A bipartisan group of more than 70 former United States attorneys is urging Attorney General Jeff Sessions to end a policy of separating the children of illegal immigrants from their parents at the border, saying his recently announced “zero-tolerance” policy has caused “unnecessary trauma and suffering of innocent children.”

“Like the majority of Americans, we have been horrified by the images and stories of children torn from their families along our nation’s Southwest Border,” the group wrote in a letter issued late Monday.

“But as former United States Attorneys, we also emphasize that the Zero Tolerance policy is a radical departure from previous Justice Department policy, and that it is dangerous, expensive, and inconsistent with the values of the institution in which we served,” they wrote.

Under the “zero-tolerance” policy recently announced by Sessions, “100 percent” of immigrants illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border would be referred for prosecution, while children and parents would be separated.

“If you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you, and that child will be separated from you as required by law,” Sessions said last month while announcing the new initiative. “If you don’t like that, then don’t smuggle children over our border.”

Statistics released by the Department of Homeland Security show that more than 2,300 children were separated from their parents between May 5 and June 9.

Audio recordings and images of young children held at warehouses have sparked a national outcry, with Democrats and some Republicans urging the administration to end the policy.

Administration officials, denying they have a “family separation policy,” have said Congress can put an end to the crisis by passing new immigration laws.

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said Monday that the Trump administration “did not create a policy of separating families at the border,” contending that both the Bush and the Obama administrations separated families, albeit at a lower rate.

“This is not new,” Nielsen said. “We have a statutory responsibility that we take seriously to protect alien children from human smuggling, trafficking and other criminal actions, while enforcing our immigration laws,” she told a press conference.

Sessions, speaking at a gathering of the National Sheriffs Association on Monday, stood by the administration’s policy.

“We do not want to separate children from their parents,” he said. “We do not want adults to bring children into this country unlawfully, placing them at risk.”

WATCH: Sessions on separating parents, children

Under the new initiative, parents are held at adult detention centers near the border, while children, reportedly including infants and children, are transferred to refurbished shelters, sometimes thousands of miles away.

In their open letter, the former prosecutors wrote that the law “does not require the systematic separation of families under these circumstances.”

A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment on the letter.

 
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The voices and faces of the Central American children separated from their parents at the U.S. border with Mexico are now emerging, lending a heart-rending human element to the debate over President Donald Trump’s controversial “zero-tolerance policy” towards illegal immigrants.

The world heard several desperate, crying children Monday on an audio recording released by the investigative news site ProPublica, with the children pleading over and over to immigration agents to be with their “Mami” and “Papa” as the parents were questioned, detained and eventually split from their children.

LISTEN: Children separated from parents at border

Meanwhile, millions of people have viewed a photo of a 2-year-old girl from Honduras in a bright pink shirt screaming in fear last week as a U.S. border agent patted down her mother.

The children on the audio, estimated to be between 4 and 10 years old, sobbed throughout the nearly eight-minute tape that was recorded last week inside a U.S. Customs and Border Protection detention facility. ProPublica said it was recorded by a person who declined to be identified for fear of retaliation, handed to a long-time civil rights attorney in Texas, who then passed it to the news organization.

As the children cried to be with their parents, one border agent joked in Spanish, “Well, we have an orchestra here, right? What we’re missing is a conductor.”

Pleading with agents

One determined 6-year-old Salvadoran girl, identified as Alison Jimena Valencia Madrid, pleaded with agents to be with her aunt, who along with her 9-year-old daughter is already seeking to stay in the United States. The aunt told ProPublica that her sister paid a smuggler $7,000 to guide her through Guatemala and Mexico to entry into the United States, where they were apprehended.

“I want to go with my aunt,” Alison told an agent on the tape. “I want my aunt to come so she can take me to her house.”

She told an agent she had her aunt’s phone number and recited it to a consular worker.

“Are you going to call my aunt so she can come pick me up?” the girl pleaded. “And then so my mom can come as soon as possible?”

ProPublica said it called the number recited by the girl and reached the aunt.

“It was the hardest moment in my life,” the aunt said. “Imagine getting a call from your 6-year-old niece. She’s crying and begging me to go get her. She says, ‘I’ll promise I’ll behave, but please get me out of here. I’m all alone.'”

The aunt said she had been able to talk to her sister, 29-year-old Cindy Madrid, but that Alison and her mother had been separated and unable to speak to one another. The girl is being housed in a shelter, but was told that her mother might be deported without her.

“I know she’s not an American citizen,” the aunt said of her niece. “But she’s a human being. She’s a child. How can they treat her this way?”

Thousands stopped at border

More than 2,000 children stopped at the U.S.-Mexican border have been separated from their parents, amid a growing outcry from Democratic and Republican lawmakers, political figures and others for Trump to reverse the policy, which his administration implemented in April in hopes of discouraging migrants from attempting to enter the United States.

On Tuesday, Trump was scheduled to meet with majority Republican congressmen about immigration legislation the House of Representatives expects to vote on later in the week.

The U.S. leader, in a Twitter comment, again defended the border policy leading to the separation of children from their parents.

