{"id":115068,"date":"2018-07-23T12:01:11","date_gmt":"2018-07-23T11:01:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=115068"},"modified":"2018-07-21T17:00:14","modified_gmt":"2018-07-21T16:00:14","slug":"toddlers-on-trial","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/07\/toddlers-on-trial\/","title":{"rendered":"Toddlers on Trial"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kids as young as 1-year-old are being forced to stand trial alone in Trump’s immigration courts, often without even attorneys.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

19 Jul 2018 – <\/em>We Americans believe everyone has a right to have their day in court. Right?<\/p>\n

But what if the court is turned into a loony bin, making a mockery of justice? Welcome to the federal immigration courts that are struggling to deal with the insanity of Trump\u2019s imperious \u201czero tolerance\u201d decree that all Latino asylum seekers will be jailed and prosecuted as criminals.<\/p>\n

How insane is it? Toddlers, separated from their parents by Trump\u2019s border guards, are being put on trial by themselves. \u201cWe were representing a 3-year-old in court,\u201d said\u00a0Lindsay Toczylowski<\/a>, a dismayed defender of a migrant kiddo, \u201cand the child\u2014in the middle of the hearing\u2014started climbing up on the table. It really highlighted the absurdity of what we\u2019re doing with kids.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not just doing \u201cwith\u201d them, but to them. Fleeing unimaginable trauma in their home country, then suffering the pain of being torn away from their parents inside our border, the expectation that these little ones can mount a legal defense has rightly been labeled \u201cunconscionable\u201d and \u201cgrossly inappropriate\u201d<\/a> by experts. But I would add, inexpertly, that it\u2019s insane and evil.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a bit of Trumpian evil for you: Johan, a 1-year-old Honduran boy taken from his amnesty-seeking father by border agents, was hauled into federal immigration court in July. A one-year-old! As an AP reporter wrote, the baby briefly played with a ball, drank from a bottle, then \u201ccried hysterically.\u201d The law doesn\u2019t even require that children have a lawyer to represent them!<\/p>\n

The judge said he was too embarrassed to try explaining this judicial proceeding to anyone: \u201cI don\u2019t know who you would explain it to, unless you think that a 1-year-old could learn immigration law,\u201d the judge said in exasperation<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Maybe he could try explaining it to the U.S. president who\u2019s foisted this lunacy on us. It\u2019s a case of the inmates having taken charge of the insane asylum.<\/p>\n

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.<\/p>\n

_____________________________________<\/p>\n

OtherWords columnist Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker. He\u2019s also the editor of the populist newsletter, <\/em>The Hightower Lowdown<\/a>.\u00a0Distributed by <\/em>OtherWords.org<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 intrepidreport.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

19 Jul 2018 – We Americans believe everyone has a right to have their day in court. Right? Kids as young as 1-year-old are being forced to stand trial alone in Trump’s immigration courts, often without even attorneys.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":113213,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-115068","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anglo-america"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115068","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=115068"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115068\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/113213"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=115068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=115068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=115068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}