Even though Hurricane Florence was downgraded to a category 1, some undocumented communities in North Carolina were evacuated from their homes with no sense of where to go: rewire.news/article/2018/0… Immigration enforcement seems to be on the uptick in NC and undocumented communities are afraid of asking for help from officials out of fear of detention and deportation.

Earlier today a grassroots organization in Charlotte, NC posted on social media that a community member saw ICE agents on a Charlotte-Mecklenburg school bus and on the campus of North Meck High School. I'm not one for circulating rumors, but I've spent a significant amount of time trying to verify these events - or at least learn more about how this information emerged.

Recirculating this piece I had published yesterday because there are still a lot of questions lingering about how many of the 500+ children who remain separated are separated because the federal government won't release them to their legal guardian: rewire.news/article/2018/0… HHS & ICE will not respond to queries about how many children/families this is impacting because of "ongoing litigation." When I reached out to the ACLU, who filed the litigation, I was told they are not even tracking the number of kids in this situation.

Here's a quick lesson in how white supremacists use environmentalism as a cover to attack immigrants. There is a group called Negative Population Growth and this is their purported focus.

Doing some research today, I found multiple white nationalist/ultra conservative sites referencing the denaturalization of a nazi as a way of trying to diminish/demean the movement to abolish ICE. And of course, ICE is also highly publishing the story: ice.gov/news/releases/… But here is the super important context that those willfully ignorant fools won't mention: Historically in the U.S., the primary target of denaturalization PRIOR TO THE TRUMP ADMIN was fucking nazis. They were the primary group of people the US denaturalized, AS THEY SHOULD.

A MOTHERFUCKING MESSAGE. Stop quoting anti-immigrant hate groups to "balance" quotes from immigrants fighting for their lives. This is not hard.

As all of this unfolds, I'm curious: Were there people who had faith in this country, like in its goodness? I remember going to a NOW chapter meeting last year, my first in NC, and a White Feminist had a long conversation with me about how Nixon was her first introduction to the idea that the president could lie....

I interviewed Phillip Agnew this morning of the @Dreamdefenders about their nationwide actions against GEO Group. In the context of my work, I've covered GEO as a private prison company that is responsible for human rights abuses in immigrant detention centers. But GEO also runs prisons and is complicit in mass incarceration. If you'll recall, around this time in 2016, a very different DOJ released a damning report about how prisons run by companies like GEO are less safe and less secure: oig.justice.gov/reports/2016/e…

ICE is denying that fathers are on a hunger strike at the Karnes detention center: reuters.com/article/us-usa… What do you know, in 2015, ICE denied that nearly 500 women were hunger striking at Hutto: rewire.news/article/2015/1…

When bad things happen to children, people mobilize. I understand it. I understand why the family separation policy galvanized millions of people to march. I understand why the death of the little girl released from Dilley will likely do the same. Today I have a really fucking heavy heart thinking about that little girl and how her family were likely asylum seekers. They came to the US for help and instead, their child died.

Yesterday many of us were scrambling to verify tweets from an attorney that a child had died after being detained at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, TX. Multiple sources confirmed to me it was true. One said it happened "weeks ago." rewire.news/article/2018/0… This is what ICE said to me when I asked for comment.

This was published back in April, but I just came across this crucial piece of reporting from @JCArbasetti and @LauraC_Moscoso about CoreCivic wanting to handle the transfer of Puerto Rican inmates to the U.S. periodismoinvestigativo.com/2018/04/compan… In the coming weeks and months, chances are folks will become very familiar with the private prison company CoreCivic. They used to be called Corrections Corporation of America, but rebranded because CCA became synonymous with human rights violations and in-custody deaths.

Because it keeps coming up: Immigrants dying in detention centers while in ICE custody is not a new phenomenon because of Trump. As long as there has been detention, immigrants have died. Don't tie these deaths to Trump; tie them to a dangerous, deadly, and negligent system. Because ICE refuses to be transparent, we often don't know the exact details of the death. ICE's press releases focus more on outlining the person's country of origin and supposed "immigration violations" than on the circumstances that lead them to dying in custody.

So, if I wasted my time dragging every outlet/shitty journalist who wrote some shitty, racist thing, that would be my full-time job. But the Washington Post is really out here publishing garbage today: IN WHICH WE'RE SUPPOSED TO FEEL BAD FOR TWO WHITE TRUMPKINS BECAUSE THEY ARE WHITE AND IN THE MINORITY AT THEIR PLACE OF WORK. GOODBYE WITH THIS BULLSHIT.

This is circulating today and I have to say... I'm surprised? Women in federal immigration custody have always taken pregnancy tests as part of intake. When it appeared ICE's policy for detaining pregnant people had shifted, we reported on the long-established protocol of having women take pregnancy tests as part of intake: rewire.news/article/2017/0…

ICE is reporting that Efrain De La Rosa, a Mexican immigrant from Puebla, has reportedly committed suicide while detained at Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, GA. His is the third death at the facility in 15 months. Stewart is notorious for being a sort of last stop before deportation for many immigrants and for many years, the judges there have denied a bulk of asylum claims.

Over a week ago, I went to a #FamiliesBelongTogetherMarch in North Carolina and I'm 99 percent certain two young, white people there were white supremacists surveilling communities of color. Which I'm sure sounds totally nutty to some of you. A young white man with a shaved head, without any press credentials, had a professional camera and he was filming the speakers and laughing when they talked about children in cages.

Last night I sat in a packed movie theater and watched "Won't You Be My Neighbor?," a documentary about Mr. Rogers. Everyone was fucking sobbing. EVERYONE. The movie gutted me. My personal religion is kindness, but kindness has become a double-edged sword for me over the past coupe of years. It makes me unsafe, and I've been grappling with this a lot lately.

USCIS will celebrate Independence Day with naturalization ceremonies taking place all over the country, "welcoming more than 14,000 new citizens." USCIS Director L. Francis Cissna, says the agency is "humbled to be able to share in this moment of pride, joy, and personal triumph.” Y'all remember Cissna, right? The Trump appointee who removed "nation of immigrants" from USCIS' mission statement? washingtonpost.com/news/worldview…

Negative Population Growth is a racist as shit, xenophobic, anti-immigrant group with ties to white nationalist, John Tanton. Here's an example of the kind of shit they advocate for, a "proposed national population policy" that ONLY focuses on immigration: npg.org/wp-content/upl… Keep in mind that John Tanton, considered the father of the anti-immigrant movement, is also behind the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS). If those orgs sound familiar and you don't know why, look to the Trump admin.

A bright spot on a bad news day: A federal judge granted a preliminary injunction ending Scott Lloyd's ORR policy that subjects Central American boys falsely accussed of gang membership to prolonged detention: rewire.news/article/2018/0… I wrote a two-part series on how Lloyd's policy played out. Part one is about how the Trump administration's rhetoric conflating immigration with criminality influenced the creation of the policy:
rewire.news/article/2018/0…