Subscribe to Receive the Daily Report

Saturday, July 28th, 2018

Immigrant Parents Are Being Charged Up to $8 a Minute to Call Their Children

Author:     Kevin Mathews
Source:     truthout
Publication Date:     July 27, 2018
 Link: Immigrant Parents Are Being Charged Up to $8 a Minute to Call Their Children
Stephan:   After walking a thousand miles, arriving in the U.S. seeking asylum  we kidnap these poor refugee children, ripping them away from their parents. Then a small group of companies begin sucking the families dry of any money they might still have after fleeing their countries in fear of their lives. When I was a boy studying history with Mr. Pattison in the eighth grade I asked him what kind of people would work in a concentration camp? His answer was, "ordinary people too frightened, complicit, or weak to say no." I could not get my head around that answer but watching Americans behave like the Gestapo I think I get it now. He was right,"ordinary people too frightened, complicit, or weak to say no." $8 a minute to make a call. Scumbaggery at a level that should be a national embarrassment but, instead, is just business as usual.

If your phone carrier charged you $8 per minute to speak on the phone, you’d immediately cancel that plan and look for a more reasonable offer. The one exception might be if your children were being held captive and only one service provider allowed you to communicate, you’d pay whatever is necessary to have a conversation with them.

Go figure that the diabolical Trump administration has decided to exploit a situation like that. Callous federal policy has resulted in thousands of migrant families being separated at the border, and now BuzzFeed Newsreports that the government is milking them for extra cash if they want to occasionally keep in touch.

The White House created this problem by instituting a “zero tolerance” approach to immigration and tearing kids and parents apart in an attempt to deter other would-be migrants from coming to the United States. It then exacerbated the problem by developing no logistical system for reuniting the families. That’s not just zero tolerance, that’s zero thought and zero heart.

As a result, the government is still trying to figure out how to return kids to their parents, and has had to receive extensions to make that happen. At the very least, in the […]

Read the Full Article

1 Comment

  1. Dariel Garner on Saturday, July 28, 2018 at 5:44 am

    Every day millions of American prisoners and their families suffer under this same cruelty..

    It’s just business as usual fat cats might say.

    BTW — Prisons are often far from poulation denters and the families of the prisoners most of which are poor people which makes visits impossible.. A new twist is that some prisons are only allowing video visits at exorbitant minute rates—even if you visit the prison.