The negotiations, which began in the early months of the Biden administration, were aimed at settling claims brought by migrant families that were separated under the “zero tolerance” policy while seeking to enter the U.S. for asylum and other reasons.

But government officials abruptly pulled the plug on all settlement talks on Thursday, Lee Gelernt, a lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union, and one of the lead negotiators told NPR.

Gelernt said the Justice Department did not explain why it was walking away from the talks.

“We can see no reason for this other than this administration does not want to use any political capital to help these children,” Gelernt said in an interview. “History will not judge this decision kindly.”

In a statement, the Department of Justice said the parties have been unable to reach a settlement, but “we remain committed to engaging with the plaintiffs and to bringing justice to the victims of this abhorrent policy.”

The controversial immigration policy was dismantled within Biden’s first week as president

In all, the Trump administration separated more than 5,000 families who crossed into the U.S. without visas. Under the policy adults who entered the U.S. from the southern border were prosecuted for illegal entry. Because children cannot be imprisoned with adults, the young kids were taken into separate federal facilities.

Government reports ultimately found the administration had no clear plan nor had it allocated resources to help reunite parents or guardians with their children when it implemented the zero tolerance enforcement policy. Hundreds of families remain separated, many more say they are still suffering the effects of the separation. More than 100 have brought claims seeking monetary damages from the government, Gelernt said.

Republicans and Democrats appeared united against the draconian policy, calling it a humanitarian failure. President Biden called it a “moral and national shame.” And settlement talks proceeded quietly behind closed doors for several months — until October, when the Wall Street Journal broke the story that financial compensation amounts could reach as high as $450,000 per person in some cases.

At that point, the negotiations became a political liability for Biden and his administration who came under fire by Republicans in Washington.

Lawyers representing families who’d been torn apart, have insisted most settlement amounts would be far lower, But the story generated enormous outrage among GOP members, who tried to link the issue to the soaring number of arrests at the southern border. They argued that giving large cash settlements to migrant families would encourage more illegal immigration.

In a Department of Homeland Security hearing on immigration last month, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said he takes the entire concept of compensation as a personal affront.

“As you can imagine, many Americans think it’s a pretty outrageous idea to offer massive taxpayer funded payments to illegal immigrants who broke our laws,” Grassley told DHS secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, blaming the Biden administration for the current immigration crisis.

Grassley noted that the families of service members who die on active duty receive a tax repayment of $100,000. “Under what circumstances, if any do you think it’s appropriate for an illegal immigrant who broke our laws to receive more money from the government than the family of a fallen service member,” he asked.

Biden administration officials and the president himself were asked frequently about the settlement talks, which appeared likely to become an election-year issue in 2022.

Lawyers representing the families say they’re deeply disappointed and contend everyone who was a victim of the zero tolerance approach deserves recompense, including financial settlements. They also say the government could easily wind up spending even more money fighting these cases than if it had simply reached a settlement.

The Women’s Refugee Commission condemned the decision by the Justice Department to pull out of the negotiations.

“This move is a shameful, profound betrayal of the government’s responsibility to redress the harms of this heinous policy,” Katharina Obser, director of the Migrant Rights and Justice program with the group, said in a statement.

“While the U.S. can never undo what happened, we expected the Biden administration to engage in good faith with efforts for redress and repair,” she said, adding that “the cruelty of intentionally tearing families apart inflicted unspeakable and permanent trauma on children and their parents coming to the U.S. border seeking safety.”

Kathryn Hampton, deputy director of the Physicians for Human Rights Asylum Program, also noted the long term effects of the separation on children. The organization has documented the psychological harms and trauma many have suffered, including PTSD, depression, and anxiety.

“Instead of bowing to right-wing ideologues, the Biden administration should pursue justice and accountability for the deeply traumatized children and parents who endured these atrocious acts perpetrated by the United States government,” Hampton said in a statement.

The Biden administration says it will continue to identify and reunify families that were separated under the Trump administration.

Meanwhile, the ACLU is in negotiations with the administration over other issues, including the possibility of legal status for separated families. Those talks will continue, Gelernt said — but the end of financial negotiations won’t make them any easier.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2021/12/16/1065044185/justice-department-breaks-off-talks-on-compensation-for-separated-families

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PARIS—Migrants trying to reach Europe face routine rape and sexual torture throughout their journey and especially in Libya, with men facing abuse nearly as routinely as women, according to a study based on dozens of interviews with aid workers and migrants.

