children upon arrival.

Meanwhile, Canada has a deal with the US that allows it to deny asylum requests from those going north. It has tried to stem the number of migrants crossing outside border posts after a surge of Haitians and Nigerians coming from its neighbour. However, there were no reports of families being forcibly separated.

“What the US is doing now, there is no equivalent,” said Michael Flynn, executive director of the Geneva-based Global Detention Project, a non-profit group focused on the rights of detained immigrants. “There’s nothing like this anywhere”.

Republicans in the House of Representatives have unveiled legislation to keep families together but it is unlikely to win the support of its own party or the White House.

▻https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-44503514?platform=hootsuite

Les récits de la détresse d’enfants de migrants créent l’émoi aux Etats-Unis

Plus de 2000 enfants ont été séparés de leurs parents depuis l’entrée en vigueur en avril de la politique de « tolérance zéro » en matière d’immigration illégale aux Etats-Unis. Ces jours, plusieurs témoignages ont ému dans le pays.

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▻http://www.rts.ch/info/monde/9658887-les-recits-de-la-detresse-d-enfants-de-migrants-creent-l-emoi-aux-etats-

Etats-Unis : quand la sécurité des frontières rime avec torture d’enfants mineurs

Au Texas, dans un centre de détention, un enregistrement audio d’enfants migrants âgés entre 4 à 10 ans pleurant et appelant leurs parents alors qu’ils viennent d’être séparés d’eux, vient de faire surface.

Cet enregistrement a fuité de l’intérieur, remis à l’avocate Jennifer Harbury qui l’a transféré au média d’investigation américain ProPublica. L’enregistrement a été placé sur les images filmées dans ce centre. Il soulève l’indignation des américains et du monde entier. Elles sont une torture pour nous, spectateurs impuissants de la barbarie d’un homme, Donald Trump et de son administration.

Le rythme des séparations s’est beaucoup accéléré depuis début mai, lorsque le ministre de la Justice Jeff Sessions a annoncé que tous les migrants passant illégalement la frontière seraient arrêtés, qu’ils soient accompagnés de mineurs ou pas. Du 5 mai au 9 juin 2018 quelque 2’342 enfants ont été séparés de leurs parents placés en détention, accusés d’avoir traversé illégalement la frontière. C’est le résultat d’une politique sécuritaire dite de “tolérance zéro” qui criminalise ces entrées même lorsqu’elles sont justifiées par le dépôt d’une demande d’asile aux Etats-Unis. Un protocol empêche la détention d’enfants avec leurs parents. Ils sont alors placés dans des centres fermés qui ressemblent tout autant à des prisons adaptées.

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▻https://blogs.letemps.ch/jasmine-caye/2018/06/19/etats-unis-quand-la-securite-des-frontieres-rime-avec-torture-denfants

Aux États-Unis, le traumatisme durable des enfants migrants

Trump a beau avoir mis fin à la séparation forcée des familles à la frontière, plus de 2 000 enfants migrants seraient encore éparpillés dans le pays. Le processus de regroupement des familles s’annonce long et douloureux.

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The Government Has Taken At Least 1,100 Children From Their Parents Since Family Separations Officially Ended

“You can’t imagine the pain,” Dennis said. “If you’re not a dad, you don’t know what it’s like.” I reached Dennis by phone in a small town in the Copán Department of Honduras, where he lives with his wife and three children. For five months this year, the family was fractured across borders. Sonia, age 11, had been separated from Dennis after they crossed into the United States and turned themselves in to the Border Patrol to ask for asylum. Dennis was deported from Texas, and Sonia sent to a shelter in New York.

The U.S. government is still taking children from their parents after they cross the border. Since the supposed end of family separation — in the summer of 2018, after a federal judge’s injunction and President Donald Trump’s executive order reversing the deeply controversial policy — more than 1,100 children have been taken from their parents, according to the government’s own data. There may be more, since that data has been plagued by bad record keeping and inconsistencies. The government alleges that separations now only happen when a parent has a criminal history or is unfit to care for a child, but an ongoing lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union argues that the current policy still violates the rights of children and families. Border Patrol agents, untrained in child welfare, make decisions that some parents are unfit to stay with their children based solely on brief interactions with them while they are held in custody.

