Tag Archives: freedom

Why Is There No Code Name for the ISIS Bombing Campaign?

by DamienCorser Posted on October 1, 2014

Mother Jones

I learned something new today: code names for military operations only became a public thing after World War II, and it was only around 1980 that the names of major operations got turned into serious PR exercises. Paul Waldman runs down all the recent hits:

Operation Urgent Fury (invasion of Grenada, 1983)
Operation Just Cause (invasion of Panama, 1989)
Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm (Kuwait/Iraq, 1989)

Operation Restore Hope (Somalia, 1993)
Operation Uphold Democracy (Haiti, 1994)
Operation Deliberate Force (NATO bombing of Bosnia, 1995)
Operation Desert Fox (bombing of Iraq, 1998)
Operation Noble Anvil (the American component of NATO bombing in Kosovo, which was itself called Operation Allied Force, 1999)
Operation Infinite Justice (first name for Afghanistan war, 2001)
Operation Enduring Freedom (second name for Afghanistan war, 2001)
Operation Iraqi Freedom (Iraq, 2003)
Operation Odyssey Dawn (bombing of Libya, 2011)

Aside from the fact that we have twelve of these things in just the past 30 years, Waldman points out that Republican names (in bold) are considerably more martial than Democratic names:

Even though it’s the military that chooses these names, you might notice that the ones during Republican administrations have a particularly testosterone-fueled feel to them, while most of the Democratic ones are a little more tentative. Something like Operation Uphold Democracy just doesn’t have the same oomph as, say, Operation Urgent Fury. If the Obama administration had really wanted to get people excited about fighting ISIS, they should have called it Operation Turgid Thrusting or Operation Boundless Glory.

Oddly, though, it turns out that the ISIS campaign doesn’t even have any name at all. I guess that’s a good sign.

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Why Is There No Code Name for the ISIS Bombing Campaign?

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How Does This GOP Senate Candidate Keep Getting Away With Such Terrible Gaffes?

by RosariaRan Posted on September 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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This year’s Iowa Senate race—a key contest that could determine whether Republicans gain control of the upper body—has so far not been shaped by titanic policy issues. Instead, farm animals have played a larger role. GOP state Sen. Joni Ernst, who is up against Democratic Rep. Bruce Braley in this much-watched face-off, got a boost from an ad in which she bragged about castrating hogs. Braley has been hurt by the news that he allegedly threatened* a lawsuit against a neighbor whose chickens had wandered into his yard. Ernst has accused Braley of sexism for including stock footage of baby chickens—i.e., “chicks”—in an ad that asserted she had not made a “peep” about cutting government pork.

This may not be shocking for a Senate race in the Hawkeye State. But what is surprising is that the campaign has not been much affected by a series of controversial, extreme, or just plain dumb remarks Ernst has made—and her subsequent denials that she said them.

Here are a few examples of Ernst’s out-there statements:

Ernst has alleged that the federal government is partnering with the United Nations to force Iowans off their land and into urban cores as part of a conspiracy called Agenda 21. At a campaign event last November, she said:

All of us agreed that Agenda 21 is a horrible idea. One of those implications to Americans, again, going back to what did it does do to the individual family here in the state of Iowa, and what I’ve seen, the implications that it has here is moving people off of their agricultural land and consolidating them into city centers, and then telling them that you don’t have property rights anymore. These are all things that the UN is behind, and it’s bad for the United States and bad for families here in the state of Iowa.

At a candidate forum in January, she said that President Obama has “become a dictator” and should be impeached.
Meeting with business leaders in late August, she complained about the existence of federal minimum wage. Here’s what she said, per the Mason City (Iowa) Globe Gazette:

The minimum wage is a safety net. For the federal government to set the minimum wage for all 50 states is ridiculous…The standard of living in Iowa is different than it is in New York or California or Texas. One size does not fit all.

She told the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition last September that federal laws can be nullified by states:

She told the Des Moines Register editorial board in May that the United States really did find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Per my colleague Pat Caldwell:

“We don’t know that there were weapons on the ground when we went in,” she said, “however, I do have reason to believe there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.” When a Register reporter quizzed her on what information she has, Ernst said, “My husband served in Saudi Arabia as the Army Central Command sergeant major for a year and that’s a hot-button topic in that area.”

She said at a GOP primary debate in May that abortion providers “should be punished” and zygotes should be granted full constitutional protection if the state passed a “personhood” amendment—and in 2013, sponsored a bill in the state Senate to make that possible.