The graphic study released Monday by the Women’s Refugee Commission comes as Europe has blocked rescues at sea and outsourced its migration policy to Libya’s coast guard instead. With European Union funding, the Libyan coast guard retrieves migrants from the Mediterranean Sea and returns them to detention centers nominally run by the Libyan government, where migrants say the abuse resumes.

African migrants who were rescued from the Mediterranean Sea north of the Libyan coast, on Sept. 1, 2017. (Darko Bandic/AP Photo)

Smugglers torture migrants and film it to extract ransom payments from their families, and to thin the number of people in their unofficial prisons, according to the study. Previous studies have found that nearly all women who cross from North Africa have been raped or sexually abused along the journey; this one found that the danger was likely nearly as prevalent among men. A mental health worker described graves filled with men with their genitals sliced off — a description corroborated by the account of a survivor of a mass mutilation.

Migrants told similarly horrific stories about rape, forced incest and mass sexual abuse intended to humiliate detainees who had to strip naked and become either rapists themselves or victims.

According to a 20-year-old man from Guinea, “when the men came back crying, they would talk about what the guards did to them and how violent it was.”

Because the men were victimized together, they were willing to talk about it in ways that might otherwise be taboo. Mostly, they don’t talk about it. In repeated AP interviews with migrants in Europe and in Africa, Libya is the place they don’t discuss.

The area around Bani Walid is particularly notorious for its clandestine prisons, where migrants have described being held in sunless warehouses for months and even years on end while smugglers try to extract money from them to continue their journey. Last May, more than 100 migrants and refugees broke out from one of the lockups, fleeing under their captors’ gunfire. At least 15 people died and 40 were left behind, according to the aid group Doctors Without Borders. The survivors were ultimately shipped to an official Libyan detention center.

And now official detention is likely where they will end up even if they make it into the Mediterranean, due to European policy that has effectively banned rescues at sea in an effort to slow migration. The EU has spent $382 million (338 million euros) in Libya since 2014 to stem migration, much of it on strengthening the Libyan coast guard and the detention centers.

Migrants turned back in the Mediterranean are unlikely to fare much better in official detention than they did in the warehouses, according to the study’s lead researcher, Sarah Chynoweth. United Nations staff and aid groups have limited access to the centers and Chynoweth said migrants told her than in any case “we were just too terrified to say anything.”

At one of the official prisons, a 19-year-old Nigerian woman told a health worker that women faced near constant threat of rape, and men only marginally less. Migrants bribe their way to freedom or escape if they can.

“They said that if we tell in Europe what is happening in Libya, our brothers and sisters in the prison will pay,” she said, according to the study.

Chynoweth has carried out similar studies among the Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh and Syrian refugees in the Middle East. What differs in the European context, she said, is how widespread it is, and the fact that profoundly disturbing forms of sexual torture are used for purposes of extorting ransoms—sent via video to desperate families.

“The minute people are stopped at sea, Europeans wash their hands of it,” said Hassiba Hadj-Sahraoui, the humanitarian affairs adviser for Doctors Without Borders, also known as Medecins Sans Frontieres.

Earlier this month, the European Union issued a statement saying the continent’s migration crisis is over, “and current levels are a mere 10 percent of what they were at their peak in 2015.” The statement cited “appalling conditions” in Libya’s detention centers as an issue, without suggesting solutions.

One of the study’s few bright points came aboard the MSF rescue ship Aquarius. On the ship, the medical team realized that men and boys appeared not to know that what they’d experienced was sexual abuse. Trained health workers decided in 2018 to emphasize free medical and psychological counseling.

As a result, the study said, 33 percent of sexual assault survivors who came forward last year on the Aquarius were male, compared with just 3 percent in 2017.

“It was about creating that safe environment, allowing the men and boys to know they’re not alone,” said Aoife Ni Mhurchu, who was a nurse on board the Aquarius at the time and specializes in working with vulnerable populations. Few migrants had any illusions that their attackers would face justice, said Ni Mhurchu, who worked in four detention centers in Libya before her time at sea.

She said few detained in Libya would dare come forward while there.

“This climate of impunity in Libya signals to this extremely vulnerable population that reporting is not only dangerous but futile,” she said.

The Aquarius is now chartered for a scientific expedition. The only people pulling migrants from the Mediterranean waters off the Libyan coast take them right back where they came from.

Source: https://www.ntd.com/study-sexual-torture-widespread-for-migrants-seeking-europe_307758.html

The post Study: Sexual Torture Widespread for Migrants Seeking Europe first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.