Dennis picks coffee during the harvest season and works other basic jobs when he can, but he struggles to put food on the table and pay for his kids’ school supplies. In April, unable to find steady work in the coffee fields and receiving regular threats from a creditor, he headed north, hoping to find safety and opportunity in the United States. “We were barely eating. I couldn’t give my kids a life,” Dennis told me. (He preferred that I only use first names for him and his family due to safety concerns.) Thinking that his two boys — ages 2 1/2 and 7 — were too young to travel, Dennis took Sonia and together they left Honduras. They trekked through Guatemala and Mexico by bus, train, and on foot. They were robbed once, terrified the whole way, and had to beg for food. They slept wherever they could — sometimes in the woods, along the tracks, or, when they could scrounge enough money together, in migrant flophouses.

After about a month of travel, Dennis and Sonia crossed the Rio Grande in a small raft outside of McAllen, Texas, on the morning of May 17. They walked for hours before they turned themselves in to a Border Patrol agent and were taken to a processing center, where they were locked up in one of the freezing-cold temporary holding centers known as hieleras, or iceboxes. Only a few hours later, a Border Patrol agent took Dennis and Sonia and locked them in separate rooms. It was the last time he would see his daughter for five months.

For the next 11 days, Dennis remained in the hielera, asking repeatedly to see his daughter. Border Patrol officers tried to get him to sign papers that were in English, which he couldn’t read. He refused. “You can’t see her,” a Border Patrol agent told him about his daughter. The agent said that she was fine, but wouldn’t tell him where she was. Border Patrol transferred Dennis to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Port Isabel, Texas. They told him that because of a previous deportation and a felony — a 10-year-old charge for using false work authorization papers — he was ineligible for asylum. For the next 30 days of his detention, he knew nothing of his daughter or her whereabouts. Finally, an agent called him over and told him that she was on the phone. The call was brief. They both cried. He told her to be strong. He told her that they were going to send him away. Two weeks later, without talking to his daughter again, he was deported back to Honduras. “I’m a man, but I cried. I cried,” he told me. “Oh, it was so hard.”

Sonia was in New York in an Office of Refugee Resettlement, or ORR, shelter, where she was living with a number of other children. In Honduras, after Dennis’s deportation, the rest of the family waited in agony for nearly 5 months, until October 9, when Sonia was released and then flown home. “My wife,” Dennis said, “she didn’t eat, didn’t sleep. You can’t imagine the suffering. And, don’t forget,” he reminded me, “she had two other kids to raise.”

In 2018, much of the world looked on aghast as U.S. immigration agents separated thousands of children from their parents in an unprecedented anti-immigrant crackdown. In one notorious instance captured on audio, Border Patrol agents laughed and joked at desperate children crying for their parents. The separations, part of a series of policy changes to limit total immigration and effectively shutter refugee and asylum programs, stemmed from the so-called zero-tolerance policy that began in El Paso in 2017 and was rolled out border-wide in the spring of 2018. The administration had announced that it would seek to prosecute all people who illegally crossed the border (despite the fact that, according to U.S. law, it is not illegal for an asylum-seeker to cross the border), but it later emerged that the government had specifically targeted families. A strict zero tolerance policy — prosecuting every individual who was apprehended — was always beyond capacity. The focus on families was part of a distinct effort by the Department of Homeland Security and the White House to try and dissuade — by subjecting parents and children to the terror of separation — more people from coming to the United States.

After widespread uproar and international condemnation, Trump issued an executive order to halt the separations on June 20, 2018. Six days later, U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw issued an injunction, demanding the reunification of parents with their children within 30 days. For children under the age of 5, the deadline was 14 days. For some, however, it was too late. Parents had already lost custody, been deported, or even lost track of their children. Even for those who were reunified, trauma had set in. In 2018, the number of publicly known separations was 2,800. In fact, as the government revealed this October after pressure from the ACLU lawsuit, that original count was over 1,500 children short. Furthermore, the government has admitted that more than 1,100 additional families have been separated since the executive order and injunction — bringing the total number of children impacted to at least 5,446. That number may still be an undercount and will continue to rise if immigration officials’ current practices continue.

