Why We Have Laws -- About State LICENSED Child-Care Facilities...

In relatively small increments -- many, many truly horrific affronts have been ham-handedly attempted -- by this current Trump administration. It takes a moment, like a reflective July 4 holiday, to pull back -- and ask oneself: Is this the sort of America I believe in? That I want to call home? Where I feel safe, with my children and grandchildren?

In the California Central District USDC version of the child kidnapping cases (called Flores, since 1985), the City of Chicago, along with New York and San Francisco -- have filed a consolidated so-called "friend of the court" brief, late on the evening of the Third.

The brief takes Trump to task -- about law we settled over a half century ago: children should not be left unattended in facilities that are not INSPECTED and certified, by state licensing agencies -- for safety, cleanliness, and appropriately nurturing programming. I cannot agree to open a day care in my neighborhood, for three children, without (quite sensibly) complying with state licensing background checks, etc.

But right now, in Texas, California, Pennsylvania, Illinois and Michigan (among a handful of others) -- Trump affiliated donors are running some non-profit, and some for profit "kid prisons" -- all without the benefit of rudimentary criminal background checks, to weed out pedophiles, for example. And they are certainly now ware-housing over 2,000 young children.

Here is Chicago's corporation counsel, on brief (17 page PDF there) -- but do let that sink in: these kids are in icebox style cages (food holding cages, repurposed to cage. . . children) -- being not nurtured, but "guarded", by people with no child education training, no nurturing skills, and no basic safety protocols. Trump's own Homeland Security Department/OIG just concluded the same. And, a bit:

. . . .Amici are acutely focused on Defendants’ attempt to modify the settlement to eliminate the state licensing requirement. . . . Amici have a strong interest, therefore, in the continued licensed regulation of Defendants’ child welfare programs, especially considering that media reports estimate that hundreds of children recently separated from their families by Defendants’ are being held in and around amici’s jurisdictions. . . .

Licensing is a critical check on the adequacy and competence of the organizations running the facilities holding these migrant children. The very purpose of state licensing is to ensure a minimum standard of quality in a service field that is incredibly complex with the potential to inflict extreme harm upon an already vulnerable youth population. The only discernible purpose of the government’s requested change is to evade the crucial layer of oversight and accountability provided by the settlement agreement’s state licensure requirement. But Defendants present no evidence that state licensing is unavailable or even impracticable, nor do they propose any alternative to state licensure that would help ensure accountability of the agencies running the facilities. To the contrary, a report released just this week by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) at the Department of Homeland Security shows that ICE, for example, should not be self monitoring. Specifically, the OIG determined that ICE’s privately contracted inspection firms and its own self-monitoring via ICE’s Office of Detention Oversight do not result in sustained compliance with detention standards and practices, nor do they promote systemic improvements or comprehensive corrections of deficiencies.

The state licensing requirement is all the more critical now that Judge Dana M. Sabraw has issued an order requiring the federal government to reunite the separated children with their parents, many of whom are in Defendants’ custody.33 Removing the licensing requirement at this critical moment of reunification could create serious consequences for the health and wellbeing of the children. In his ruling, Judge Sabraw recognized the “constitutional liberty interest ‘of parents in the care, custody, and control of their children[,]’ which ‘is perhaps the oldest of the fundamental liberty interests recognized by’ the Supreme Court.” Id. at *35 (quoting Troxel v. Granville, 530 U.S. 57, 65 (2000)). . . . Amici’s interest in seeing the state licensing requirements be properly applied and enforced within our respective jurisdictions has its foundation in that same fundamental liberty interest in protecting the care and custody of all children. . . .

[For over a decade, I served as the chairman of the board, and counsel to a federally-funded early childhood education connector locally -- and so, I speak from experience when I say licensing is vitally needed, to protect these vulnerable children from ordinary, casual harms -- but especially from otherwise unanticipated, unfathomable harms.] In this regard, you dear reader, may safely assume that putting children in cages is NOT permitted -- at any licensed facility.

Folks, honestly -- this is the way a democracy dies -- a million smallish affronts, claimed as needed for various "exigencies" (ones that do not, in fact, exist -- or are the making of 45's own policies, in the first place), and then. . . silently, slowly -- we one day awaken in a. . . monarchy. I -- for one -- will. . . resist.

Briefs in my pro bono versions of these matters are due. . . Friday. And these excellent models (I've been linking and quoting from, over the last few weeks) make life much easier. Smile.

Onward!

नमस्ते