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Co-host Juan González was at the Dallas/Fort Worth airport this past Sunday, where he encountered Central American refugee families recently released from detention centers. The families, who were from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, had been left there by Immigration and Customs Enforcement without guidance or a translator to help them navigate their flight information. The families were likely traveling to cities where they could reunite with loved ones already in living in the U.S. In the case of the Guatemalan families, most of them didn't speak Spanish, but indigenous languages. None of them spoke English. They had no money and received no assistance from American Airlines employees. Several airport staff, mostly maintenance workers and others, said they have been trying to assist the stranded Central American refugees, providing them with food, blankets and other aid. This is a common scene at major airports around the country.
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 Tonight, 10 challengers for the Democratic 2020 presidential nomination will face off in the first debate of the season. After months of campaign coverage, the two-hour event will finally give voters a chance to watch Democratic candidates exchange views on a variety of issues, from health care and immigration to taxes and climate change. While they will likely spend a fair amount of time attacking the policies of President Donald Trump, the debate will also be an opportunity for candidates to draw contrasts with each other and tout their signature issues in front of a national audience.
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A divided House approved a contentious $4.5 billion emergency funding package to address the border crisis Tuesday, under growing pressure to address the Trump administration's inhumane treatment of migrants. The bill passed largely along party lines in a 230-195 vote, with some progressive Democrats voting in favor after negotiating to include provisions including new health and safety standards for jailed migrants. Four Democrats voted against the bill: Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib. Last week, the progressive congressmembers issued a statement condemning the bill and calling for the abolition of ICE. The Senate is slated to consider its own border funding measure this week, including President Trump's original request for more than a billion dollars for Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. We speak with Renée Feltz, a Democracy Now! correspondent and producer who has long reported on the criminalization of immigrants, family detention, and the business of detention. Her recent report for Rewire.News is headlined "'Willful Recklessness': Trump Pushes for Indefinite Family Detention."
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Immigration jails along the southern border are facing heightened scrutiny following horrific reports of dirty and unhygienic conditions at a detention center in Clint, Texas, and other facilities. We speak with government whistleblower Dr. Scott Allen, who was hired in 2014 to inspect facilities where immigrant families are incarcerated, who says degrading conditions for jailed migrants date back to Obama's presidency. He is calling for more government transparency about conditions in immigration facilities, saying, "I think most Americans, if they were confronted with the humanity of what we are doing here, would be outraged and would not tolerate it." Allen is still on contract with the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. He and fellow whistleblower Dr. Pamela McPherson were recently awarded the 2019 Ridenhour Prize for Truth-Telling and are represented by the non-profit Government Accountability Project.
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Amid reports of inhumane and degrading conditions at child immigration jails along the southern border, we speak with Satsuki Ina, a Japanese-American psychotherapist who was born in the Tule Lake Segregation Center, a maximum-security internment camp for Japanese Americans during WWII. "After decades of living our lives as compliant and quiet, and demonstrating and proving ourselves as good citizens, many of us have felt that it's time for us to speak out, to protest, to resist, and to speak out in ways that we haven't in the past, because we know what these children are experiencing," Ina said. "We know what it's like to have family separation, to suffer the long-term consequences of the trauma of being incarcerated—for some of us, more than four or five years."
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