Senate Democrats call for government watchdog probe into ICE using therapy notes against kids – By Gabe Ortiz (Daily Kos) / March 5 2020
Nearly two dozen Senate Democrats are demanding the inspectors general of the Homeland Security and Health and Human Services departments open an investigation into the Trump administration’s disgusting weaponizing of confidential therapy notes against detained children in U.S. immigration court, writing “The reported breach of confidentiality as it relates to traumatized children is particularly egregious.”
“Federal agencies must treat children in their care with humanity and in accordance with the law,” the group of senators tell HHS Principal Deputy Inspector General Christi Grimm and DHS Inspector General Joseph Cuffari. “Unfortunately, as your offices have repeatedly documented, agency decisions and practices have failed migrant children, including children ripped apart from their parents at the border due to the cruel family separation policy and children who have languished in dangerous, overcrowded facilities at the southwest border.”
The request to the inspectors general, led by Senators Dick Durbin and Patty Murray, is one of the latest actions by congressional Democrats in response to The Washington Post’s outrageous report detailing Immigration and Customs Enforcement using these confidential therapy notes to get children deported. Earlier this week, Sen. Jeff Merkley and Rep. Grace Napolitano introduced a bill that would ban this practice, and then in a letter to Office of Refugee Resettlement director Jonathan Hayes, nearly a dozen senators doubted HHS Secretary Alex Azar’s recent claim that this practice has stopped.
Doubts were similarly expressed by senators in the letter to the two inspectors general. “[T]he agency’s own rules, which were revised in 2018, appear to require reporting to ICE of criminal history and other ‘Significant Incidents,’” the senators tell Cuffari and Grimm, “and may suggest broader discretion than suggested by Secretary Azar about the scope and ongoing nature of therapy disclosures.” Azar’s untrustworthiness regarding the well-being of migrant kids is fact, immigrant rights advocacy group America’s Voice wrote last year.
Continue to article: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/3/5/1924702/-Senate-Democrats-call-for-government-watchdog-probe-into-ICE-using-therapy-notes-against-kids
