The U.S. federal government has begun a partial shutdown of its operations.

About a quarter of the government ran out of funds at 12:01 a.m. Saturday, Washington time. More than 800,000 federal employees’ jobs have been disrupted and more than half of those employees are required to work without pay.

The U.S. Senate and House of Representatives adjourned late Friday without passing a federal spending bill that provides President Donald Trump with the $5 billion that he insists is needed to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border in addition to appropriations for government agencies.

Lawmakers had until midnight to enact a measure to keep the government fully funded.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Speaker-designate Nancy Pelosi issued a joint statement Saturday saying, “Democrats have offered Republicans multiple proposals to keep the government open, including one that already passed the Senate unanimously, and all of which include funding for strong, sensible, and effective border security — not the president’s ineffective and expensive wall. If President Trump and Republicans choose to continue this Trump shutdown, the new House Democratic majority will swiftly pass legislation to re-open government in January.”

Trump tweeted a video late Friday, saying “we’re going to have a shutdown. There’s nothing we can do about that.”

​Senate advances House bill

Earlier Friday, the Senate voted to advance a House-passed bill that included funding for the wall. The procedural vote gave the Senate “flexibility” to continue negotiating, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told The Washington Post that Democrats were open to discussions but would not agree to any new money for a border wall.

After previously saying he would “proudly” accept responsibility for a partial U.S. government shutdown if Congress does not pass legislation that includes funding for his proposed border wall, Trump early Friday tweeted, “The Democrats now own the shutdown!”

Friday afternoon he tweeted:

Congress will be back in session Saturday, but no votes are scheduled at the present time.

House bill has wall funds

On Thursday, the Republican-led House of Representatives passed a temporary spending bill that included billions for Trump’s proposed wall along the southern U.S. border.

Trump repeatedly has demanded funds to build the wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, and he told House Republican leaders he would not sign a bill that did not include funding for the wall.

Schumer told colleagues Friday on the Senate floor that Trump is making unilateral decisions that are creating chaos throughout the world.

“All of this turmoil is causing chaos in the markets, chaos abroad and it’s making the United States less prosperous and less secure,” Schumer said. “There are not the votes in the Senate for an expensive taxpayer-funded border wall. So President Trump you will not get your wall. Abandon your shutdown strategy. You’re not getting your wall today, next week or on January 3rd when Democrats take control of the House.”

McConnell argued for the wall’s funding, saying, “The need for greater security on our southern border is not some partisan invention. It’s an empirical fact and the need is only growing.”

Frustration with Congress

Trump has voiced increasing frustration that Congress has refused his request for a $5 billion down payment on the $20 billion wall he says will thwart illegal immigration. Construction of the wall was a popular rallying cry at Trump campaign events during his successful 2016 run for the White House. Trump also told his supporters that Mexico would pay for the wall.

The dispute is occurring in the last days of Republican control of both houses of Congress.

Democrats, adamantly opposed to Trump’s wall proposal, picked up 40 seats in the 435-member House of Representatives in the November elections and are set assume control in early January, although Republicans will maintain their edge in the Senate.
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U.S. Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis Thursday announced he was quitting, personally handing his letter of resignation to U.S. President Donald Trump following a lunch meeting at the White House.

 

While not mentioning Trump by name, the letter from Mattis outlined sharp differences between his views and those of the president, notably on the importance of allies and the use of U.S. power.

 

“We must be resolute and unambiguous in our approach to those countries whose strategic interests are increasingly in tension with ours,” Mattis wrote, warning that Russia and China in particular “want to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model-gaining veto authority over other nations’ economic, diplomatic and security decisions.”

 

“Because you have the right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours on these and other subjects, I believe it is right for me to step down,” Mattis concluded, saying he would step down at the end of February.

 

The defense secretary’s decision came one day after Trump announced he would withdraw some 2,000 U.S. troops from Syria, a move the Pentagon opposed. 

