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Undocumented Mother: Stop Separation of Migrant Children by Dropping Charges Against Their Parents
President Trump’s “zero tolerance” crackdown on immigrants and asylum seekers continues as parents of more than 2,000 separated children say they still don’t know where their kids are. Trump now says migrants should be deported without judges. Maru Mora Villalpando is an undocumented immigrant and mother with the group Mijente and Northwest Detention Center Resistance. She has a hearing in her own immigration case on Tuesday and says the best way to stop the separation of children from their families at the border is to drop the charges against their parents.

50 Years After MLK’s Poor People’s Campaign, 2,500+ Arrested Over 6 Weeks Calling for Moral Revival
This show features voices of the thousands who marched on the nation’s capital Saturday for the Poor People’s Campaign. The mass demonstration followed six weeks of actions around the country and more than 2,500 arrests, as protesters join what they are calling a “moral revival” to demand an end to systemic racism, poverty, the war economy and ecological devastation. The march brought together activists from around the country more than 50 years after demonstrators converged on Washington, D.C., in 1968 to take up the cause that Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been fighting for when he was assassinated on April 4, 1968: the original Poor People’s Campaign. Demonstrators rallied to protest widespread poverty just days after U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley slammed a new U.N. report slamming the Trump administration’s policies for worsening the state of poverty in the United States.

“The King” Director Eugene Jarecki: Elvis Presley’s Rise and Fall Is a Metaphor for America Today
To understand America in the age of Trump, prize-winning documentary filmmaker Eugene Jarecki says to look no further than the checkered history of Elvis Presley. Jarecki’s new documentary “The King” opens in New York City this week. It follows the filmmaker as he drives Elvis Presley’s 1963 Rolls Royce across the United States in an attempt to understand what has happened to America in the age of Trump. “The American dream…wasn’t for anybody if you weren’t a white man,” Jarecki said. “We got here because this nation puts power and money ahead of democracy. We have been hijacked by capitalism.” We speak with Jarecki about Elvis, cultural appropriation, the civil rights movement and the story of this country.

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Immigrant Parents Search for Children Snatched by Gov’t at the Border, But Reunification Is Rare
More 2,300 children have been separated from their families at the U.S.-Mexico border after their parents were charged with illegal entry under the Trump administration’s ongoing “zero tolerance” policy. As concerns grow about poor coordination between Customs and Border Patrol, which takes the children, and the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which puts them into detention and foster care, The Intercept has a new report on one of the first reunifications. Journalist Debbie Nathan speaks about a Guatemalan woman whose 5-year-old son was taken from her last month by immigration authorities in Texas after she sought asylum, and has been reunited with him after 38 days in detention.

Investigation: Substandard Medical Care in ICE Detention is Killing Immigrants, Endangering Lives
Human Rights Watch has a new report that exposes dangerously substandard medical care in ICE detention facilities around the country and reveals that more people died in immigration detention in fiscal year 2017 than any year since 2009. Physicians reviewed 15 deaths in immigration detention from December 2015 to April 2017, determining that substandard medical care contributed or led to eight of the 15 deaths. “What we found is ICE, the agency that’s detaining now 40,000 people… and wants to expand, cannot provide adequately for the safety of the people that it holds,” says Clara Long, senior researcher at Human Rights Watch. She’s the author of the report “Code Red: The Fatal Consequences of Dangerously Substandard Medical Care in Immigration Detention.”

ICE Detention is “Soul-Destroying”: Eritrean Immigrant Dies by Suicide After U.S. Deports Him
An Eritrean man took his own life after being deported from the United States earlier this month. Zeresenay Ermias Testfatsion died by suicide at the Cairo International Airport. He was 34 years old. Testfatsion sought asylum in the United States in 2017, fleeing violence in Eritrea. He spent more than a year detained in South Florida and Ohio before he was deported. Friends and family are demanding to know why he was deported to Eritrea, despite his fears that he would be tortured or even killed there. Christine Ho founded a volunteer visitation program that provides support for immigrants and asylum-seekers inside Broward Transitional Center, the immigrant detention center in South Florida where Testfatsion was jailed for more than a year.

