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pun-pkindude · 4 years

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- The Todeshund -

?: FRED ARE YOU THERE?! WHERE ARE YOU?! I CANT SEE ANYTHING IN THIS FREAKEN SNOWSTORM!

Fred: Yup! I'm here! Right in front of ya crys!

Crystal: My eyesight is already bad and having everything be one color isn't helping!!! Where is the base?! also, Dont call me crys, it makes me sound like a boy!

Fred: over here, I see it! *Crunching of snow, door opens then slams*

Fred: we are here! Yay!!

Crystal: uggghhh Its so cold even with all this winter gear.. when I signed up to study this place I didn't sign up for snowstorms and unbearable cold!

?: I mean.. no.

But it's sorta part of studying a mountain isn't it?

Crystal: I guess so germ but it's still stupid!

Jeremy: my name's Jeremy but call me what ya want I guess, also, I'm tired.. I don't know why.. can you take over "writing and updating the log for the team" duty?

Crystal: I do that every night. All the time.. you haven't done a single thing. I mean, Fred helps me explore sometimes, you just sit around, and yet YOU'RE the one who's tired?

Fred: actually, I'ma crash too see ya!

Crystal: wait what? oh come on! Fine I'll do everything by myself... Ok I guess I gotta update the log first and call group 1 at the base to say we have to delay the trip. Oh well.

*phone ringing*

Crystal: This is crystal from group 2 and we need to delay the trip to the top of the mountain, we have been hit with a snowstorm. Let's say.. 2 more days?... Wait.. you there? Hellooooo? *Phone stops* the phone lines must be damaged, that's gonna take some time to repair, guess I should write things down now.. but where's my pen!?! Or my journal?? Oh crap.. they might be in the other building.. it's night.. uggfhh

*10 mins later*

Alright I'm ready to go, let's do this.

*door opens then slams shut*

So... Cold... I think.. the buildings over.. here? There it is!!

*Running, door opening then closing*

Whew.. now to write..

*12 mins later*

Ok! Done. Now to go back..

*door opens then closes, footsteps*

Crystal: alrighty this time I can bring the journal with me so I don't have to worry about going to the writing room.. hehehe.

Why do we need to study this mountain anyways?! So what if it had a few people go missing on it, it's a MOUNTAIN! I hate this joB-

*screams*

*12 hours later*

Fred: *yawns* whew. Nice night. Though I'm still sorta tired so that sucks.

Jeremy: *yawns too* me too.. i think I only got a bit of sleep.. I couldn't sleep. HEY CRYSTAL CAN YOU BRING ME A DRINK OR SOMETHING? LIKE A PEPSY OR AN MT. DOO? *Silence*

Well you could just say no instead of ignoring me ya butt. Heh. Don't worry I'm getting up to get it.. you there? Fred look at this, she's gone!

Fred: what? She's probs sleeping In the writing room.

*door opens*

Fred: looks like the storm mostly passed, get your coat though.

*they both get ready and leave*

Jeremy: is that blood on the ground?

Fred: that's just her journal you idiot, just because 2 things are red doesn't mean they are the same.

Jeremy: HER JOURNAL IS ON THE GROUND?

Fred: oh yea that's also bad. Did she update it?

*page turns* yup.

Entry 17: a snowstorm hit today while we tried to go to the top of the mountain, the phone lines are down, why are we studying this place anyway? It's just a dumb mountain that 2 people got lost on.

Jeremy: weird.. WAIT A SEC IS *THAT* BLOOD?

Fred: that time it seems you are correct. What the fuck happened here? It seems there's a trail of footprints and blood that way, well, less footprints and more just.. tracks.. I can't tell what might have made them. let's go, we gotta find out what happend.

Jeremy: are you kidding? Like every horror movie ever we FOLLOW the monster?!

Fred: it's not a monster.. some animal might have scared her and made her drop her journal and run or something.

Jeremy: fine but if we die bc of you I will kick your ghost ass.

*2 hours later*

Fred: let's set up some sorta camp. Luckily I brought food from the main base, so no death from starvation. And also I brought 2 tents. I came prepared.

Jeremy: what about things to make a campfire?

Fred: ....... Fuck.

Jeremy: we won't die luckily, but that sucks. Let's set up the camp here, there is a clear area over there.

*26 mins later*

Fred: well that should be good, food is outside due to oh having 2 tents.. that sucks, but there are very few animals in this cold so it should be good. Let's go to sleep.

*6 hours pass*

*metallic crunching and banging*

Fred: you hear that germ? Something is outside!

Jeremy: hecc no I'm staying in the tent, you go outside and kill yourself.

Fred: fine. I don't want this animal eating our food!