 

Mattis did not mention the dispute over Syria in his letter, but he did note his “core belief” that U.S. strength is “inextricably linked” with the nation’s alliances with other countries. 

 

President Trump first announced Mattis’s departure on Twitter, saying the former four-star Marine general will retire “with distinction.”

 

“During Jim’s tenure, tremendous progress has been made, especially with respect to the purchase of new fighting equipment. General Mattis was a great help to me in getting allies and other countries to pay their share of military obligations. A new Secretary of Defense will be named shortly. I greatly thank Jim for his service!”

 

White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders told reporters late Thursday that Trump and Mattis are on good terms despite not agreeing on foreign policy and other issues. 

 

“He and the president have a good relationship, but sometimes they disagree,” Sanders said. “That doesn’t mean you don’t have a good relationship with somebody. He was laying out the reasons he was stepping down from his post.”

 

Still, the resignation has sparked an outpouring of anger and despair from both Republican and Democratic lawmakers, and even top U.S. officials.

 

“I was deeply saddened,” U.S. Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats said in an official statement Friday, describing Mattis as a “national treasure.”

 

“The experience and sound judgement that Secretary Mattis has brought to our decision-making process is invaluable,” Coats continued. “His leadership of our military won the admiration of our troops and respect of our allies and adversaries.” 

 

Much of the pushback from U.S. officials and lawmakers has centered on the decision to withdraw U.S. troops from the fight against the Islamic State terror group in Syria – a decision that, according to some officials, ultimately convinced Mattis to resign.

 

U.S.-backed forces have made steady progress against Islamic State over the past several years. Last week, taking advantage of a dramatic increase in U.S. and coalition airstrikes, the forces were able to enter the town of Hajin, part of the terror group’s last stronghold in eastern Syria.

 

But despite Trump’s declaration of victory against IS, senior administration officials have said it will be up to the U.S. partner forces to liberate the rest of Hajin and the surrounding areas, where about 2,000 IS fighters have been mounting a stubborn last stand for several months.

 

Pentagon officials have also warned that despite the gains, IS was still well-positioned to rebuild. And Mattis had said that before leaving, the U.S. must train enough local troops to assume the role of suppressing the militants. He said the United Nations peace process in Syria must progress toward a resolution of the country’s eight-year-old civil war.

 

While a relatively small number of troops are involved, their withdrawal will have sweeping consequences in Syria’s long-running civil war. Allies will be more heavily burdened with confronting energized adversaries and Turkey, Iran and Russia’s influence in Syria will increase.

 

“This is scary,” said Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner, a Democrat. “Secretary Mattis has been an island of stability amidst the chaos of the Trump administration.”

 

Republican senator and former presidential hopeful Marco Rubio tweeted, “It makes it abundantly clear that we are headed toward a series of grave policy errors which will endanger our nation, damage our alliances and empower our adversaries.”

 

While the decision to pull out of Syria may have been the last straw for Mattis, tensions have been simmering over other issues for quite some time, including on Russia and Iran.

 

Mattis believed Russian President Vladimir Putin has been trying to undermine NATO and assaulting Western democracies.

 

“[Putin’s] actions are designed not to challenge our arms at this point, but to undercut and compromise our belief in our ideals,” Mattis told U.S. Naval War College graduates at a commencement ceremony in June.

 

But Trump has praised Putin’s leadership skills and recently caused concern among U.S. allies by calling for Russia’s reinstatement in the group of major industrial nations. Russia was expelled from what was then the Group of Eight after Moscow’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine.

 

Another point of contention between the two men involved the Iran nuclear deal.

 

Mattis argued the U.S. should consider staying in the Iran nuclear deal unless Tehran was found not to be abiding by the agreement. Iran was following the pact’s rules, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, which monitors the use of nuclear energy and has verified Iranian compliance with the accord multiple times since 2015.

 

Despite Mattis’s position, Trump pulled out of the deal in May, saying it had been poorly negotiated during the administration of former President Barack Obama.