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Trump Admin to Indefinitely Detain Migrant Families Together; No Plan to Reunite Separated Children
President Trump has signed an executive order claiming to end the separation of children from their parents at the border, but critics warn the order could lead to the indefinite detention of entire families. The government has no plans to reunite the thousands of children already separated from their families with their parents. Franco Ordoñez is the White House correspondent for the McClatchy Washington Bureau. His latest story is headlined, “Trump’s immigration order replaces one crisis with another.”

GEO Group & Private Prisons Stand to Profit as Trump Pushes Indefinite Family Detention
President Donald Trump’s executive order ending family separations at the border opts to indefinitely detain families together instead. The Nation reports that this policy will directly benefit the two largest prison companies in the United States: GEO Group and CoreCivic, formerly Corrections Corporation of America. Bob Libal is the executive director of the Austin-based civil and human rights group Grassroots Leadership. They sued the state of Texas when it tried to classify ICE’s family detention centers as “child care” facilities. They won, but the detention centers continue to operate without a license. His new article in the Texas Observer is headlined, “It’s Time to Decriminalize Immigration.” It is co-authored with Judy Greene.

Report from McAllen, Texas: No One Knows What Will Happen Now to Separated Migrant Children
The government has no plans to reunite thousands of children who have been separated from their parents at the border, despite President Trump’s executive order claiming to end family separations. Zenén Jaimes is advocacy director for the Texas Civil Rights Project. He is part of their team that goes to the federal courthouse in McAllen each day since Trump began his “zero tolerance” policy, and collects information from parents who had their children taken away from them before they were taken to court to face criminal charges for crossing the border.

Lawsuit Claims Detained Migrant Children Have Been Forcibly Injected With Powerful Psychiatric Drugs
Shocking reports have revealed that immigrant children were subdued and incapacitated with powerful psychiatric drugs at a detention center in South Texas. Legal filings show that children held at Shiloh Treatment Center in southern Houston have been “forcibly injected with medications that make them dizzy, listless, obese and even incapacitated,” according to reports by Reveal. Meanwhile, according to another Reveal investigation, taxpayers have paid more than $1.5 billion over the past four years to companies operating immigration youth facilities despite facing accusations of rampant sexual and physical abuse. The reporter who broke these stories is Aura Bogado. She is an immigration reporter with Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting. Her latest stories are, “Immigrant children forcibly injected with drugs, lawsuit claims” and “Migrant children sent to shelters with histories of abuse allegations.”

Yemenis Accuse UAE Officers of Sexual Torture Inside Secret Prisons
A new investigation has uncovered rampant sexual violence against Yemeni prisoners held in prisons run by the United Arab Emirates in Yemen. The Associated Press reports that in March, 15 officers lined up the prisoners in the southern city of Aden and ordered them to undress before searching their anal cavities, claiming they were looking for contraband cell phones. The prisoners screamed and cried and those who resisted were beaten and threatened by dogs. Hundreds of prisoners reportedly suffered similar abuse. A Pentagon spokesman quoted in the piece said the allegations were not substantiated. The UAE is a key ally of the United States and has partnered with Saudi Arabia in its military assault on Yemen.

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Seymour Hersh: Media Today Must Cover Yemen & Trump Policy, Not Get Distracted by Tweets
“Our Country’s biggest enemy is the Fake News,” President Trump tweeted last week, in his latest attack on the nation’s press. A week earlier, federal prosecutors revealed they had secretly captured years’ worth of phone and email data from journalist Ali Watkins, who broke several high-profile stories related to the Senate Intelligence Committee. A former top aide on the committee, James Wolfe, has been charged with lying to the FBI about his contacts with the press. Meanwhile, Reporters Without Borders recently dropped the United States to number 45 in its annual ranking of press freedom. When the group first published its list in 2002, the United States came in at number 17. The nation’s best-known investigative journalist, Seymour Hersh, has a new book out looking back on his more than half-century of scoops and digging up secrets. It’s titled “Reporter: A Memoir.”

Remembering the My Lai Massacre: Seymour Hersh on Uncovering the Horrors of Mass Murder in Vietnam
In 1970, Seymour Hersh won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on how the U.S. slaughtered more than 500 Vietnamese women, children and old men in the village of My Lai on March 16, 1968. The event became known as the My Lai massacre.

