“The Department of Defense has threatened me with imprisonment in response to our report on the illegal alien shelter at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas,” wrote Infowars journalist Kit Daniels on Friday.
“In a certified letter sent to Infowars [on June 27], the Defense Department claims that I engaged in ‘unauthorized photography and broadcast’ which were somehow ‘detrimental’ to the ‘safety and security of the installation’ even though the photos of Lackland’s illegal alien shelter, which is housing nearly 2,000 illegals at a cost to taxpayers of around $250 per immigrant per day, were taken outside the shelter and are clearly in the public’s best interest,” the reporter continued.
Daniels received the letter in response to his June 12 report in which he claimed that federal officials were treating illegal aliens in a superior manner to U.S. military veterans. Daniels pointed out that while the Department of Health and Human Services is allowing the Hackney Training Complex on the Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, to be used as a refugee camp for more than 2,000 minors — some as young as five years old — who crossed the border illegally, an offer to house homeless veterans in empty military facilities has never been extended.
Lackland Air Force Base began housing young illegal immigrants in mid-May, after it was reported that there were thousands of unaccompanied immigrant children in the United States trying to escape poverty and the local criminal organizations who terrorize their towns, and to reunite with family members already living in the U.S.
According to Mike Joseph, a member of the public affairs department for the Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland, officials at the base were officially asked by the Department of Health and Human Services to house up to 1,200 children at the facility just two days before the first children arrived on May 18.
The building where the children are staying has been vacant since November 2013, after the 321st Training Squadron relocated to a different building.
The facility where the children are being housed was originally built in 1969, and officials needed repair the air conditioning system and hot water boilers and conduct operational checks on the electrical and fire alarm systems before the children could move in. Doors also had to be brought into compliance with security and fire codes, a beehive had to be removed, debris cleaned up, furniture moved, an environmental assessment completed, and a lease signed.
“We’d have done the same things regardless of who would have gone into the building,” said John Heye, JBSA-Lackland deputy base civil engineer, in a press release announcing the opening of the refugee camp this past May. “We are fortunate to have the dedicated and skilled craftsmen that made this effort go smooth so we could support their mission.”
Daniels, the conservative-leaning reporter, asked to interview someone at the military base after he discovered that taxpayers were paying more than $250 per day, per child to house the young immigrants. However, the base’s public information officer told Daniels that access to the facility is only allowed on designated media days. And even when media are invited to the base, the information officer told Daniels, reporters are not allowed to film or take photos.
Claiming it was in the best interest of the public, given the amount of taxpayer dollars being spent and the fact that many homeless people are veterans, Daniels decided to pursue the story, so he and Infowars cameraman and reporter Josh Owens took photos of the facility and the immigrant families staying there through holes in the fences surrounding the facility.
Daniels also partnered with fellow Infowars reporter SSG Joe Biggs, who also works for PrisonPlanet.com, to broadcast live from what he referred to as the “illegal alien takeover compound.” Video footage included images of the children, who the reporters said spend much of their time singing songs and playing basketball on the taxpayers’ dime, “while homeless veterans are outside the gate with no shelter and no food.”
When officials at the base saw the story, photos and accompanying video footage, they issued the notification of debarment to Daniels. But since the press is granted certain additional freedoms under the U.S. Constitution, some have argued that the letter to Daniels was a violation of the First Amendment and an attempt to censor information.
The DOD doesn’t see it that way, though.
Legalities of the freedom of the press
According to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, each branch of the military has its own guidelines regarding media access to bases, and each branch has the authority to implement its own regulations. Since Sept. 11, 2011, the U.S. military has further restricted access to military facilities, which courts have often supported.
But even before the Sept. 11 terror attacks, reporters were denied access to events at military bases, including the arrival of the bodies of soldiers killed abroad. A federal appeals court ruled in 1996 that this lack of access for reporters to military bases is not a violation of the First Amendment, which grants freedom of the press, since a reporter doesn’t necessarily need access to a building to acquire “basic facts” and other “raw material” that a news story may require.