*footsteps*

Fred: WHAT THE FU- ARGH...

Jeremy: ok well now I HAVE to check on him

*he peaks outside the tent*

YOUR BLEEDING?! HOW?! WHAT ATTACKED YOU?

Fred: I'm alive don't worry.. but that... Thing attacked me.. I believe you now, whatever it is it is NOT normal. This thing is a monster. Heck it almost bit off my leg and it ate almost all our food! We got a few meals worth left. We gotta pack that up and get going. We must follow the trail more no matter what it takes.

Jeremy: good to hear your ok, bud. But we cant go, you can barely walk!

Fred: WE NEED TO SAVE CRYSTAL BEFORE THAT MONSTER DOES MORE TO HER! If your not going I am. I can still sorta wal- *trip* ow.. I'm going.

*footsteps*

Jeremy: fine. Atleast let me help you. *More footsteps*

*one hour later*

Jeremy: we are going nowhere and you need rest

Fred: we are going somewhere and no I don't. Speaking of what's that in the distance? Looks like a abandoned building. It would be warmer there then anywhere else, I bet that's the monsters hide out.

Jeremy: there are broken windows and papers surrounding it. It's a abandoned research building. The research team went missing studying this Mountain I bet! But they hired ANOTHER research team to discover a missing research team?! How stupid IS group 1?

Jeremy: well we are here. I doubt we should go in the main entrance. We should probably climb through a window.

*breaking glass and a plop*

Fred: I'm in. Now to find crystal.. how many hallways *are* there In this building? It's like its one gaint room with a buncha walls slapped randomly everywhere- come look germ! Come look! It's crystal! I think she was hurt!

Jeremy: ya think?

Fred: well, let's get her outa-

*growls*

Fred: germ... Run... I'll get crystal.

Jeremy: no. For once I don't wanna be the guy that doesn't do anything. For once I want to help people. I'll fend it off. I think i know where it is.

*Jeremy picks up a sharp piece of glass as a weapon*

*footsteps*

Fred: alright. Good for him. Now I gotta pick her up and *OWW* oh yea my leg... Who cares

Fred: ok. I gotcha. Now we gotta go through the front... or not..

*infront of him is a gigantic wolf about 5 - 6 feet tall, growling at him*

AHHHHHHHH! *fast footsteps* fred: where is the door where's the door where's the fuckin door?! Oh crap a wall.. *SLAM*

Fred: good.. dog?

*growls, slow footsteps*

*ROAR*

Fred: AHH-

*whining and whimpers, fast footsteps away*

Fred: am I dead yet?

Jeremy: sadly no.

Fred: wow. That was badass! You stabbed it with a glass shard! Go get it, it's running away! *Fast footsteps* I'll come with! *Ow* let's go!

*faint whimpers and footsteps*

Jeremy: COME BACK HERE YA IDIOTIC DOG!... it jumped through a window! we can't follow it... What were these guys researching anyway?

*papers rustling*

Fred: looks like they researched that thing. The creature is called todeshund.

To-a-shund... Well, let's go help crystal.. speaking of thanks for saving me, Jeremy, I guess your not so lazy after all!

Jeremy: no problem, it means alot. *He smiles*

*2 hours later*

Jeremy: we are here! Whew.. let's get crystal bandaged up in our bed... It's the softest place.

*5 mins later*

Crystal: HH! wait wha- where am I? Where did the big wolf go? Why am I back at the base?

Jeremy: we saved you from it, i stabbed it with a shard of glass. It's called a todeshund.

Crystal: you killed it?! Awesome!

Fred: not really.. it's still out there.. somewhere...

- Audio log 1 ended -

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news-monda · 4 years

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news-sein · 4 years

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news-lisaar · 4 years

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chestnutpost · 5 years

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Florida Detention Center Expands, Packing In Migrant Children ‘Like Sardines’

At a detention center in Homestead, Florida, a group of immigrant teens are packed into cold rooms that can hold 70 to 250 kids, given a substandard education and detained for more than six months, according to interviews done by five legal and child psychology experts.

On Feb. 6 and 7, the team spoke with roughly two dozen children to assess the Homestead shelter’s compliance with the Flores settlement, the 1997 agreement in a landmark lawsuit that outlines child welfare standards in government-run detention centers. They told HuffPost the conditions inside the “temporary” shelter at Homestead are troubling and not suitable for any child, especially over a long period of time.

“These children are in perhaps the most restrictive and least family-like setting possible,” said Neha Desai, the director of immigration at the National Center for Youth Law, in an email to HuffPost. “I spoke with youth that slept in rooms with 100 other kids at night. Some of them have been there for months on end, with no freedom of movement, no privacy, no human contact.”