The grounds for the ongoing separations — the 1,100 new cases — stem from a carve-out in Sabraw’s injunction: that children should not be separated “absent a determination that the parent is unfit or presents a danger to the child.” That language, the ACLU and others allege in an ongoing lawsuit, is being interpreted too broadly by the government, resulting in unwarranted separations. ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt, who has been litigating against the government on behalf of a class of separated families, called the ongoing separation policy “as shocking as it is unlawful.”

The reason that Dennis and Sonia were separated, for example, goes back to 2008, when Dennis’s wife was pregnant with Sonia, and Dennis came to the U.S. to find work and support his family. He made it to Minnesota and was loaned false papers to get a job, but he was quickly picked up and charged with forgery. He spent three months in a federal prison before being deported. Eleven years later, that conviction led to Sonia being taken from him. “You could call any child expert from anywhere in the country, and they would tell you that these parents are not a danger to the child,” Gelernt said in a September 20 hearing. “The government is simply saying, ‘We are going to take away children because the court said we could.’”

In a brief filed to the court in July, ACLU attorneys pointed out cases in which children were taken from their parents for “the most minor or nonviolent criminal history.” The reasons for separation cited in those cases included marijuana possession convictions, a 27-year-old drug possession charge, and a charge of “malicious destruction of property value” over a total of $5. An 8-month-old was separated from his father for a “fictitious or fraudulent statement.” A mother who broke her leg at the border had her 5-year-old taken from her while she was in emergency surgery, and ORR did not release the child for 79 days.

In an example of a dubious determination made by the Border Patrol of a father being “unfit” to care for his 1-year-old daughter, an agent separated the two because the father left his daughter in a wet diaper while she was sleeping. She had been sick and, after caring for her and taking her to the hospital on two separate occasions for a high fever, the father “wanted to let her sleep instead of waking her to change her diaper,” according to the ACLU brief. Nonetheless, a female guard took his daughter from his arms, criticized him for not changing the diaper, and even called him a bad father. The government’s own documents show that the father has no other criminal history.

In another instance, a 3-year-old girl was separated from her father due to Customs and Border Protection’s allegation that he was not actually her parent. Although the father’s name does not appear on the child’s birth certificate, he presented other documentation showing parentage and requested a DNA test as proof. Officials ignored his request and separated the family. After an attorney intervened, the family took a DNA test and confirmed paternity. Meanwhile, the daughter was sexually abused while in ORR care and, according to the brief, “appears to be severely regressing in development.”

CBP did not respond to a request for comment.

The ACLU’s brief received some coverage this summer, but many of the most egregious stories it collected went unmentioned. Overall, even as the separations have continued, media attention has flagged. From a high of 2,000 stories a month in the summer of 2018, this fall has seen an average of only 50 to 100 stories a month that mention family separation, according to an analysis by Pamela Mejia, head of research at Berkeley Media Studies Group. Mejia told me that the issue had “reached a saturation point” for many people: “The overwhelming number of stories that generate outrage has made it harder to keep anything in the headlines.”

At first, the child victims of the government’s actions were easy to empathize with. There was no “crime frame,” as Mejia put it, to explain away the children’s suffering, in contrast to the way that immigration is often covered. Whether denominating migrants as “illegals,” seeing them as “hordes” or “invaders,” or using a broad brush to associate them with crime or terrorism, politicians and the media alike often wield anti-immigrant or dehumanizing language when discussing immigration. Young children, however, are something different. The broad consensus in 2018 was that the family separation policy was an outrageous and unnecessary cruelty.

But, despite the outrage, the policy continued and now there’s a sense of “futility that this is going to keep happening,” Mejia said. Gelernt likewise attributed the lack of ongoing coverage to “media burnout,” noting especially that there are more than 200 kids under the age of 5 who have been separated from their families. It’s hard to cover so many heartrending stories, Gelernt said. And now, simply, “People think it’s over.”

But it’s not. Sabraw, the southern California judge who issued the injunction in 2018, is expected to rule soon on the ACLU’s challenge to the continued separations. But even if he again orders the government to reunify families, or narrows immigration officials’ latitude in carrying out separations, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the government can, or will, comply. CBP, the Border Patrol’s parent agency, has already proven negligent in keeping track of the separated children — calling families who had undergone separation, for example, “deleted family units.” Some children still remain unaccounted for.

“At this point, no government official can plausibly claim that they are unaware of the damage these separations are doing to the children,” Gelernt told me, “yet they continue to do it.”