“We must always arrest people coming into our Country illegally,” Trump said. “Of the 12,000 children, 10,000 are being sent by their parents on a very dangerous trip, and only 2,000 are with their parents, many of whom have tried to enter our Country illegally on numerous occasions.”

Support for Trump policy

Trump has some support in highly political Washington for his controversial policy.

Conservative commentator Ann Coulter called the children detained at the border “child actors,” while a second, Laura Ingraham, called the U.S. detention facilities for the children “essentially summer camps.”

 
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The U.S. Senate passed a $716 billion defense policy bill on Monday, backing President Donald Trump’s call for a bigger, stronger military but setting up a potential battle with the White House over Chinese telecommunications firm ZTE Corp.

The Republican-controlled Senate voted 85-10 for the annual National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, which authorizes U.S. military spending but is generally used as a vehicle for a broad range of policy matters.

Before it can become law, the bill must be reconciled with one already passed by the House of Representatives. That compromise measure must then be passed by both chambers and signed into law by Trump.

The fiscal 2019 Senate version of the NDAA authorizes $639 billion in base defense spending, for such things as buying weapons, ships and aircraft and paying the troops, with an additional $69 billion to fund ongoing conflicts.

This year, the Senate included an amendment that would kill the Trump administration’s agreement to allow ZTE to resume business with U.S. suppliers. That ZTE provision is not included in the House version of the NDAA.

While strongly supported by some of Trump’s fellow Republicans as well as some Democrats, the measure is opposed by the White House and some of its close Republican allies, who control the House as well as the Senate.

It could face a difficult path to being included in the final NDAA.

That bill is more likely to include a much less stringent provision, included in the House bill, that would bar the Defense Department from dealing with any entity using telecommunications equipment or services from ZTE or another Chinese company, Huawei Technologies.

Republicans and Democrats have expressed national security concerns about ZTE after it broke an agreement to discipline executives who had conspired to evade U.S. sanctions on Iran and North Korea.

The U.S. government placed a ban on ZTE earlier this year, but the Trump administration reached an agreement to lift the ban while it is negotiating broader trade agreements with China and looking to Beijing for support during negotiations to halt North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.

Foreign investment rules

The Senate version of the NDAA also seeks to strengthen the inter-agency Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which assesses deals to ensure they do not compromise national security.

The bill would allow CFIUS to expand the deals that can be reviewed, for example making reviews of many proposed transactions mandatory instead of voluntary and allowing CFIUSto review land purchases near sensitive military sites.

The Senate NDAA also includes an amendment prohibiting sales to Turkey of F-35 Joint Strike Fighter jets made by Lockheed Martin Corp unless Trump certifies Turkey is not threatening NATO, purchasing defense equipment from Russia or detaining U.S. citizens.

Senators included the legislation because of the imprisonment of U.S. pastor Andrew Brunson and the purchase of the S-400 air defense system from Russia.

Shipbuilders General Dynamics Corp and Huntington Ingalls Industries Inc could benefit from the bill’s authorization of advance procurement of materials needed for the Virginia class nuclear submarines.

This year’s Senate bill was named after six-term Senator John McCain, the Armed Services Committee’s Republican chairman and Vietnam War prisoner of war, who has been absent from Washington all year as he undergoes treatment for brain cancer.
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The Pentagon on Monday formally suspended a major military exercise planned for August with South Korea, a much-anticipated move stemming from President Donald Trump’s nuclear summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

Dana White, spokeswoman for the Defense Department, said planning for the summer drills has stopped, but there have been no decisions made on any other military exercises with South Korea. Military exercises with other countries in the Pacific will continue.

Speaking at a news conference last Tuesday after his summit with Kim, Trump abruptly announced that he was suspending military exercises with the South, “unless and until we see the future negotiation is not going along like it should.” He added that dumping the drills will save the U.S. “a tremendous amount of money. Plus, I think it’s very provocative.”

His announcement appeared to catch U.S. defense officials by surprise, and his comments ran counter to long-held American arguments that the exercises are critical for effective operations with allies and are defensive in nature. The Pentagon has for years flatly denied North Korean assertions that the exercises are “provocative.”

But as the days went by, the U.S. and Seoul began discussions about temporarily suspending the large Ulchi Freedom Guardian exercises that usually take place in August and possibly other joint drills while nuclear diplomacy with North Korea continues. Seoul’s Defense Ministry said Friday that Defense Minister Song Young-moo held “deep” discussions about the drills with U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis in a telephone conversation Thursday evening.

Trump’s decision to suspend the exercises, coupled with the vague joint statement issued after his summit with Kim, have reinforced fears in South Korea that the North is attempting to take advantage of a U.S. president who appears to care less about the traditional alliance than his predecessors.

Last year’s Ulchi Freedom Guardian went on for 11 days in August and involved about 17,500 U.S. troops. Also participating were troops from nations that contributed forces during the 1950-53 Korean War, including Australia, Britain, Canada and Colombia.

