Migrants march on White House demanding end to "family detention"

On the 22nd of October, migrants and their sopporters marched on the White House demanding that President Obama comply with court orders demanding an end to "family detention" of migrant mothers and their children. A Federal court has ordered an end to this outrageous violation of human rights, but the Obama admninistration is expected to appeal rather than comply.

The march from the Justice Department to the White House against family detention was organized by DC-MD-VA Coalition in Support of Children Fleeing Violence,CARECEN-Central American Resource Center, Detention Watch Network,RAICES, and other supporters of dignity and human rights for migrants on the day before the US government was supposed to begin complying with the ruling of federal district court Judge Dolly Gee that family detention is illegal under standards were set bythe 1997 Flores Settlement Agreement. As of Oct 22nd the US government was expected to appeal this ruling rather than comply with it.

There is a strong element of hypocrisy in anti-immigrant racists whose ancestors stole an entire continent now calling the mostly Indigenous people of Central America "immigrants" for moving from one piece of Indigneous land to another. Now it turns out the (settler-descended) US government deliberately introduced family detention some years ago as a deliberate policy to deter such migration by putting children into privately-owned, for-profit prisons. As this is being written there are active efforts in Texas to get two of these prisons certified as "child care facilities!" Family detention is nothing more than legalized child abuse, even a judge has agreed with that. Now it's just a matter of getting the racists in ICE and CBP to comply with their own laws.

Video-the march followed by a migrant mother explaining what detention was like