The Trump administration reopened the facility in February 2018 and in December announced it would almost double the shelter’s capacity from 1,350 to 2,350 children, ages 13 to 17.

Before Homestead’s expansion, most children slept in rooms of 12. But, according to immigration lawyers who visited Homestead last week, the facility recently outfitted one of its buildings to house 17-year-olds in large rooms that sleep 70 to 250 kids.

J.J. Mulligan Sepulveda, an immigration lawyer at the University of California, Davis, School of Law who conducted interviews at Homestead, spoke with teens who said they were sleeping in rooms with 150 to more than 200 kids.

Mulligan Sepulveda, who also received a tour of the facility, told HuffPost the bunk beds in these large rooms were in “perfect, neat, 12-by-12 rows” and that children were packed in “like sardines.” “[There’s] just enough room to walk by [with your] shoulder skimming the bunk beds on each side,” he said. “[It] really hits home how inhumane it is.”

Mary Bauer, the deputy legal director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Immigrant Justice Project, says that, though kids should never be detained, the government shelters should at least be “small, home-like settings.” “A facility [with] a thousand kids is not appropriate for children,” Bauer said. “The idea [of] now moving to a 2,500-bed facility is very, very concerning.”

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services declined to provide HuffPost with a comment.

The Homestead facility is considered a temporary shelter and should be used only to accommodate an influx of immigrants. But the number of children crossing the border hasn’t increased significantly, and experts say there are high numbers of detained immigrant kids only because the government is unnecessarily keeping them in shelters for record-long periods of time.

As a temporary shelter, Homestead isn’t required to follow Florida’s child welfare regulations when it comes to issues such as staff training, education and recreation time, unlike permanent Office of Refugee Resettlement shelters. Nor was Tornillo, a tent city that had the capacity to house 3,800 immigrant kids in the Texas desert, which was shut down in January amid public outcry.

The Homestead complex, which was opened by the Obama administration in 2016 for a 10-month period, is on federal land beside Homestead Air Reserve Base in Miami-Dade County. The campus, made up of buildings and tents, is surrounded by chain-link fences with guards at every entrance. Children are not allowed to leave the facility, despite regulations in the Flores settlement specifying that children’s shelters must be non-secure, and they must wear wristbands that track their movements.

Desai says the shelter is “very militaristic” and “highly regimented.” The children wake up at 6:30 a.m., spend most of the day in school, save for roughly an hour of outdoor time, and go to bed at around 10 p.m. They walk in single-file lines and eat at the cafeteria three times a day. They can only call their parents twice a week for 10 minutes.

Brynn Anderson/ASSOCIATED PRESS

A migrant teen plays soccer as others gather at the Homestead Temporary Shelter for Unaccompanied Children in Homestead, Florida, in December.

Seventeen-year-olds detained in the newly opened Homestead building told Mulligan Sepulveda and Desai that to use the washroom in the middle of the night, the staff must escort them to temporary toilets outdoors and that they are only allowed to take five-minute showers.

They told the lawyers that the buildings were always cold and that they weren’t allowed to touch one another, which was also a rule at Tornillo.

Mulligan Sepulveda interviewed a 17-year-old girl who burst into tears because she was so desperate for a hug. He also spoke with a boy who only got to see his brother for an hour and a half each week because the teens were placed in separate buildings.

“It’s basic human contact that people need,” said Mulligan Sepulveda. “[Kids] spend all this time together, five to six months, and make friends. But when someone leaves or gets transferred, they can’t even hug each other to say goodbye.”

Desai said many of the children she spoke with had a hunger for human connection and suffered from the “sheer emotional deprivation of not getting to touch another human being for months on end.”

She added that when young people are warehoused together, there’s no way to meet their educational, physical and emotional needs. “They are existing in this highly regimented structure that leaves no space for any individualized attention,” she said.

Mulligan Sepulveda said children also complained about their schooling, which takes place in large tents subdivided into classrooms. Mateo, a 17-year-old who was recently released from Homestead after seven months and who requested a pseudonym to protect his privacy, told HuffPost that noise traveled between the classrooms, making it a “very loud and very distracting” experience.

The teachers at Homestead aren’t certified by the Miami-Dade County public school district, according to The New York Times. They were when the Obama administration opened the shelter in 2016.

A former teacher at Homestead recently told the Miami Herald that the children were given few books and that those books were often below their grade level. She said her students were enthusiastic to learn English but described the learning situation as “not a school.”

Mulligan Sepulveda and Desai said that, though Homestead is designed for short-term stays, they interviewed kids who had been in the shelter for more than six months and who had no idea when they would be released to their sponsors. According to HHS, are detained at Homestead for an average of 67 days.