Investigative Reporter Sy Hersh: Working with Gene McCarthy’s Presidential Bid Shaped My Life Path
Before investigative reporter Sy Hersh exposed many of the government’s deepest secrets, from Nixon’s bombing of Cambodia to the CIA’s role undermining the Chilean government of Salvador Allende, he served as press secretary for Democrat Eugene McCarthy during his 1968 presidential bid.

Sy Hersh: I Knew Richard Nixon Beat His Wife in 1974, But Did Not Report the Story
Soon after President Richard Nixon resigned in 1974, Seymour Hersh got a call from a source at a California hospital. He learned that Nixon had beaten his wife so severely in 1974 that she sought treatment at an emergency room. Hersh did not report the story. Years later, he received criticism for this choice. Hersh says of his decision not to report on Nixon beating his wife, “I was obtuse to the notion that it was a crime. … I didn’t get it.”

Sy Hersh: Henry Kissinger Must “Count Burned and Maimed Cambodian & Vietnamese Babies” in His Sleep
While Sy Hersh was working at The New York Times Washington bureau, he would watch reporters call then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger nearly every day, diligently writing down his comments and then reproducing them as front-page news. This is one of many stories Hersh tells in his new memoir, “Reporter.” Hersh says, “What I always said about Kissinger, publicly, and again and again, is that when people … can’t sleep and they count sheep, I think Kissinger has to count burned and maimed Cambodian and Vietnamese babies the rest of his life. But, of course, he doesn’t.”

Seymour Hersh on Torture at Abu Ghraib & Secret U.S. Assassination Programs
In 2004, investigative reporter Sy Hersh exposed the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal in Iraq that shocked the world. Shocking photos of U.S. military personnel humiliating and torturing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib sparked global outcry, as well as national hearings, investigations and finger pointing.

Eric has now completed all 12 signs of The Sacred Space of Self, the 2018 Spring Reading on Chiron’s transition into Aries, and Mars retrograde in Aquarius over the summer. Order today and get all 12 signs for just $99. Check out our sample videos here, and the full Guide to Chiron Transits here.

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“Trump Creates Crises & Preys on Fear”: Rep. Jayapal on Policy of Separating Kids from Parents
Outrage is growing over the Trump administration’s separation of children from their parents along the U.S.-Mexico border. On Monday, ProPublica released audio from inside a U.S. Customs and Border Protection facility, in which children estimated to be between the ages of 4 and 10 years old are heard crying “Mama” and “Papi” after being separated from their parents. In another part of the audio, a Border Patrol agent is heard joking, in Spanish, “Well, we have an orchestra here. What’s missing is a conductor.” Video footage released by the U.S. Border Patrol Monday shows migrant children in concrete-floored chain link cages, in an old warehouse in McAllen, Texas. A new Quinnipiac Poll shows roughly two-thirds of U.S. voters oppose separating children from their parents at the border. About 7 percent of Democratic voters support the Trump policy, while 55 percent of Republicans support it. Rep. Pramila Jayapal is a Democratic congressmember from Washington state. She has just helped announce a march on Washington and cities nationwide on June 30 against family separation. She is vice ranking member of the House Budget Committee and vice chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. On June 9 she visited a detention center in her home state and spoke with some of the 200 asylum-seekers held at the Sea-Tac Bureau of Prisons facility.

Caged Children & Terrified Infants: Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee Describes “Acts of Indecency” at Border
President Trump is continuing to blame Democrats for his administration’s practice of separating at least 2,000 children from their parents in recent weeks. He also doubled down on the practice in an address Monday, ahead of his meetings today with Republicans to discuss compromise legislation on a hardline immigration bill. Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee, Democrat of Texas, has represented the 18th Congressional District since 1995, which includes most of central Houston. She is just back from the Texas border with Mexico, where she joined a delegation of lawmakers who visited a processing center in McAllen, Texas, and the Southwest Key Programs’ Casa Padre, which houses 1,500 children in Brownsville, Texas.