Ernst is hailed by supporters as a straight-talking candidate who will stick to her conservative principles. But throughout this campaign, she has been quick to walk away from her most bizarre statements as soon as she’s challenged on them.

When asked by Yahoo News last month about her suggestion that an international cabal would relocate her constituents to Des Moines, Ernst said, “I don’t think that the UN Agenda 21 is a threat to Iowa farmers.” When asked about impeachment in July, she insisted, “I have not seen any evidence that the president should be impeached.” She added that “obviously” the president is not a dictator. In June, referring to the federal minimum wage, she said that, contra whatever she said earlier that month, “I never called for the abolishment of it. Never.” In May, she walked back her weapons of mass destruction claim and conceded that Iraq had none at the time of the US invasion. Recently, Ernst attacked Braley for proposing an adjustment to the Social Security retirement age, while simultaneously making an identical proposal herself.

It’s Braley’s poultry-related gaffes—and not Ernst’s Palinesque positions and subsequent clarifications—that have made the biggest political dent; the most recent poll of the race found Ernst with a 6-point edge. It’s just easier to understand a claim about someone’s character than it is an international conspiracy. “Something like Agenda 21—who knows about that?” says Tim Hagle, a political scientist at the University of Iowa. “But they understand the idea that my neighbor is suing me over chickens.”

*Correction: This piece originally stated that Braley had sued his neighbor.

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How Does This GOP Senate Candidate Keep Getting Away With Such Terrible Gaffes?

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Everyone Please Calm Down About the White House Jumper

by Iris56Cyosfzby Posted on September 22, 2014

Mother Jones

In response to the fence-jumper who got inside the White House before being apprehended, the Secret Service is considering the possibility of creating a larger “buffer zone” around 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue:

One proposal is to keep people off the sidewalks around the White House fence and create several yards of additional barrier around the compound’s perimeter. Another is to screen visitors as far as a block away from the entrance gates.

Petula Dvorak is outraged:

Now the Secret Service — which hasn’t exactly covered itself in glory the past few years — wants us to pay for its mistake, to once again intrude on more public space and make suspects out of millions of visitors, residents and office workers who come near the White House every day. To further encroach on the country’s most important values: our openness and our freedom.

The security gurus think they might want to keep people off the sidewalks around the nation’s most famous residence. Or maybe screen tourists a block away from the White House. They want to Anschluss even more public space to expand The Perimeter around 1600 Pennsylvania, amping up the feeling of hostility, fear and paranoia that already pervades the heart of our nation.

Dvorak speaks for me, and I hope she speaks for plenty of others too. This crap has just got to stop. We simply can’t continue this endless series of insane overreactions every time something bad happens. Sometimes an incident is just an incident. In this case, the Secret Service needs to examine its procedures and probably tighten up a thing or two. That’s it.

This is a case where no-drama Obama really needs to step in. For God’s sake, let’s dial down the drama on this whole affair. It’s nowhere near as big a deal as it’s being played up to be.

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Everyone Please Calm Down About the White House Jumper

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Confidential Memo: Former Koch Group Insider Fears the Tea Party Is Fading

by AidanZiegler Posted on August 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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Americans for Prosperity, the dark-money-funded advocacy group founded by Charles and David Koch, rose to prominence in 2009 and 2010 on the back of the white-hot tea party movement. But today, even though Republicans stand a good chance of retaking the Senate and the conservative fringe has hijacked the House’s efforts to pass immigration reform, the tea party grassroots is withering away, according to a confidential AFP memo obtained by Mother Jones.

The internal AFP memo was written in April by Jason Cline, an Arkansas political consultant who left the state’s influential AFP chapter this spring. It’s clear from the memo that Cline clashed with higher-ups in AFP’s national office, including Teresa Oelke, a former AFP-Arkansas director who now is AFP’s vice president of state operations. In the memo, Cline responds to various allegations leveled against him by Oelke and others, including that Cline was “sexist toward women,” “prejudiced against old people,” and mismanaged AFP-Arkansas.

Cline writes in response that he was not biased against elderly activists but rather sought out younger activists for AFP-Arkansas due to a dropoff in support among older tea party followers. He explains:

We have a declining tea party engagement and we need to engage new forms of activists. The comment made by Cline to a fellow activist was specifically, ‘These old people are not gonna get it done. These kids are workers.’ Not in the sense that they can’t accomplish it, but that there are too few of them.

