Bhinneka News Online: Friday Morning Briefing: Questions surround Trump's detention plan

Friday 22 June 2018

Friday Morning Briefing: Questions surround Trump's detention plan

IMMIGRATION

One child stopped eating and fell into a depression. Another who could previously walk on his own now asks his mother to carry him everywhere. These are the experiences of children who have spent just three weeks at a temporary family immigration detention at the South Texas Family Detention Center in Dilley, Texas, attorneys and volunteers who work at the center told Reuters.

As Trump calls for family detention, existing facilities are already strained. The United States has just three centers and 3,326 beds available to house parents and families together behind bars.

U.N. human rights office called on the Trump administration to “overhaul” its migration polices and find alternatives to detention, saying that children should never be held in custody, even with their parents.

First Lady Melania Trump’s visit to a Texas shelter housing migrant children separated from their parents was overshadowed by a jacket she wore with the words: “I really don’t care, do u?” scrawled in white brush strokes on the back.

China

Armed with interactive online courses, generous funding and new dedicated research institutes, China’s universities are on the frontlines of an effort to promote the thinking of President Xi Jinping to China and the world.

U.S. protectionism is self-defeating and a “symptom of paranoid delusions” that must not distract China from its path to modernization, Chinese media said as Beijing kept up with its war of words with Washington while markets wilted.

World

Delegations from North and South Korea met for talks to arrange the first reunions in about three years for families separated by the Korean War, with the Red Cross paving the way.

Commentary: Trump’s unexpected announcement that he was suspending joint U.S.-South Korean military exercises as part of negotiations with the North has caused consternation in Seoul as well as at the Pentagon, writes Reuters columnist Peter Apps. The greatest alarm, however, will be amongst Washington’s major allies in Asia and Europe, already made nervous by the U.S. president’s rhetoric that Washington spends too much money on defending them.

Breakingviews: The U.S. president has many fans among the world’s great democracies. He has admirers in the parliaments of France, the Netherlands, Germany and Japan. But no government of a developed country has mimicked Trump’s iconoclastic communications style, broken conventions and put forward radical economic, trade and immigration policies like the new Caesars ruling Italy.

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Reuters journalists Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo have been detained in Myanmar for 193 days. Follow updates on their situation: https://reut.rs/2K1gpUT

5:20 AM - JUN 22, 2018

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