As Demonstrators Demand Nicaraguan President’s Resignation, Government Accuses Opposition of Coup
The political crisis in Nicaragua is intensifying. More than 178 people have been killed since widespread demonstrations to oust Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega began in mid-April, when his government announced plans to overhaul and slash social security. Amnesty International has accused the Nicaraguan government of using “pro-government armed groups to carry out attacks, incite violence, increase their capacity for repression and operate outside the law.” But the Nicaraguan government has blamed part of the violence on armed members of the opposition who are trying to overthrow the democratically elected government.

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Democratic Lawmakers Join Family Separation Protests at Detention Centers from Texas to New Jersey
Protests have erupted nationwide against the Trump administration’s new policy of separating children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border. Most of the parents apprehended by Customs and Border Patrol are now charged with criminal entry—and, in many cases, criminal re-entry—then taken to jails or prisons to serve their time before they are sent to immigrant detention centers. In the meantime, their children are being sent to shelters and foster care programs around the country. The Associated Press reports that between April 19 and May 31, nearly 2,000 children were separated from their parents. Hundreds of protesters also met at a family processing center in McAllen, Texas, where nearly half of all children have been removed from their parents. And in New Jersey, a group of Democratic lawmakers visited a private immigrant detention facility in the town of Elizabeth to speak with asylum-seeking parents held there after they were separated from their children. Meanwhile, on Sunday, in Houston, people marched in the rain outside a former warehouse and homeless shelter where the government plans to detain hundreds of separated children, including many who are a so-called tender age—children who are younger than 12 years old.

Meet the Migrant Child Detention Center Whistleblower Now Speaking Out Against Family Separations
A youth care worker who quit his job at a Tucson detention center for unaccompanied minors is speaking out about inadequate facilities, untrained staff and inhumane policies, after witnessing the devastation of family separations firsthand. Antar Davidson says he quit after he was forced to tell children who were separated from their mother not to hug one another. The facility is run by Southwest Key, a nonprofit that operates 27 facilities and has signed a lease to detain hundreds of separated children, including many who are a younger than 12 years old, in a “baby jail” in a former warehouse and homeless shelter in Houston. For more, we speak with Antar Davidson.

With Spotlight on Migrant Families Separated at the Border, Will Democrats Push to Abolish ICE?
On Saturday, President Trump blamed the widely condemned family separation practice on Democrats, tweeting, “Democrats can fix their forced family breakup at the Border by working with Republicans on new legislation.” Trump is set to meet Tuesday with Republican lawmakers to discuss a so-called compromise immigration bill they claim would end family separation while lifting limits on how long families can be detained, and which also includes a promise of $25 billion for Trump’s border wall. Democracy Now! correspondent Renée Feltz discusses a history of family separation that has stemmed from previous legislative compromises with Democrats, and looks ahead to calls for them to defund Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), if they gain control of the House in November.

“Civilian Lives No Longer Matter”: Millions at Risk as Saudi-Led Coalition Attacks Yemeni Port City
Hundreds of fighters have been killed and more than 4,000 civilians have fled their homes in the Yemeni port city of Hodeidah since the U.S.-backed coalition, led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, launched an all-out offensive last week. Coalition aircrafts bombarded Hodeidah’s main airport Monday, wounding dozens and preventing aid organizations from reaching parts of the city.

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Lawyer: Jeff Sessions’ Attacks on Migrant Domestic Violence Survivors Drags U.S. Back to “Dark Ages”
On Monday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that domestic and gang-related violence will generally no longer be grounds for asylum, a far-reaching shift that could affect thousands of people, particularly women from Central America fleeing gender-based violence. This decision reverses the Board of Immigration Appeals’ grant of asylum to a Salvadoran domestic violence survivor known as A.B., who fled to the U.S. for her life after surviving 15 years of beatings, rape and death threats from her husband. In ruling against A.B., Sessions also overturned a groundbreaking precedent from 2014 in which the immigration appeals court affirmed that domestic violence survivors are deserving of protection.

U.S. Withdrawal from Human Rights Council “Imminent” After U.N. Condemns Israel for Gaza Massacre
The Trump administration will reportedly withdraw the United States from the U.N.’s Human Rights Council. Reuters reports the decision is “imminent” and comes after the U.N. General Assembly voted 120 to 8 on Wednesday to condemn Israel over its massacre of Palestinians protesting nonviolently against Israel’s occupation.