The problem of declining support from older tea partiers, Cline continues, is a national problem:

On my very first phone call with Jen Stefano as my new AFP regional director, I asked her if declining tea party engagement was just an Arkansas problem or if everyone was experiencing that. Her comment was that it’s a problem everywhere.

At the time, Cline and Stefano were prominent figures within AFP. As the director of AFP-Arkansas, Cline led one of AFP’s strongest chapters. Stefano is a national regional director for AFP and a fixture on Fox News and Fox Business News. If they believe tea party support is drying up, the problem is probably real. AFP spokesman Levi Russell declined to comment, and Stefano did not respond to a request for comment.

This year’s primary season has borne out Cline and Stefano’s observations. Unlike 2010 and 2012, when tea party favorites Mike Lee and Ted Cruz ousted establishment Republicans, the 2014 Senate primary season has seen the defeat of every single tea-party-aligned challenger. The major surprise of this election cycle has been economics professor David Brat’s victory over then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.). Yet neither AFP or FreedomWorks, the two major national tea party groups, spent money to elect Brat.

Of course, establishment Republicans won in 2014 in part because they tacked hard to the right in anticipation of a tea party challenge. Likewise, the Republican Party has become more hardline in the past five years. The tea party, then, has won an ideological victory. But as a source of manpower on the ground, the movement is no longer what it once was.

Read Cline’s 19-page memo below (some personal information has been redacted):

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Confidential Memo: Former Koch Group Insider Fears the Tea Party Is Fading

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Here’s What Happens When You Challenge the CIA Through “Proper Channels”

by DoraOZLPgq Posted on July 5, 2014

Mother Jones

One of the standard criticisms of Edward Snowden is that he should have tried harder to air his concerns via proper channels. This is fairly laughable on its face, since even now the NSA insists that all its programs were legal and it continues to fight efforts to change them or release any information about them. Still, maybe Snowden should have tried. What harm could it have done?

Today, Greg Miller of the Washington Post tells us the story of Jeffrey Scudder, who worked in the CIA’s Historical Collections Division. This is a division explicitly set up to look for old documents that can be safely released to the public. Scudder discovered thousands of documents he thought should be released, and he worked diligently through channels to make this happen. When that ran into repeated roadblocks, he eventually decided to try to force the CIA’s hand—legally, openly—by filing requests under the Freedom of Information Act:

Scudder’s FOIA submissions fell into two categories: one seeking new digital copies of articles already designated for release and another aimed at articles yet to be cleared. He made spreadsheets that listed the titles of all 1,987 articles he wanted, he said, then had them scanned for classified content and got permission to take them home so he could assemble his FOIA request on personal time.

….Six months after submitting his request, Scudder was summoned to a meeting with Counterintelligence Center investigators and asked to surrender his personal computer. He was placed on administrative leave, instructed not to travel overseas and questioned by the FBI.

….On Nov. 27, 2012, a stream of black cars pulled up in front of Scudder’s home in Ashburn, Va., at 6 a.m. FBI agents seized every computer in the house, including a laptop his daughter had brought home from college for Thanksgiving. They took cellphones, storage devices, DVDs, a Nintendo Game Boy and a journal kept by his wife, a physical therapist in the Loudoun County Schools.

The search lasted nearly four hours, Scudder said. FBI agents followed his wife and daughters into their bedrooms as they got dressed, asking probing questions. “It was classic elicitation,” Scudder said. “How has Jeff been? Have you noticed any unexplained income? Cash? Mood changes?”

….Last summer, the board recommended that Scudder be fired. Around the same time, he was shown a spreadsheet outlining his possible pension packages with two figures — one large and one small — underlined. He agreed to retire.

So, um, yeah. Snowden should have tried harder to work through proper channels. What harm could it have done?

At this point, of course, I have to add the usual caveat that we have only Scudder’s side of this story. The CIA naturally declines to comment. This means it’s possible that Scudder really did do something wrong, but spun a self-serving version of his story for Miller’s benefit. We’ll never know for sure. Nonetheless, I think it’s safe to say that this isn’t exactly a testimonial for aggressively trying to work through the proper channels, even if your goal is the relatively harmless one of releasing historical documents that pose no threats to operational security at all. By comparison, it’s pretty obvious that having his pension reduced would have been the least of Snowden’s worries.