In late November, back in Copán, Sonia graduated from sixth grade. One of her favorite things to do, Dennis told me, is to draw with her younger brothers. She is also teaching the older of the two boys to read, practicing his letters with him. She’ll go into seventh grade soon, but her father worries about her growing up in what he described as a gang-ridden town. Honduras has one of the highest incidence rates of violence against women in the world. He also doesn’t know how he’ll be able to pay for her high school. “I know it’s desperate,” he said, “but I’m thinking of heading north again. I can’t see how else to do it.”

Sonia doesn’t talk much about her time separated from her family, but Dennis notices that she’s changed, and he and his wife are worried: “She told me she didn’t feel good. She was just crying at first [while in the ORR facility]; that’s all she did.” Now when she goes quiet sometimes, her parents wonder if she’s still affected by the trauma. As Dennis contemplated aloud another potential trip north in search of personal and financial security, he reflected, “I just ask that we have enough food to eat every day. I just want my family to be safe.”

▻https://theintercept.com/2019/12/09/family-separation-policy-lawsuit

Je trouve la 2e image de l’article beaucoup plus parlante sur le phénomène, avec cette langue de chaleur qui vient lécher le pôle nord.
Et en parallèle, on voit bien la vague de froid qui touche l’Europe ce même 25 février 2018.

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c’était pas Moscou alors ?
#guerre_chaude

#effondrement #collapsologie #catastrophe #fin_du_monde #it_has_begun #Anthropocène #capitalocène

Ajouter à la troisième compilation :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/680147

US : Poor Medical Care, Deaths, in Immigrant Detention

Poor medical treatment contributed to more than half the deaths reported by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during a 16-month period, Human Rights Watch, the American Civil Liberties Union, Detention Watch Network, and National Immigrant Justice Center said in a report released today.

Based on the analysis of independent medical experts, the 72-page report, “Code Red: The Fatal Consequences of Dangerously Substandard Medical Care in Immigration Detention,” examines the 15 “Detainee Death Reviews” ICE released from December 2015 through April 2017. ICE has yet to publish reviews for one other death in that period. Eight of the 15 public death reviews show that inadequate medical care contributed or led to the person’s death. The physicians conducting the analysis also found evidence of substandard medical practices in all but one of the remaining reviews.

“ICE has proven unable or unwilling to provide adequately for the health and safety of the people it detains,” said Clara Long, a senior US researcher at Human Rights Watch. “The Trump administration’s efforts to drastically expand the already-bloated immigration detention system will only put more people at risk.”

12 people died in immigration detention in fiscal year 2017, more than any year since 2009. Since March 2010, 74 people have died in immigration detention, but #ICE has released death reviews in full or in part in only 52 of the cases.

Based on the death reviews, the groups prepared timelines of the symptoms shown by people who died in detention and the treatment they received from medical staff, along with medical experts’ commentary on the care documented by ICE and its deviations from common medical practice. The deaths detailed in the report include:

Moises Tino-Lopez, 23, had two seizures within nine days, each observed by staff and reported to the nurses on duty in the Hall County Correctional Center in Nebraska. He was not evaluated by a physician or sent to the hospital after the first seizure. During his second seizure, staff moved him to a mattress in a new cell, but he was not evaluated by a medical practitioner. About four hours after that seizure, he was found to be unresponsive, with his lips turning blue. He was sent to the hospital but never regained consciousness and died on September 19, 2016.
Rafael Barcenas-Padilla, 51, had been ill with cold symptoms for six days in the Otero County Processing Center in New Mexico when his fever reached 104, and nurses recorded dangerously low levels of oxygen saturation in his blood. A doctor, consulted by phone, prescribed a medication for upper respiratory infections. The ICE detention center didn’t have the nebulizer needed to administer one of the medicines, so he did not receive it, and he showed dangerously low oxygen readings that should have prompted his hospitalization. Three days later, he was sent to the hospital, where he died from bronchopneumonia on April 7, 2016.
Jose Azurdia, 54, became ill and started vomiting at the Adelanto Detention Facility in California. A guard told a nurse about Azurdia’s condition, but she said that “she did not want to see Azurdia because she did not want to get sick.” Within minutes, his arm was numb, he was having difficulty breathing, and he had pain in his shoulder and neck – all symptoms of a heart attack. Due to additional delays by the medical staff, two hours passed before he was sent to the hospital, with his heart by then too damaged to respond to treatment. He died in the hospital four days later, on December 23, 2015.