“It’s completely baffling how they are justifying keeping kids there for [up to] nine months at a time,” Desai said. “In my mind, there’s zero justification for keeping kids there for several months, let alone these extreme [cases] of eight or nine months.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center, the Legal Aid Justice Center and a Washington, D.C.-based law firm recently filed a class-action lawsuit against the Trump administration, in part because of how long it’s keeping children detained. The filing describes how the sponsorship process is not transparent, and how case managers have the discretion to prolong the procedure or deny applicants based on subjective criteria.

Mateo’s father, Pablo, who also requested a pseudonym to protect his privacy, submitted his sponsorship application on July 25 and waited seven months for his son to be released. Throughout that time, he was told by caseworkers and social workers that he needed to resubmit his fingerprints, move into another apartment and send in three rounds of additional paperwork ― all of which cost him hundreds of dollars in transportation and rent.

Meanwhile, his son struggled with mental health issues at Homestead and experienced headaches “so severe that he broke out in screams, and was taken to a hospital,” according to the court filing.

“I would spend all day at work thinking about him,” Pablo said. “I would come home at night and would feel very sad.”

Desai says that her legal team is still evaluating what to do with the information they gathered from kids at Homestead. She says it’s important to tackle the foundational issues that result in temporary shelters like Homestead ― such as the fact that the government isn’t speedily releasing children to sponsors ― in addition to exposing worrisome conditions.

“We are trying to be thoughtful about the systemic issues,” she said. “If you shut down one place, it doesn’t mean the next place isn’t just going to crop up.”

RELATED COVERAGE

The post Florida Detention Center Expands, Packing In Migrant Children ‘Like Sardines’ appeared first on The Chestnut Post.

from The Chestnut Post https://www.thechestnutpost.com/news/florida-detention-center-expands-packing-in-migrant-children-like-sardines/

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mikemortgage · 5 years

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Groups demand end to info-sharing on asylum-seeking children

Earlier this year, the federal agency tasked with caring for asylum-seeking children separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexican border officially took on a new, little heralded role: helping to deport relatives of the young migrants.

In a Wednesday letter to the heads of the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Homeland Security, 112 civil-liberties and immigrant-rights groups, child-welfare advocates and privacy activists are crying foul, demanding an immediate halt to what they call an illegal practice.

HHS and DHS are using information on U.S.-based relatives and other potential sponsors obtained from detained children to “arrest and deport those families,” the authors complain. Already, they write, “families have become too scared to step forward to sponsor children.”

The new role for the Office of Refugee Resettlement, an HHS unit that works to reunite unaccompanied migrant children with relatives until their legal status can be resolved, began under an information-sharing agreement it quietly signed in April with immigration enforcement agencies in DHS.

Fingerprints and personal data from would-be sponsors and members of their households were then fed into a DHS database originally intended to track criminal histories — but revamped in May to aid immigration verification, government documents show.

Wednesday’s letter complains that federal, state and local authorities — and some foreign governments — have virtually untrammeled access to that database, which could subject law-abiding potential sponsors to unwarranted scrutiny.

Federal officials say the information-sharing aims to protect the migrant kids from traffickers and other abuse. But since it began, the average time children spend in federal custody has roughly doubled to more than two months.

Worse, child-welfare advocates say, the arrangement has made unwitting snitches of the children themselves — most of them Central Americans fleeing some of the world’s most violent, lawless nations.

“Children are being turned into bait to gather unprecedented amounts of information from immigrant communities,” said Becky Wolozin, an attorney with the Legal Aid Justice Center, which signed the letter. The centre is representing immigrant children in a federal case in Virginia that challenges the information-sharing as arbitrary and capricious.

Neither the refugee-resettlement office nor the Homeland Security Department responded directly to questions from The Associated Press about whether the arrangement violates legal protections for unaccompanied migrant children, which require they be held by authorities the shortest possible time.

At least 41 relatives and household members in the country illegally have been arrested for deportation by ICE based on the data-sharing, Matthew Albence, a top Immigration and Customs Enforcement official, told a September congressional hearing . An ICE spokesman said the arrests occurred from early July to early September but did not provide an updated number, which the AP requested.

Democratic lawmakers in both houses of Congress — Sens. Kamala Harris of California and Ron Wyden of Oregon and Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida — have introduced legislation that would prohibit DHS from using information obtained in screening potential sponsors in deportation proceedings.

The American Civil Liberties Union sued earlier in November to end the mandatory fingerprinting of potential sponsors and household members instituted with the information-sharing. The group blames the practice for delays in releasing migrant children that has contributed their growing numbers in custody — now officially around 14,000, the largest number in U.S. history.