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Here’s What Happens When You Challenge the CIA Through “Proper Channels”

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There’s Some Serious Weirdness Up In the State of Maine

by DaneMartinez Posted on July 1, 2014

Mother Jones

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You wouldn’t normally expect Maine to be an epicenter of crackpottery, but ever since they elected tea party darling Paul LePage as their governor, things have been a little weird up north. Actually, more than a little. Over at TPM, they’re running an excerpt from Mike Tipping’s new book about LePage’s tenure, and it turns out that LePage has been surprisingly fascinated by the claims of a local “sovereign citizen” group called the Aroostook Watchmen, which claims that pretty much everything that both Maine and the United States are doing is blatantly illegal. To make their point, they submitted a set of “remonstrances” to a variety of Maine officials, including LePage:

The remonstrances the group submitted to LePage and the legislature accused Maine’s government of being unlawful, of having illegally accepted and used unconstitutional currency (anything other than gold and silver), and of coordinating with UNESCO, UNICEF, NATO, and the UN to deprive Americans of their property rights. An e-mail sent to the governor’s office by Constitutional Coalition spokesperson Phil Merletti, along with the remonstrance document, declared that legislators who had violated their oaths in this way were committing treason and domestic terrorism.

….LePage’s staff, including executive assistant Micki Muller, who reviews the governor’s e-mails, had previously shunted aside requests from Merletti to meet with LePage….This time, however, word of the remonstrances and the press conference made it past the executive office gatekeepers and to the attention of Governor LePage himself. Rather than ignoring the submission and its radical claims, LePage called Merletti at home at 9 a.m. the next morning in order to set up a meeting for that Saturday with members of the Constitutional Coalition. According to a note that Merletti sent to his e-mail list later that day and that was forwarded to LePage and members of his staff, the governor was angry that he hadn’t heard about the remonstrances earlier, and during the call he pledged to fire any staffers found to have been keeping the information from him.

….The Watchmen describe—and e-mails and documents obtained from LePage’s staff through Maine’s Freedom of Access laws confirm—at least eight meetings over a period of nine months in 2013, almost all more than an hour in duration and some lasting almost three hours.

During these regular meetings, according to the participants, the governor was “educated” by a series of “experts” brought in by the Constitutional Coalition on a number of their conspiracy theories. LePage also made a series of promises to the Watchmen that he would assist them in pressing their cases of treason against Eves and Alfond and in pursuing their wider antigovernment aims.

There’s much, much more at the link. If you want to read a case study of how someone can apparently go completely off the rails when he’s stuck inside a tea party bubble, this is for you.

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There’s Some Serious Weirdness Up In the State of Maine

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Hobby Lobby Wasn’t About Religious Freedom. It Was About Abortion.

by Martha8879 Posted on June 30, 2014

Mother Jones

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Elsewhere at Mother Jones, Dana Liebelson collects the either best lines from Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dissent in the Hobby Lobby case. Here’s what I consider the most telling passage from Samuel Alito’s majority opinion:

Kinda reminds you of Bush v. Gore, doesn’t it? Alito takes pains to make it clear that his opinion shouldn’t be considered precedent for anything except the narrowly specific issue at hand: whether contraceptives that some people consider abortifacients can be excluded from health plans.

I think it’s important to recognize what Alito is saying here. Basically, he’s making the case that abortion is unique as a religious issue. If you object to anything else on a religious basis, you’re probably out of luck. But if you object to abortion on religious grounds, you will be given every possible consideration. Even if your objection is only related to abortion in the most tenuous imaginable way—as it is here, where IUDs are considered to be abortifacients for highly idiosyncratic doctrinal reasons—it will be treated with the utmost deference.

This is not a ruling that upholds religious liberty. It is a ruling that specifically enshrines opposition to abortion as the most important religious liberty in America.

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Hobby Lobby Wasn’t About Religious Freedom. It Was About Abortion.

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Joy, Rage, and Love: ’80s-tastic Photos of San Francisco Pride

by Rian Mahon Posted on June 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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I can’t remember exactly how we all ended up going to Gay Pride brunch together at my friend Marta’s house that Sunday morning, in June of 1988. In retrospect, it seems inevitable that I would bring along Saul Bromberger, a photographer at the East Bay newspaper where I was a reporter, and his then girlfriend and now wife, Sandra Hoover.