“Immigrant detention centers are dangerous places where lives are at risk and people are dying,” said Silky Shah, executive director of Detention Watch Network, a national coalition that exposes the injustices of the US’ immigration detention and deportation system. “The death toll amassed by ICE is unacceptable and has proven that they cannot be trusted to care for immigrants in their custody.”

In fiscal year 2017, ICE held a daily average of nearly 40,500 people, an increase of nearly 500 percent since 1994. The Trump administration has asked Congress to allocate $2.7 billion for fiscal year 2019 to lock up a daily average of 52,000 immigrants in immigration detention facilities, a record number that would represent a 30 percent expansion from fiscal year 2017.

“To the extent that Congress continues to fund this system, they are complicit in its abuses,” said Heidi Altman, policy director at the National Immigrant Justice Center, a nongovernmental group dedicated to ensuring human rights protections and access to justice for all immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. “Congress should immediately act to decrease rather than expand detention and demand robust health, safety, and human rights standards in immigration detention.”

The new report is an update of a 2017 Human Rights Watch report that examined deaths in detention between 2012 and 2015, as well as a 2016 report by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Detention Watch Network, and the National Immigrant Justice Center that examined deaths in detention between 2010 and 2012.

The medical experts who analyzed the death reviews for the groups include Dr. Marc Stern, the former health services director for the Washington State Department of Corrections; Dr. Robert Cohen, the former director of Montefiore Rikers Island Health Services; and Dr. Palav Babaria, the chief administrative officer of Ambulatory Services at Alameda Health System in Oakland, California, and assistant clinical professor in Internal Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.

Six of the new deaths examined occurred at facilities operated by the following private companies under contract with ICE: #CoreCivic, #Emerald_Correctional_Management, the #GEO_Group, and the #Management_and_Training_Corporation (#MTC).

“ICE puts thousands of people’s health and lives at risk by failing to provide adequate medical care to the people it detains for weeks, months, and even years,” said Victoria Lopez, senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union.

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▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VL9IKGoozII

Bunnies by the boxful
▻https://pateblog.nma.gov.au/2016/03/27/bunnies-by-the-boxful

Opened in 1916, the freezing works supplied rabbit meat to markets around southern Queensland (Brisbane, Toowoomba, and Warwick), while pelts were sent to Sydney for auction and to hat factories in Melbourne. In 1917 the works processed over 110,000 rabbits. This success led to plans to expand capacity and establish exports.

‘The plant which did the freezing was small at first, supplying mainly Brisbane markets, but this grew until it was supplying a large city in Indonesia, then as the years went by, a firm in England…’

Bert Wright, 1992

Bert Wright was one of many locals who found employment at the works, operated in the 1920s by local businessmen Bill Wilkinson and Ted Maher.

‘I worked for the Yelarbon chiller for years on and off. The rabbit kept me in good work whenever I needed it. … I drove for them … from Yelarbon to Stanthorpe – 90 odd miles. Of course you were all over the place picking up, grading and buying rabbits. A docket was issued – so many pair of large, medium and small – all at different prices.’

Bert Wright, 1992

Bert recalled that in the interwar years (1919-1938) Yelarbon was known as a ‘rabbit town’. Over 20 tons of rabbits were trucked to Brisbane each week in peak periods and 151 trappers were on the freezing works’ books. During the 1930s Depression prices for rabbits were very low but trappers were able to make a little over £1 a week, enough for their families to survive the difficult times.

With the start of the Second World War in 1939, most of the young trappers enlisted for the Army and the flow of rabbit carcasses to the freezing works dropped significantly, but the company remained in business. Bert explained the impact that the absence of trappers had on rabbit populations: when the war finished ‘… there were rabbits everywhere – even living under the freezing works itself.’ The trappers came back and shipments of rabbits started coming from as far away as St George, approximately 250 km west of Yelarbon. The record catch Bert remembers was 4007 pairs delivered by one trapper in 1947-48. The works closed in 1955.