Bob Carey, who ran the resettlement agency for nearly two years until January 2017, said the average time in custody for unaccompanied children “hovered around 33 days the entire time I was there.” Now it’s closer to 70 days, HHS says.

Trump administration officials show no signs of budging.

The AP asked the Office of Refugee Resettlement how the new policies square with its mission to place children as quickly as possible with relatives or other sponsors. The office did not respond directly, but in an emailed reply called the longer stays “a symptom of the larger problem, namely a broken immigration system that encourages them to make the hazardous journey.”

Previously, the resettlement office only collected fingerprints of prospective sponsors in very specific circumstances, Carey said — most often in the case of unrelated adults volunteering to sponsor children. He said a study he once commissioned found fingerprint checks to be more trouble than they were worth, as few applicants had a record of legal offences. Those that turned up were nearly all traffic violations, he said. By contrast, none of the 2,100 staffers at a Texas tent city currently holding more than 2,300 teenage migrants have had to submit to the FBI’s rigorous fingerprint background checks, which detail any histories of child abuse or neglect, an HHS inspector general’s memo published Tuesday revealed.

In his September appearance before Congress, Albence of ICE justified the information-sharing on law enforcement grounds. The agency said just over 80 per cent of would-be sponsors were in the country illegally.

Albence was not asked about the revamped database and its expanded use for tracking U.S. residents suspected of being in the country illegally.

That system now includes among its records the fingerprints and personal data of prospective sponsors. The ICE tool lets law enforcement agencies ask about the immigration status of individuals arrested, subject to background checks or “otherwise encountered.”

Harrison Rudolph of the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law School says it effectively puts prospective sponsors in an “active queue” for deportation because their case files appear prominently when ICE enforcement agents open the database.

DHS privacy policy says ICE can also share the information with “appropriate federal, state, local, tribal, territorial, foreign or international government agencies.”

One database entry belongs to Rosa Caceres, a 45-year-old Honduran whose 12-year-old grandson was separated from his father in May when the two crossed the border at San Ysidro, California, and applied for asylum.

The father was immediately deported. The grandson, who had identified his mother’s body (his parents were separated) after criminals killed her in Honduras in September 2016, was held at a group home in Baltimore for three months before moving in with his grandmother.

“He couldn’t sleep at night, thinking ‘My God, what’s going to become of me?”‘ said Caceres, a construction worker. “The feelings of desperation, he said, made him feel asphyxiated.”

Caceres says she’s been in the U.S. for 16 years and hopes to obtain legal residency. As a Honduran, she has an official temporary immigration status that she’s seeking to make permanent. The grandson is now a 6th grader happy with school and running track, she said.

Caceres is aware that the data she provided to take in her grandson could one day be used to deport her.

“It’s frightening, but in the end, when it’s family you overcome the fear,” she said. “There was nothing I could do but confront the reality, come what may.”

——

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newestbalance · 6 years

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Tech issues plague U.S. web portal tracking separated children

(Reuters) – In late June, attorney Sebastian Harley tried to log into a U.S. government web portal to check on a Guatemalan child who had been separated from his parent at the border. He got an error message saying there were too many users.

FILE PHOTO: Immigrant children now housed in a tent encampment under the new “zero tolerance” policy by the Trump administration are shown walking in single file at the facility near the Mexican border in Tornillo, Texas, U.S. June 19, 2018. REUTERS/Mike Blake/File Photo

“I just couldn’t get in,” he said. “The system appeared to be down.”

It was not an isolated incident. From the moment it went online in January of 2014, the computer system designed to track unaccompanied immigrant children and process their release has created headaches for the shelter staff, government employees and others who use it, according to interviews with a dozen current and former users, government reports, and congressional testimony.

Users described a frustrating array of issues, including that the portal could only handle a limited number of users at once without crashing, lost saved data, had poor searchability and required significant manual work for even small updates.

Now that system, operated by the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) and known as the UAC portal, has become a key part of the effort to track thousands of children under government supervision who were separated from their parents by immigration officials in recent months. It is being used by government employees, legal service providers, shelter workers and call center operators looking to answer parents’ questions about their children’s whereabouts.

But the system was set up to track unaccompanied minors rather than those separated from their parents by border officials, and it has little ability to interact with the separate database used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement to track the children’s parents, users said, complicating efforts to easily link family members.

One case worker involved in reunification efforts said she has used the portal regularly over the past eight months, and that “for some weeks during that period, it was making our daily work impossible.”

A Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) official said the UAC portal is what call center workers use to locate children in ORR custody. The agency is “constantly making improvements to the portal,” he said, but did not provide further details.

Paige Austin, an attorney with the New York Civil Liberties Union, said she and her colleagues have documented numerous cases this year in which issues with the UAC portal delayed the release of children from ORR custody.