In delivering this ruling, the court sided with the DOD in its argument that freedom of speech and freedom of the press does not mean that the press has the right to go onto government property in order to report a story. As a result, military bases often require journalists to be escorted by public information officers. Journalists need to schedule an appointment in order to be on the base, and they need to obtain permission in order to take photographs and video footage of classified materials.
Given that Daniels was told directly by a public affairs officer at the military base that he would not be allowed on base unless there was an approved and scheduled media event, the officials from JBSA-Lackland issued the notification of debarment action to the journalist on the basis that he “circumvented proper installation access procedures and gained unauthorized access to a secure military installation to engage in unauthorized photography and broadcast.”
According to the memorandum, officials at the military base “determined that [Daniels’] actions are detrimental to the maintenance of good order and discipline, as well as to the safety and security of the installation.” Daniels was notified that if he entered JBSA-Lackland military base or others without permission, he would be detained by the base’s security personnel and handed over to either civilian or military law enforcement authorities.
Though the freedoms awarded to the press in the U.S. have eroded in the last decade with the U.S. dropping 14 spots from 32nd place to 46th, according to the Reporters Without Borders’ 2014 Press Freedom Index, marking one of the most severe declines in the world, Robert Drechsel, professor of journalism ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who also serves as director for the University’s Center for Journalism Ethics, says this case may be more complicated than either side realizes.
In an email to MintPress News, Drechsel explained that while he is not familiar with all of the facts in the case, a distinction must made between whether Daniels was threatened with arrest for trespassing on closed government property or whether he was threatened after the government learned he had taken photos of the facility even though he was not on the property.
“Trespassing can be a fairly open-and-shut legal issue, but some type of threat of imprisonment if a journalist publishes or retains information legally in his possession is another matter all together (sic),” he said. “But those are legal issues.”
Drechsel further explained that media issues can be tricky. “What’s illegal can sometimes be ethical and what’s legal can sometimes be unethical. The reporter will have to judge the importance of the values in play and, considering the larger public interest as well as the interests of any individuals involved, try to make a reasonable judgment as to what to do.”
Political posturing?
Daniels argues that the story needed to be told because Democrats are allowing illegal immigrants from Latin American nations — including Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala — into the U.S. to rally support among increasingly powerful Latino voters and other groups who are sympathetic to immigrants.
“The kids were encouraged by the de facto amnesty enacted by the Obama administration through selective enforcement of immigration laws and executive actions, which is a large enough incentive for them to endanger their lives to the ultimate benefit of the White House which standsto gain politically from the resulting pressure on Congress to enact amnesty in law,” Daniels wrote.
In his original report he backed up his argument for why the refugee camps are a waste of taxpayer dollars with a statement from the National Association of Former Border Patrol Officers, an organization that agreed with the reporter that “[t]his is not a humanitarian crisis. It is a predictable, orchestrated and contrived assault on the compassionate side of Americans by her political leaders that knowingly puts minor illegal alien children at risk for purely political purposes.”
Epidemic proportions
One in four children in the U.S. is an immigrant or the child of immigrants, making immigrant and first-generation American children the fastest growing group of children in the country. The refugee shelters, like the one at Lackland, opened afterHomeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson declared a government-wide emergency and asked federal facilities to shelter the surge of immigrant youth who have entered the country in the last year.
Though Daniels was not given access to the Unaccompanied Children Temporary Shelter on the military base, reporters from other news outlets were granted access during the base’s media day. John P. McAteer reported for NBC News that the military barracks turned refugee camp felt like a mix between a shelter for hurricane refugees and a kids summer camp.
While McAteer noted that there was “obviously a sincere effort to make these children feel at home,” he said the case management area, “where the challenging task of getting to know who these children are, where they’re from, and where they have family is underway,” has an entirely different feel.
“We’re told that a total of 102 Spanish speaking case workers meet with 300 children in this room every day,” he reported. “Their primary task is to connect the kids with family. One key requirement — their family member or sponsor must agree to guarantee the children will show up at all of their immigration court appearances.”