Blistering U.N. Report: Trump Administration’s Policies Designed to Worsen Poverty & Inequality
A group of top Democrats are demanding the Trump administration present a plan to Congress to address growing poverty in the United States, following an excoriating report by the United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty, Philip Alston. Alston slammed the Trump administration’s policies for worsening the state of poverty in the United States. The report details how 40 million Americans live in poverty, and 18.5 million Americans live in extreme poverty. It also details how the United States has the highest rate of income inequality among Western countries and one of the lowest rates of intergenerational social mobility.

Rev. William Barber: U.S. Policies on Healthcare, Poverty Are Immoral & a Threat to Democracy
The release of the U.N. report on extreme poverty in the United States comes amid a nationwide, weeks-long direct action campaign known as the new Poor People’s Campaign, aimed at fighting poverty and racism in the United States. Nearly 2,000 people have been arrested around the country since the campaign began in March, 50 years after Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. launched the first Poor People’s Campaign.

Rev. William Barber: Jeff Sessions Using Religion to Justify Family Separations Is “Biblical Heresy”
More than 300 Catholic bishops have blasted the Trump administration’s immigration policies, calling for an end to the separation of migrant children from their parents and condemning Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s policy of ending the right of domestic violence survivors to seek asylum in the United States. On Thursday, Sessions quoted the Bible to justify his department’s immigration policies. Sessions was speaking to an invitation-only crowd in Fort Wayne, Indiana. “I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13 to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained the government for his purposes,” stated Sessions. Critics seized on his reference to Romans 13, noting it was a favorite passage of defenders of the Confederacy used to justify slavery. We speak to the Rev. William Barber.

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Trauma at the Texas-Mexico Border: Families Separated, Children Detained & Residents Fighting Back
Outrage is growing over the Trump administration’s policy of separating immigrant families who cross the U.S.-Mexico border, many fleeing dangerous conditions and seeking asylum. At least 600 immigrant children were removed from their parents last month, after Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the new rule. On Wednesday, 10 members of Congress protested by blocking the entrance to the headquarters of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the agency tasked with carrying out the forced removal of children from their parents. More protests in at least 60 cities are planned today by the group Families Belong Together, which formed in response to the new policy. The epicenter of this “zero tolerance” crackdown is the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas, where more than half of all migrant families and children have been apprehended by Border Patrol agents since mid-May. Democracy Now! correspondent Renée Feltz spoke with residents taking action in response to the widely condemned practice of separating families.

Residents on Both Sides of the Border Try to Help Asylum Seekers Illegally Turned Away by U.S. Gov’t
Under President Trump’s new “zero tolerance” policy, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has called for people seeking asylum to follow the law and go to official ports of entry to request help. But asylum seekers at international bridges across the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas have been blocked by Border Patrol agents who say they are unable to process them. In some cases, asylum seekers—including women and young children—have been told to wait for days and even weeks on international bridges over the border, often in extreme heat. Residents on both sides of the border have responded by bringing food, water and clothing to people as they wait to be processed. Democracy Now! producer Renée Feltz followed some of them as they delivered aid, and interviewed Jennifer Harbury, a human rights lawyer who has lived in the Rio Grande Valley for over 40 years, about the significance of the United States rejecting legal requests by asylum seekers, detaining them at length, and in some cases deporting them after separating them from their children.

As Detention Centers Hit Capacity, Trump Eyes Tent Cities on Military Bases to Jail Migrant Children
The Trump administration is reportedly planning to build tent cities on military bases near the U.S.-Mexico border to accommodate the increasing numbers of migrant children being held in detention centers. According to McClatchy, Department of Health and Human Services officials are due to visit Fort Bliss, an Army base near El Paso, Texas, in the coming weeks to look at the land where they’re considering building a tent city. HHS detention shelters are 95 percent full and hold more than 10,000 children. The number of migrant children in custody has recently surged by over 20 percent, and a tent city could temporarily accommodate an additional 1,000 to 5,000. In Washington, D.C., we speak with the reporter who broke the story, Franco Ordoñez. He is the White House correspondent for the McClatchy Washington Bureau.

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