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Extermination of rabbits in California
(From “The Picture Magazine,” 1894)

Louis Pasteur and the $10m rabbit reward
▻http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/earshot/louis-pasteur-and-the-$10m-rabbit-reward/6703072

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Image: Plague proportions: farmers with one evening’s cull in central Victoria, 1949. (State Library of Victoria’s Pictures Collection/ Accession no H19019)

In the 1880s, the greatest threat to Australia’s political and economic future was the rabbit, and our desperate struggle with the bunny resembled a Looney Tunes plot, involving biological warfare, a scientific genius, a world famous actress and a $10 million reward. Lorena Allam reports.

Rabbits arrived in Australia with the First Fleet but didn’t thrive initially. The great bunny plague is commonly blamed on Thomas Austin of Barwon Park near Geelong, who decided in 1859 to organise a ’spot of hunting’ by releasing two dozen rabbits into the wild.

’Those two dozen rabbits went on to multiply, as rabbits do, to be a plague of a billion rabbits by the 1880s,’ says historian and author Stephen Dando-Collins.

The speed of the invasion was astonishing.

Some of the strong contenders were people who thought, “Well, let’s bring in something that will eat the rabbits.” In fact, some animals were brought in ... mongooses, cats.
Brian Coman, author and research scientist

’In the west of NSW in particular, properties were quite marginal to begin with,’ says Dando-Collins. ’Once the rabbits arrived and stripped them of all the crops and stock feed, these places became dustbowls and totally useless to farmers.’

Next the rabbits invaded politics.

’At that time there was no income tax, no company tax and the colonial government’s single biggest source of income was from the lease of crown lands,’ says Dando-Collins. ’By the late 1880s a lot of these leases were coming up for renewal, and farmers said to the government, “If you don’t sort out this rabbit problem, we’ll just walk away. We will not renew our leases.”’

Under the Rabbit Nuisance Act, the NSW government paid a rebate for rabbit scalps. The act spawned an entire industry.

’In just 12 months near Wilcannia 782,510 rabbits were caught, and they were still saying the property was useless,’ Dando-Collins says.

’Near Menindee 342,295 were scalped over three months. Word came back to the government in Sydney: “It’s just not working!”’

In 1887, the premier of NSW, Sir Henry Parkes, appointed an Inter-Colonial Rabbit Commission made up of prominent graziers, men of science and government administrators. The commission’s task was to find a biological solution to the rabbit problem. It sent out a global call for entries, with prize money of £25,000 ($10 million in today’s terms) for ’any method or process not previously known in the colony for the effectual extermination of rabbits’.
Rabbit plague Image: Plague proportions: farmers with one evening’s cull in central Victoria, 1949. (State Library of Victoria’s Pictures Collection/ Accession no H19019)

The Rabbit Commission received more than 1,500 suggestions, most of them ’pretty insane’ according to author and research scientist Brian Coman.

Coman worked for the Victorian Department of the Environment for 23 years, battling rabbits for much of that time.

’Some of the strong contenders were people who thought, “Well, let’s bring in something that will eat the rabbits.” In fact, some animals were brought in ... mongooses, cats. There was a whole trainload of cats dispatched into outback Australia and let loose at various points along the line,’ he says.

The NSW government and pastoralists sought a ’magic bullet’ because keeping rabbit numbers down was (and still is) expensive, backbreaking and unrelenting work. Coman, who grew up in the Western Districts of Victoria, can relate.

’Back then the first sort of crude methods—other than trapping and bounties, which were totally ineffectual—were broad-spectrum poisons like arsenic and phosphorous. These were terrible poisons to use in the bush because they were non-specific. A lot of other animals got killed as well,’ he says.

’They were also very dangerous. My father has a recollection, as a little boy, of coming home at night after he’d been with his uncle poisoning on a farm up near Euroa, and rubbing his hands and they glowed in the dark. That was the phosphorous all over his hands.’

The Rabbit Commission did receive a few useful suggestions, including one from a great man of science: Louis Pasteur.

Pasteur claimed he could eradicate rabbits with chicken cholera—something he’d trialled with some success in France. Pasteur dispatched his nephew, the scientist Adrien Loir, on a steamer from Paris to Australia with vials of chicken cholera in his luggage.