“We definitely observed that issues with the portal were an impediment to finalizing release and referrals,” said Austin.

The portal’s shortcomings are just one of many challenges that have cropped up as the government races against court-imposed deadlines to reunite children and families it has separated at the border.

Federal judge Dana Sabraw ordered the reunifications after the American Civil Liberties Union filed a San Diego lawsuit challenging the government’s policy of separating children from their parents. In his order setting a July 26 deadline for reuniting all separated families, he noted that while the government routinely catalogs detainees’ possessions, it “has no system in place to keep track of, provide effective communication with, and promptly produce alien children.”

A TRAIL OF PROBLEMS

Issues with the computer system have been repeatedly documented.

In October 2015, HHS data analysts told a U.S. Senate subcommittee that the portal had shortcomings the agency was “working to fix.” Users had to be extremely specific when entering a name or address, for example: an entry for a street name including “Pl” is not the same thing as “Place.” And a minor misspelling of a name could mean a search would come back with no results, they told the committee.

The next year, a report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that ORR still did not have the processes in place to ensure data were reliable, systematically collected, and compiled in a useful manner.

FILE PHOTO: Immigrant children are led by staff in single file between tents at a detention facility next to the Mexican border in Tornillo, Texas, U.S., June 18, 2018. Picture taken June 18, 2018. REUTERS/Mike Blake/File Photo

Michael Weiss, chief operating officer of the system’s initial developer Patriot LCC, said the government’s needs changed drastically from September 2013 when his company won the contract to build the first iteration of the system.

“They gave us very minimal requirements to get something up and running that they could at least use internally in their office,” he said.

After the system was launched, “they kept changing their requirements,” said Weiss, necessitating frequent updates. Still, he said, the company was unaware of any issues with the system beyond the usual software bugs. From 2013 to 2016, when Patriot’s contract ended, the company met or exceeded ORR’s requirements, he said, according to evaluations it received.

In mid-2016, a government agency known as 18F, which does small-scale technology projects, was brought in to help strategize how to manage increasing demands on the system and address its problems.

The home page took minutes to load, even without heavy traffic, and the system would crash if too many people logged on at once, said former 18F developer Kane Baccigalupi. “There were really significant performance problems.”

For one thing, she said, case workers who wanted to add to or fix a child’s record had to copy what was in the fields before they went into edit or else information would be deleted.

Baccigalupi said her team ran out of time to address system-wide problems and instead focused on building a feature that allowed users to check bed capacity. When the developers’ contract ended around the time of the 2016 presidential election it was still “not a working system,” according to Baccigalupi.

The HHS official said upgrades to the portal were made in 2016 to refine the process for entering addresses and add the bed capacity feature.

PROBLEMS PERSISTED

A former government contractor who used the portal daily from when it launched until June 2017 said the system made it difficult to find children with multiple last names, which are common in Latin America, or to search for different spellings of names such as Cortez and Cortes.

“If you have the wrong one, it’s not going to find anything,” he said. He described working around the system by putting in different combinations of names until he found the child he was looking for.

When he went to edit or update a child’s file, he said, he learned to save the information in a separate document on his computer in case the system crashed or the information did not upload correctly. “I wanted a Word document to make sure I had it,” he said.

Currently, Pennsylvania-based Applied Intellect has the contract for operating the portal. The company referred requests for comment to HHS, and it is unclear what work has been done since Trump took office in January 2017.

A GAO report this year noted some improvements by ORR in “systematically collecting information that can be used internally and shared, as appropriate, with external agencies,” such as more timely and complete record keeping of the quality of care children received after they leave ORR facilities.

But the report also found that as of April, “case management functionality had not yet been built into ORR’s web-based portal,” a crucial component for tracking the care of children.

Kathryn Larin, who directs the GAO’s education, workforce, and income security team, said that as of April 2018, case workers maintained paper files for children and the data were not always entered into the UAC portal. Case workers often collected information in their files which did not fit readily into the portal’s data fields, she said.

A day after attorney Sebastian Harley was unable to log in to the portal, his colleague was able to get an update on the Guatemalan boy – by calling the child’s case worker.

The post Tech issues plague U.S. web portal tracking separated children appeared first on World The News.

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democratsunited-blog · 6 years

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Democrats want investigation into HHS’ efforts to reunite migrant families

https://uniteddemocrats.net/?p=4338

Democrats want investigation into HHS’ efforts to reunite migrant families

The European Union’s health chief said President Donald Trump’s claims about drug prices are “absolutely fake news,” and a new lawsuit is coming over HHS’ changes to the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program.

But first: HHS is likely facing a government audit as it scrambles to reunify migrant families.