Daniels and Biggs reported that the refugee camps seemed to be all fun and games, but McAteer said there is a classroom at the facility where groups of 30 students are taught basic English and math. Religious studies and arts and crafts classes are also offered to those children who are interested.
Before a child is admitted into the refugee camp, he or she is given a medical check-up, vaccinations and treatments for scabies and lice. The children are also assessed for mental health issues.
Illegal immigrants or refugees?
Earlier this month, Diana Villiers Negroponte, a nonresident senior fellow with the Latin America Initiative at the Brookings Institute who focuses on foreign policy-related issues in Mexico and Central America, argued in a blog post that the U.S. has to decide how it’s going to handle illegal immigrants — particularly unaccompanied children crossing the border illegally — because the fate of more than 90,000 children is in our hands.
“According to the Border Patrol, apprehension of unaccompanied children increased from 16,067 in FY 2011 to 24,481 in FY 2012 and 38,833 in FY 2013. During the first eight months of FY 2014, 47,017 children were apprehended, most of them from Honduras,” Negroponte wrote. “If this flow continues at the current rate, the Border Patrol anticipates that90,000 unaccompanied children could be apprehended by the end of the fiscal year (FY) on September 30.”
When these children are caught illegally crossing the border, they are transferred from the Border Patrol to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, an agency run by the Department of Health and Human Services that is tasked with processing and sheltering unaccompanied minors who enter the U.S. illegally.
Due to the backlog in the Immigration Courts, illegal immigrants face an average wait time of 578 days before they can begin their removal proceedings. Children can live with a parent or family member during that time, which is what 85 to 90 percent of children end up doing.
Regardless of where the children stay, they are allowed to attend school, receive medical care, and re-establish emotional bonds with their family members while awaiting their court date.
The ORR is currently only set up to house and feed children for 45 days. This is why current lodging facilities for these children are operating at maximum capacity in Texas, California and Oklahoma, and the Obama administration has agreed to the $1.57 billion in emergency funding to be used to house, feed, process, and transport these children.
While Negroponte recognized there isn’t an easy solution “to this complex problem which has existed for over a decade,” she argued that some sort of humanitarian solution that supports these children needs to be taken immediately.
Congressional intervention
Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California agrees that this is more of a refugee issue than an illegal-immigration problem. She has argued that these children are “fleeing dangerous situations. They are deserving of protection under international and domestic law.”
After touring the Rio Grande Valley last week, Lofgren and other Democratic lawmakers issued a statement highlighting the unacceptable conditions along the border, encouraging the Obama administration to deal with the “root causes of violence and predation in Central America.”
“Countless children — even toddlers — are currently being held in holding cells in Border Patrol stations that were never designed to care for them,” the lawmakers said. “We saw one 3-year-old child who had been held for 12 days — she had been looked after by a teenage detainee, but after her caretaker was transferred to another Border Patrol facility in Nogales, the child was handed off from one preteen detainee to another as they were churned in and out of the station.
“This is intolerable,” they continued, “and the administration must address the situation without delay, including, if necessary, utilizing (Federal Emergency Management Agency) resources to provide these children with a safe and secure environment while their immigration matters are being decided.”
Republicans recognize the struggles these children are facing in their native countries, but many, such as Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas, argue that lax immigration policies could result in as many as 150,000 children illegally crossing the border next year.
At a field hearing in Texas, McCaul pointed to the drug cartels as reasons why there are so many children being smuggled into the U.S., saying that if the Obama administration didn’t have policies that send the message that “If you come, you can stay,” then children wouldn’t be subjected to beatings, starvation, sexual assault and trafficking by drug cartels.
President Barack Obama may be pointing fingers at Congress for the increase in illegal immigrants in the U.S., since the legislative body has failed to pass any sort of immigration reform, but the president has also sent more immigration judges to the border to process cases in a more timely manner. He has also asked for Congress to grant Secretary of Homeland Security Johnson the legal ability to send unaccompanied children back to their native countries.
Democrats and immigration advocates have applauded the president’s plans to reform U.S. immigration policy, but warn that rushing children through the deportation process may mean that the U.S. is sending refugees right back to places rife with poverty and violence.