At the time, Saul and Sandy were already four years into a project that would last until 1990: documenting the San Francisco gay pride parade. It was the height of the AIDS epidemic, and anger at the world’s indifference to the disease was growing, generating radical groups like ACT Up (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). So Saul and Sandy came to our pride brunch with cameras in hand.

The pair started shooting the parades in 1984 because they believed they were witnessing history. “It was this kind of test I was giving myself: Can we document this movement that is also a parade?” Saul remembers. Unlike other photographers, he didn’t “just see people jumping around and dancing,” he says. He saw people “demanding change.”

Saul and Sandy wanted to capture the celebration, the love, and the rage, and in so doing, to capture the heart of a movement.

They purposely eschewed the long lenses favored by newspaper journalists, who seemed focused only on the spectacle. Instead, they got close to their subjects. They talked to them. They made friends. And the pictures they took were intimate and close.

But when Saul and Sandy asked to shoot the brunch (or maybe—I can’t remember to be honest—I invited them) they were putting me in a place I hated and loved at the same time.

A heads up: Some of these photos contain nudity.

Castro Street, 20th Anniversary of the San Francisco Pride Parade, 1989

Market St., 1984

Dykes on Bikes ride down Market St. during the SF Pride Parade, 1989

This was a time when the gay world often existed separately from the straight one, and before cameras were everywhere. They needed permission to be there. We trusted them.

I also knew they had to be there. I wanted them there. I felt honored. But I also felt scared and exposed. My experience back in 1987 was that if you didn’t purposefully and repeatedly out yourself, you were not out. There was no social media where you could simply declare yourself to be something other than straight and then watch the consequences unfold.

You had to tell people over and over again. You had to make yourself the story.

It seemed easier not to do it. Besides, I was a journalist, an outsider. I covered the stories. I didn’t make them. Like Saul and Sandy, I’m an observer by nature.

It felt strange to thrust myself into the spotlight. I could alienate people. What if my sources stopped talking to me? It wasn’t just an idle concern. It happened. But it was more than that: Like most humans, I didn’t want to put myself in a box. I didn’t want to be other.

Just a few years before, in my early 20s, I had concluded that something inside of me was broken. I had great boyfriends. I just couldn’t fall in love. I had resigned myself to a life without love, when on a balmy night in my senior year of college, my female roommate and I stepped out onto the sidewalk and fell into a passionate kiss. Yes, I kissed a girl and I didn’t just like it. It rocked my world. I got it. And in that moment, I realized I was not broken. I was just different.

Market St., 1986

Civic Center, 1987

Market St., 1987

Market St., 1984

Market St., 1989

Bonnie and Laura, Civic Center, 1985

It was an intensely personal, intensely private discovery. But I quickly understood that if I were to date people of my own gender, I would be taking a political stand, like it or not. I couldn’t remain a detached observer.

So when I went to the pride parade, it wasn’t just to party. I went because, like so many others, I needed it.

I needed to fuel up on all the pride, all the love, all the righteous anger, all the togetherness. It was an infusion on which I could draw during the year. When someone yelled “dyke” at me and my girlfriend in the street, or a friend suddenly shunned me, or a relative told me that they didn’t understand but still loved me even if I was wrong, I could tap into that reserve.

Market St., 1984

Civic Center, 1990

Market St., 1989

Market St., 1987

Recently, I was talking with Saul about those years. He seemed miffed at himself for not putting his work out there: Every year they’d go to the parade, take amazing photos, and develop them. They’d hand out these beautiful prints to their subjects. They’ve always been generous like that. My halls were lined with them.

But then they’d go in a box under the bed.

“There were a lot of pictures I took back then that I never submitted to the paper because I thought they were personal,” Saul says.

Surely they could have gotten them out before. Surely, they would have gained notoriety for capturing a movement in advance of everybody else. I’ve been thinking about that: Why didn’t they bring these pictures out?

I think I know. I think in a way they kept them in a box for us. To protect the community from a world that could be hostile and cruel.

Dykes on Bikes awaits the start of the parade on Market St., 1990

Civic Center, 1987

Dykes on Bikes before the start of the parade, 1989

Market St., 1988

Market St., 1988

Market St., 1988

These pictures show something soft and vulnerable. They show humanity. But they also show nudity. It would be easy to take them out of context.

And to bring them out into the glare of society where they could be ridiculed—maybe they didn’t belong there. Not yet.