The other major U.S. exercises with South Korea — Key Resolve and Foal Eagle — took place earlier this spring. They historically include live-fire drills with tanks, aircraft and warships and feature about 10,000 American and 200,000 Korean troops. The drills typically begin in March but were delayed a bit because of the Winter Olympics in South Korea in February.

North Korea has always reacted to the Ulchi exercises with belligerence and often its own demonstrations of military capability.

During last year’s Ulchi exercises, North Korea fired a powerful new intermediate-range missile over Japan in what its state media described as a “muscle-flexing” countermeasure to the drills.

Military readiness and lethality have been key priorities for Mattis, so it is still not clear what, if any, smaller exercises may be conducted in the region with South Korea or if more desktop drills may be planned to compensate for the lack of larger, more coordinated events with various ships, aircraft and thousands of troops.

Defense officials are also scrambling to pull together cost estimates for the various exercises with the South to inform Trump’s assertion that the suspension will save an enormous amount of money. Mattis’s office sent out a request to military commands last Wednesday seeking information on costs, but the Pentagon has yet to provide a public answer.
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When Jamil Bey wanted to move back to the Pittsburgh neighborhood where he had grown up, he found the perfect house to buy. There was just one problem — a fall in property values on that street had left the owners trapped in negative equity.

Unable to agree on a price that would allow the sellers to pay off their mortgage, Bey realized he would not be able to buy a house in his old neighborhood — and that the owners would be stuck with a property they did not want.

Across the United States, former manufacturing centers like Pittsburgh have experienced overwhelming population declines in recent decades, pushing down property prices and leaving homes empty and neglected.

“For folks who have a connection to those neighborhoods because they grew up there, there’s not a whole lot of quality properties to chose from,” Bey told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “Even if you’re looking for property to invest in, you can’t fund new construction because the property values in those neighborhoods are too low.”

It took a trip to New York state for Bey to find a potential solution to the problem blighting his city — land banks, which have the power to search out vacant properties and work to return them to the market.

“I was in Syracuse and realizing that the vacant lots looked well taken care of — planted, with cut grass and nicely maintained,” he said. “And I was told, ‘We have a land bank’.”

Many former industrial cities, particularly in the northeastern United States, have lost a quarter of their population or more since the 1950s, according to census data.

Pittsburgh, once one of the largest and most prosperous cities in the country, has been among the hardest hit.

Some neighborhoods there have suffered population declines of 80 percent and more, said Bey, setting up a cycle of decline that has blighted entire communities.

Recycling Land

Bey is now vice chairman of the Pittsburgh Land Bank, which is set to start operating this summer, aiming to take on the growing numbers of abandoned properties in the city.

He describes its remit as “recycling land” — working through entanglements of ownership, addressing tax issues and fixing up or tearing down structures with a view to getting vacant property back on the market or giving it over as a public space.

Houses that have sat for long enough to become blighted are often saddled with significant tax arrears, reducing their appeal to investors.

Many land banks are able to short-circuit this process, clearing arrears before addressing regulatory violations to make the property appealing to new buyers.

Land banks have existed in the United States since the 1980s, but interest has spiked since the economic downturn of 2008-09, according to law professor Frank S. Alexander.

That created a wave of foreclosures in which “abandonment was occurring, particularly at the low end of the property spectrum,” said Alexander, a leading authority on land banking who said the sector had seen “tremendous growth” as a result.

Around 170 land banks were operating across the country as of January, according to the Center for Community Progress, which Alexander co-founded.

Land banking initially concentrated on post-industrial inner cities, but since the recession demand has expanded to other areas, said Alexander.

“I don’t go in and evangelize, but rather work with state and local officials on why vacant and abandoned properties are killing their neighborhoods and cities,” he said. And the first thing they need to do is acknowledge the cost of doing nothing.”

‘Missing Tooth’

In some places, authorities at the highest levels have taken this lesson to heart.

In 2013, New York’s attorney general announced the creation of a seed fund for land banks across the state, drawing on legal settlements from big financial institutions involved in the housing crisis that preceded the recession.

Today, there are 25 land banks operating across the state, which turned around more than $28 million worth of property through 2016 according to a report last year from the Center for Community Progress.

Jocelyn Gordon oversees a land bank in Buffalo, a city in western New York that has some of the oldest housing stock in the country but has lost half of its population.

The city has seen over 6,000 demolitions in the past decade and has thousands of vacant lots. Many of the houses that remain are enormous and so energy-inefficient that residents’ fuel bills can exceed their rents, Gordon said.

The situation, she says, is “desperate … it’s a huge problem.”

Her Buffalo Erie Niagara Land Improvement Corporation (BENLIC) is taking over vacant parcels of land and building or retrofitting to make smaller and more energy-efficient homes.

BENLIC takes on about 70 properties annually, a figure it hopes to increase to 120. It aims to take on the parcels of land it feels will have the biggest impact in a neighbourhood — what Gordon calls filling in a block’s “missing tooth.”

“If there’s a demolition on a lot in a marketable neighborhood, and we can strengthen that block,” she said, “that’s the most fulfilling part.”
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