Story Continued Below

DEMOCRATS ASK GAO: INVESTIGATE HHS’ EFFORTS TO REUNITE FAMILIES — Rep. Frank Pallone, the ranking member of the House Energy & Commerce Committee, on Thursday urged GAO to audit HHS and the Department of Homeland Security as the agencies work to reunite thousands of migrant children.

“Congress needs an immediate assessment of the systems or processes by which [the Office of Refugee Resettlement] and DHS are tracking each minor in their care,” Pallone writes, asking if HHS has a master list of children in custody, for example.

… Questions have swirled over whether HHS is prepared to reunite more than 2,300 children with their families, and whether the department’s refugee office has the resources or leadership to handle the challenge. Advocates also are asking today why refugee office director Scott Lloyd hasn’t made a public statement in more than two months.

— Meanwhile: Lawmakers descend on Texas to tour migrant facilities. Democratic officials are visiting the week-old tent shelter run by an HHS contractor in Tornillo, Texas, using the site as a backdrop to attack the administration’s immigration policies, POLITICO’s Renuka Rayasam reports from the state.

The mayors of Austin, Los Angeles, Miami and other cities visited on Thursday, while Rep. Beto O’Rourke — who‘s challenging Ted Cruz for his Senate seat this year — will visit on Saturday. Former HUD Secretary Julián Castro, California Secretary of State Alex Padilla and immigration advocates plan to hold a rally at the center on Sunday.

… Some Republicans also are visiting the migrant centers, claiming after their visits that the children are being well-treated and the situation has been distorted by the media.

First Lady Melania Trump and HHS Secretary Alex Azar visited another facility for minors run by HHS’ Office of Refugee Resettlement on Thursday, while Cruz and Sen. John Cornyn announced that they will tour South Texas immigrant detention centers today.

Rep. Frank Pallone is calling for a government audit into HHS’ efforts to reunite families.

NEW LAWSUIT AGAINST CHANGES TO TEEN PREGNANCY PROGRAM — Several Planned Parenthood affiliates today plan to file suit against HHS for what they call the administration’s abstinence-only-until-marriage (AOUM) plan in the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program, POLITICO’s Jennifer Haberkorn reports.

Planned Parenthood pegs the lawsuit — which is separate from earlier legal challenges to the program’s funding cuts — as preservation of the future of the program. Earlier this year, the administration said it would emphasize abstinence education in TPPP. Suits will be filed in Washington state and New York. The lawsuit is the latest in a slew of litigation filed against the administration’s changes to TPPP and Title X family planning programs.

SPEAKING OF TITLE X: WHAT’S NEXT IN THE LEGAL BATTLE? — A federal judge on Thursday appeared conflicted over whether the Trump administration’s changes to the Title X family planning program were substantial enough to warrant a typical rule-making process, Jennifer also reports.

HHS this year dropped references in the funding announcement to contraception and instead prioritized policies like abstinence, prompting the legal challenge.

Title X grantees told Judge Trevor McFadden, a Trump appointee, that the administration’s changes to how grants are awarded are so dramatic that they must be immediately blocked and sent through the rulemaking process. DOJ lawyers said the changes were not that substantial.

… In a worrisome sign for the plaintiffs, McFadden suggested that HHS focused on abstinence in Title X funding announcements during the George W. Bush administration in the early 2000s. That sounds like the “risk avoidance that you’re complaining about now,” he told an attorney for the grantees.

… But in a bad sign for the government, McFadden asked several times about the possible remedy for grantees, such as continuing funding, if he ruled against the administration.

THANK GOODNESS IT’S FRIDAY PULSE — Where are your author is trying to wrap his head around the blocky “HPW” as a replacement for the alliterative “HHS.” (The Trump administration on Thursday unveiled its proposed government restructuring plan, with a new name — “The Department of Health and Public Welfare” — for the health department.)

It could always be worse; one conservative reader told PULSE this month that the department should be called “ISIS” — Inefficient Subsidies & Inhumane Services. Send tips to [email protected] or @ddiamond on Twitter.

With help from Renuka Rayasam (@RenuRayasam), Victoria Colliver (@vcolliver), Joanne Kenen (@JoanneKenen) and Jennifer Haberkorn (@JenHab).

** A message from PhRMA: As a Medicare Part D Cliff looms for seniors, the program’s successful structure is also in jeopardy. Congress can act now to protect seniors from the donut hole suddenly increasing by more than $1,200, and secure the program for the future by fixing changes that undermine its successful competitive structure. https://catalyst.phrma.org **

Congressional Antitrust Caucus hosts briefing on health care consolidation. Panelists including Harvard’s Aaron Kesselheim, Yale’s Fiona Scott Morton and Phil Longman of Open Markets will discuss how mergers and acquisitions are affecting prices and patients. POLITICO’s Sarah Karlin-Smith will moderate the conversation, which starts at 11 a.m. in 2237 Rayburn House Office Building.