When we recount history, inevitably we reshape it, sharpening memories with new revelations and forgetting other parts altogether.

But these pictures capture unflinching, static moments of a different time. There’s a picture of a bare-breasted woman carrying a whip. There’s a picture of a couple on a roof with their trusty dog. There’s a picture of five men in a window, three of whom I know for sure died of AIDS.

The past lives and breathes in these photos. And it’s important to remember history. It’s important to see ourselves from a distance, especially when the closet walls have fallen and here we are.

Market St., 1985

Market St., 1987

San Francisco Mayor Art Agnos and his family, Market St., 1988

Civic Center, 1989

The parade’s Grand Marshals, James Broughton and Holly Near, on Market St., 1988

Civic Center, 1985

Civic Center, 1987

Civic Center, 1988

Mia and Friends, Civic Center, 1987

Pierre, Market St., 1989

Civic Center, 1984

From left to right: Sandra Hoover, Janet Kornblum, Saul Bromberger, 1988

For more of Saul and Sandy’s SF pride pictures go to their site: PRIDE – The San Francisco Gay & Lesbian Freedom Day Parade: 1984 – 1990.

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Joy, Rage, and Love: ’80s-tastic Photos of San Francisco Pride

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Whistleblower Crackdowns, Self-Censorship, Stonewalled FOIAs: The 1st Amendment Under Attack

by SalinaR35rp Posted on June 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

America has entered its third great era: the post-constitutional one. In the first, in the colonial years, a unitary executive, the King of England, ruled without checks and balances, allowing no freedom of speech, due process, or privacy when it came to protecting his power.

In the second, the principles of the Enlightenment and an armed rebellion were used to push back the king’s abuses. The result was a new country and a new constitution with a Bill of Rights expressly meant to check the government’s power. Now, we are wading into the shallow waters of a third era, a time when that government is abandoning the basic ideas that saw our nation through centuries of challenges far more daunting than terrorism. Those ideas—enshrined in the Bill of Rights—are disarmingly concise. Think of them as the haiku of a genuine people’s government.

Deeper, darker waters lie ahead and we seem drawn down into them. For here there be monsters.

The Powers of a Police State Denied

America in its pre-constitutional days may seem eerily familiar even to casual readers of current events. We lived then under the control of a king. (Think now: the imperial presidency.) That king was a powerful, unitary executive who ruled at a distance. His goal was simple: to use his power over his American colonies to draw the maximum financial gain while suppressing any dissent that might endanger his control.

In those years, protest was dangerous. Speech could indeed make you the enemy of the government. Journalism could be a crime if you didn’t write in support of those in power. A citizen needed to watch what he said, for there were spies everywhere, including fellow colonists hoping for a few crumbs from the king’s table. Laws could be brutal and punishments swift as well as extra-judicial. In extreme cases, troops shot down those simply assembling to speak out.

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Whistleblower Crackdowns, Self-Censorship, Stonewalled FOIAs: The 1st Amendment Under Attack

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This Is Where the Government Houses the Tens of Thousands of Kids Who Get Caught Crossing the Border

by FletcheDriscoll Posted on June 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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Yesterday, the Obama administration announced that it was creating a multiagency taskforce to oversee the recent surge of unaccompanied child migrants coming primarily from Central America and Mexico. The announcement included plans to move some 600 kids from holding cells at the border to an emergency shelter at Naval Base Ventura County in Southern California.

As the number of unaccompanied children entering the United States has more than doubled since 2011, the Office of Refugee Resettlement—the part of the Department of Health and Human Services charged with caring for unaccompanied minors in US custody—has brought more and more shelters online to accommodate the influx. (Kids are typically housed in these shelters until ORR can reunify kids with US-based family, with whom they stay pending their immigration hearings.) Here’s what the increase has looked like:

So where, exactly, are these shelters? Fifty of the 80 shelters in 2013 were in states along the Southwest border; Texas alone had 33 shelters. The rest, however, are spread out throughout the country. As Maria Woltjen, director of the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights, told me in an interview: “Nobody in Chicago knows there are 400 kids detained in our midst. You walk by, and you think it’s just an old nursing home, and it’s actually all these immigrant kids who are detained inside.”

Check out our map of ORR’s 2013 shelters, data I obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request:

Continued: 

This Is Where the Government Houses the Tens of Thousands of Kids Who Get Caught Crossing the Border

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