 

As Mattis turned in his resignation, the Defense Department was preparing plans to withdraw up to half of the 14,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan in the coming months, U.S. officials said. The development marks a sharp departure from the Trump administration’s policy to force the Taliban to the negotiating table after more than 17 years of war.

 

Rumors of Mattis leaving the Defense Department have been circulating for months.

 

In October, Trump appeared on the television news show 60 Minutes, where he told TV anchor Lesley Stahl that while “I like General Mattis,” he believed he knew more about NATO than his defense secretary. 

 

“I think he’s sort of a Democrat, if you wanna know the truth,” Trump said. “But General Mattis is a good guy. We get along very well. He may leave. I mean, at some point, everybody leaves. Everybody. People leave. That’s Washington.”

 

Mattis became secretary of defense shortly after Trump’s inauguration and is one of the longest-serving Cabinet members.

 

Before that, Mattis served 44 years in the Marine Corps and led the Marines and British troops during the bloody Battle of Fallujah in Iraq in 2004.
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Decades after the U.S. stopped institutionalizing kids because large and crowded orphanages were causing lasting trauma, it is happening again. The federal government has placed most of the 14,300 migrant toddlers, children and teens in its care in detention centers and residential facilities packed with hundreds, or thousands, of children.

As the year draws to a close, some 5,400 detained migrant children in the U.S. are sleeping in shelters with more than 1,000 other children. Some 9,800 are in facilities with 100-plus total kids, according to confidential government data obtained and cross-checked by The Associated Press.

That’s a huge shift from just three months after President Donald Trump took office, when the same federal program had 2,720 migrant youth in its care; most were in shelters with a few dozen kids or in foster programs. Some of the children may be released sooner than anticipated, because this week the administration ended a portion of its strict screening policies that had slowed the placement of migrant kids with relatives in the U.S.

Until now, public information has been limited about the number of youths held at each facility overseen by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, even for attorneys representing the kids. But the AP obtained data showing the number of children in individual detention centers, shelters and foster care programs for nearly every week over the past 20 months, revealing in detail the expanse of a program at the center of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.

The data shows the degree to which the government’s approach to migrant youth has hardened, marking a new phase in a federal program originally intended to offer safe haven to vulnerable children fleeing danger across the globe. It’s been taking at least twice as long, on average two months rather than one, for youth held inside the system to get out, in part because the Trump administration added more restrictive screening measures for parents and relatives who would take them in.

That changed Tuesday when the administration ended a policy requiring every adult in households where migrant children will live to provide the government with fingerprints. All still must submit to background checks, and parents themselves still need to be fingerprinted. Nonetheless, officials said they could now process some children more rapidly, and hoped to shorten shelter stays that had dragged on so long kids sometimes wondered if their parents had abandoned them for good.

“It’s a pain we will never get through,” said Cecilio Ramirez Castaneda, a Salvadoran whose 12-year-old son, Omar, was taken from him when they were apprehended in June under the administration’s “zero tolerance” policy, which led to nearly 3,000 children being separated from their families. Omar feared his father had given up on him during the five months he spent in a Southwest Key shelter in Brownsville, Texas, with dozens of kids.

Ramirez was reunited with Omar last month only to learn that his son had been hospitalized for depression and medicated for unclear reasons and suffered a broken arm while in government custody.

“It’s a system that causes irreparable damage,”he said. “My son says they would tell him that because he wasn’t from here, he had no rights.”

​Experts say the deep anxiety and distrust children suffer when they’re institutionalized away from loved ones can cause long-lasting mental and physical health problems. It’s dangerous for all but worse for younger children, those who stay more than a few days and those who are in larger facilities with less personal care.

“This is not a perplexing scientific puzzle. This is a moral disaster,” said Dr. Jack Shonkoff, who heads Harvard University’s Center on the Developing Child. “There has to be some way to communicate, in unequivocal terms, that we are inflicting punishments on innocent children that will have lifelong consequences. No matter how a person feels about immigration policy, very few people hate children — and yet we are passively allowing bad things to happen to them.”