The Rabbit Commission agreed to allow Loir’s team to conduct experiments and built them a laboratory and accommodation on tiny Rodd Island, which sits in a quiet bend of the Parramatta River, a safe distance from civilisation.

Loir’s plan was to ’inject nine rabbits with food containing microbes of chicken cholera, placed in equal numbers in wooden hutches, wire-bottomed cages, and artificial burrows with healthy rabbits, and to place two healthy rabbits in a hutch with the excrement of diseased rabbits.’

They would also ’feed sheep, cattle, calves, lambs, horses, pigs, goats, dogs, cats, rats and mice once a day for six days with cholera-tainted food. Various birds, including nearly all kinds of poultry and the principal native birds, are also to be fed and inoculated.’

It soon became clear that chicken cholera killed the rabbits, but only those who ate the tainted food. It was not contagious for them but—and perhaps the clue was in the name—chicken cholera killed all the birds.

The Rabbit Commission retired to consider its decision, and Adrien Loir was left to wait. Over the next few months he used the lab on Rodd Island to research the mysterious Cumberland disease which at the time was devastating Australia’s sheep and cattle. Loir established that Cumberland disease was actually anthrax and—better still—he had a vaccine.

The Rabbit Commission eventually decided against ’recommending any further expenditure by government on testing the efficacy of this disease’. Nobody won the £25,000 prize. Instead, Loir and The Pasteur Institute made a healthy profit manufacturing anthrax vaccine on Rodd Island for the next four years.

In 1891 Loir’s island life took a dramatic turn, thanks to a visiting actress and her two dogs.
Sarah Bernhardt Image: The greatest actress of her age, Sarah Bernhardt (Photographed by Felix Nadar, 1864; Licensed under Public Domain via Commons)

’Sarah Bernhardt was the superstar of her age, and she brought her entire acting troupe to Australia for a tour,’ Stephen Dando-Collins explains. ’She arrived with her two dogs, and just as Johnny Depp ran afoul of quarantine regulations, she had her dogs taken off her, and she too was threatening to leave the country.

’Young Loir had bought tickets to all her shows, he was such a huge fan, and he approached her and said, “I think I can convince the NSW government to declare Rodd Island a quarantine facility and I’ll look after your dogs while you’re in Australia.”’

Dando-Collins says the pair dined in her hotel each evening and Bernhard spent her weekends on Rodd Island ’visiting her dogs’. After one particularly boisterous party, Bernhard and her entourage were ’found on the laboratory roof’ drinking champagne.

Loir eventually returned to France and Rodd Island is now a public recreation space.
Rodd island Image: The view from Loir’s balcony on Rodd Island on a sunny winter’s day (Lorena Allam)

So, what about that pesky plague of a billion rabbits?

Australia had to wait another 60 years before the magic bullet was found.

In 1950, after years of research, scientists released myxomatosis—and it was devastating. The rabbit population dropped from 600 million to 100 million in the first two years. The change was immediate.

Brian Coman remembers walking in a field with his father as a boy and looking at a hill, part of which was covered with bracken fern.

’He clapped his hands, and it was almost as if the whole surface of the ground got up and ran into the bracken fern. There were hundreds upon hundreds, perhaps thousands of rabbits. It was a sight I’ll never forget.’

But after myxomatosis ’the grey blanket’ disappeared.

’You could walk all day and not see a rabbit,’ says Coman.

Even scientists were shocked by the cruel effectiveness of the disease.

’I had a friend, Bunny Fennessy, who was of course fortuitously named,’ says Coman.

’He remembers walking to the crest of this hill. There was a fence line there and a gate. He leaned over the gate and looked down. In front of him was this mass of dead and dying rabbits, blind rabbits moping around, birds of prey flying in the air, flies everywhere, a stench in the air—he was simply overawed. He had never seen sick rabbits before.’

Genetic resistance to myxomatosis has been increasing since the 1970s and even after the release of the virulent rabbit haemorrhagic disease (RHD, or calicivirus) in 1991, the search for a biological solution continues.

In the meantime, the ’traditional’ means of keeping rabbits under control—poisoning, and warren destruction—are still necessary. Coman says it’s a war that doesn’t end.

’You’ve got a situation here where an animal is causing immense ecological damage, not to mention economic damage, and you simply cannot let that go on. You have to act.