Opioid bills unleash lobbying blitz from health companies eyeing windfall. House lawmakers are speeding through votes on dozens of bills aimed at responding in force to the opioid crisis — and in the process, quietly boosting the fortunes of a handful of drugmakers and health interests invested in addressing the addiction epidemic, POLITICO’s Adam Cancryn reports.

In a two-week legislative blitz, the House has backed narrowly tailored measures that could spur sales for selected companies that have collectively spent millions on lobbying in recent months, according to a review of the more than five dozen bills up for votes.

… For instance, California-based Heron Therapeutics is among the firms that stand to benefit from Rep. Scott Peters’ legislation creating an additional payment under Medicare for certain non-opioid pain drugs. Heron, which is located in Peters’ district and is developing a treatment that would qualify for the payment, spent $40,000 lobbying on rate-setting issues for post-surgical non-opioid drugs from January to March. More for Pros.

CMS is planning to reduce transparency on infections, Leapfrog Group warns. The agency has proposed removing measures like catheter-associated urinary tract infections and Clostridium difficile from its inpatient quality reporting program. That’s raised concerns from patient safety advocates like the Leapfrog Group, who say the program is essential to track hospital performance.

“The public, as well as purchasers, deserve full transparency of safety and quality measures,” Leapfrog writes in a draft letter to CMS Administrator Seema Verma that’s still attracting signatures. See the letter. Comments on CMS’ proposed inpatient payment rule are due on Monday.

EU health commissioner hits Trump for ‘fake news’ on foreign drug prices. The president’s claim that Europe is freeloading on the U.S. drug system is “absolutely fake news,” European Commissioner for Health Vytenis Andriukaitis said in an interview with Science | Business.

Trump last month argued that European governments are able to purchase drugs at low prices because the U.S. health system absorbs the costs of innovation. “We’re going to be ending global freeloading,” Trump vowed.

But Andriukaitis said that many European countries obtain cheaper drugs because their governments directly negotiate for lower prices, unlike in the United States. Trump’s analysis “is such a simplification of understanding,” Andriukaitis said. “I can’t imagine how you can simplify it [like this].” Read the interview.

Federal effort to combat valley fever. California Sen. Kamala Harris introduced legislation Thursday to increase research to fight and treat valley fever, a potentially deadly respiratory disease caused by inhaling microscopic fungal spores that live in the soil in California and other southwestern states.

“We need more resources to combat this disease, raise awareness and determine the root causes and how to treat it,” Harris said in a statement. “Through the coordination of the USDA, CDC, National Institutes of Health and respective state and local public health agencies, we can work to help those in rural communities who face the greatest risk.” California, in its 2018-19 budget, included $8 million in funding for valley fever research and outreach.

Report from the Aspen Ideas Festival: At the Spotlight Health conference, POLITICO’s Executive Editor of Health Care Joanne Kenen caught up with Bernard J. Tyson, CEO of Kaiser Permanente, to discuss how his organization is approaching social determinants of health. That’s the idea that many factors outside of a doctor or hospital’s direct control — such as food, exercise, housing, crime, transportation and poverty — can significantly affect a person’s health.

According to Tyson, Kaiser Permanente is looking to address social determinants early in a person’s life, such as by partnering with school nurses and clinics. “What promotes good health?” Tyson said. “How do we work with schools on healthy eating, exercise, resiliency and stress?”

By David Pittman

A British company could be the first to win FDA approval for a cannabis-derived product, Reuters reports. More.

In the New York Times, Elizabeth Rosenthal writes that drug companies still collude on prices even when competition exists. More.

Libertarian Cato Institute scholars write in Vox they can get behind a Bernie Sanders idea to lower drug prices: Eliminate patent monopolies and replace with innovation prizes. More.

Health plans are increasing their footprint in Obamacare markets after gaining certainty in pricing and profits, the Wall Street Joural writes. More.

**A message from PhRMA: There’s lots of talk about how to change Part D to address affordability and predictability for seniors. But there are right ways and wrong ways to do that. The budget change passed in February was the wrong way, removing incentives experts agree are necessary to drive Part D’s successful market-based structure, and potentially jeopardizing the program for the future. One right way is for Congress to address the looming Part D Cliff. In 2020, the donut hole will increase by more than $1,200, raising out-of-pocket costs for the most vulnerable seniors with significant health care needs. Congress should act now on both of these issues to protect seniors from a sudden spike in out-of-pocket costs in Part D, while securing and strengthening the program for the long-term. https://catalyst.phrma.org **

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