Administration officials said increased need has driven them to expand the number of beds available for migrant children from 6,500 last fall to 16,000 today. Mark Weber, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees ORR, said sheltering children in large facilities, while not preferable, is a better alternative than holding them for long periods at Border Patrol stations ill-suited to care for them.

“This is an amazing program with incredibly dedicated people who are working to take care of these kids,” he said. “There are a large number of children and it’s a difficult situation, and we are just working hard to make sure they are taken care of and placed responsibly.”

Weber confirmed a number of specific shelter populations from the data the AP obtained. To further verify the data, reporters contacted more than a dozen individual facilities that contract with ORR to house migrant children. Reporters also cross-referenced population numbers previously collected by AP and its partners.

The kids in government care range in age from toddlers to 17. The vast majority crossed the border without their parents, escaping violence and corruption in Central America, but some were separated from their families at the border earlier this year.

The care they receive varies greatly in the opaque network, which has encompassed 150 different programs over the last 20 months in 17 states. Some children live with foster families and are treated to Broadway shows, while others sleep in canvas tents exposed to the elements amid the Texas desert.

Through dozens of interviews and data analysis, AP found: 

 — As of Dec. 17, some 9,800 children were in facilities housing more than 100 kids; 5,405 of those were in three facilities with more than 1,000 youths — two in Texas and one in Florida.

 — Texas had the most growth over the last 20 months in the number of kids under ORR custody. In April 2017, there were 1,368 migrant children in facilities or foster care in Texas. As of Dec. 17, the number was about 8,700.

 — New York had the second-highest number of children: 1,653, up from 210 in April 2017. Cayuga Centers grew from about 40 kids to close to 900; all are in foster homes.

 — The five largest providers, in order, are Austin, Texas-based Southwest Key; San Antonio-based BCFS Health and Human Services; Comprehensive Health Services Inc., based in Cape Canaveral, Florida; Cayuga Centers in Auburn, New York; and Chicago-based Heartland Alliance. Together they had about 11,600 children — or more than 80 percent of the 14,314 migrant youth in ORR custody as of Dec. 17. 

 — The states with children in care are: Arizona, California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Kansas, Massachusetts, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia and Washington state.

​Kids continue to enter the system, though dozens of the care providers have been sued or disciplined before for mistreating children in their care. Now new litigation is piling up as attorneys fight to get migrant children released.

Staff members at a Southwest Key shelter in Phoenix allegedly physically abused three children this year, leading to the closure of the shelter in October, federal officials said. And a lawsuit filed earlier this year alleged that Latino youths at the Shenandoah Valley Juvenile Center in Virginia were beaten while handcuffed and locked up for long periods in solitary confinement, left nude and shivering in concrete cells. 

The American Academy of Pediatrics and many experts warn against institutionalizing children in large groups. Dr. Ryan Matlow, a Stanford clinical psychologist whose work addresses the impact of early life stress, said best practices minimize the number of children in any one shelter. 

“Children are being treated as cogs in a machine, and their individual backgrounds, interests and unique identities are devalued as they are lost amongst the masses. This experience then becomes internalized, with significant psychological consequences,” said Matlow, who recently met with migrant children in custody. “There is no way in which a mass detention setting can replicate the experience and support that comes from family and community.” 

The number of migrant children caught by immigration officials and then turned over to the Office of Refugee Resettlement has dropped under Trump: there were 49,100 in fiscal year 2018 compared to a high of 59,170 in fiscal year 2016, when a surge of youth crossing the border prompted the Obama administration to open emergency shelters at military bases. The average length of stay has increased, however, from about 34 days in January 2016 to around 60 days , according to government reports. In October, the average length of stay reached 89 days, according to data HHS provided to members of Congress, who shared it with AP.
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