’We simply can’t allow them to gain a foothold again; the cost environmentally and economically would be enormous.’

La myxomatose c’est vraiment sale, le lapin souffre beaucoup avant d’en mourir. Cet enflure de français d’Armand-Delille est allé l’inoculer aux lapins de sa propriété d’Eure-et-Loir et ça a finit par gagner toute la France puis l’Angleterre et à la fin des années 1950, toute l’Europe était touchée. Ce ne sont pas seulement les lapins sauvages qui en sont morts, mais aussi les domestiqués ou dans les élevages familiaux. WP note Entre 1952 et 1955, 90 à 98 % des lapins sauvages sont donc morts de la myxomatose en France.

Aujourd’hui le lapin élevé industriellement a moins de considération qu’une poule, c’est dire les conditions de vie infectes dans lesquelles il est maintenu.

#épizootie

#haut_les_mains_peau_de_lapin

Nouvelle-Zélande : les autorités répandent un virus pour décimer les lapins nuisibles RTBF - Antoine Libotte - 28 Février 2018
▻https://www.rtbf.be/info/monde/detail_nouvelle-zelande-les-autorites-repandent-un-virus-pour-decimer-les-lapin

Le ministère néo-zélandais de l’Agriculture a annoncé le déploiement à travers le pays d’une nouvelle souche du virus de la maladie hémorragique virale du lapin. Il s’agit du RHDV1-K5, provenant de Corée.

Les lapins, qui ont été introduits dans l’archipel au début du 19ème siècle, causent beaucoup de soucis aux agriculteurs du pays. Selon la BBC, ils « entrent en concurrence avec le bétail pour le pâturage et causent aussi des dégâts en creusant des terriers. »

https://ds1.static.rtbf.be/article/image/1248x702/6/c/8/b916ce7f95ec79851533591b99ef1c78-1519826537.jpg

Selon le ministère de l’Agriculture, les pertes de production imputées aux lapins s’élèvent à 50 millions de dollars néo-zélandais (soit un peu plus de 29,5 millions d’euros), à quoi il faut ajouter 25 millions (environ 14,8 millions d’euros) pour la lutte contre les lapins.

La population divisée
Si la Fédération des fermiers néo-zélandais (FF) se réjouit de cette décision, la Société pour la prévention de la cruauté envers les animaux (SPCA) aurait préféré une autre solution au problème.

Andrew Simpson, porte-parole de la FF, explique à la BBC que certains agriculteurs sont désespérés : « Si une autre année s’écoule sans le virus, les dégâts écologiques causés à certaines propriétés seraient effrayants. »

Pour Arnja Dale, de la SPCA, cette décision est décevante, vu « les souffrances que le virus causera aux lapins touchés et le risque potentiel pour les lapins de compagnie. Nous préconisons l’utilisation de méthodes plus humaines. »

La SPCA pointe également du doigt le vaccin conçu pour protéger les lapins domestiques et dont l’efficacité n’aurait pas été suffisamment prouvée. Or, pour le ministère de l’Agriculture, la souche RHDV1-K5 a été déployée en Australie en 2017 et aucun lapin domestique n’a été touché par la souche virale.

Vidéo : An introduction to the rabbit problem in Australia
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xieW62u2bZQ

#Nouvelle_Zélande #Australie #virus

#états-unis #urban_matter #architecture #planification_urbaine #shrinking_cities #housing

#Migrant_Mother #Dorothea_Lange

▻http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-2254202/Wild-horses-face-slaughter-breeding-fast-Mustangs-roaming-plains-Americ

Tens of thousands of wild horses face mass slaughter after mustangs breed too fast on the great plains

Iconic horse of the American west threatens natural ecosystems
Around 37, 000 mustangs roam the US ranges over ten states
Another 50,000 held in temporary pastures
Officials say populations have hit a ’critical mass’

December 2012

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2012/12/28/article-2254202-16A2ADDF000005DC-662_634x422.jpg

▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkPo6_EwSZ0

#The_Misfits

Près de 3 000 chevaux lusitaniens abattus au Portugal cette année faute d’acheteurs
▻https://www.francetvinfo.fr/monde/europe/faute-d-acheteurs-pres-de-3-000-chevaux-lusitaniens-abattus-cette-annee
18/12/2012

#crise_économique