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Some of the immigrant children crossing the border say they are being subjected to abusive and inhumane treatment in U.S. Border Patrol stations in South Texas. This includes frigid holding rooms, sleep deprivation, verbal and psychological abuse, inadequate food and water, denial of medical care, and worse. Dozens of children have come forward to make complaints against Customs and Border Protection officers. The agency responds that any complaints are the result not of mistreatment, but of its stations being overwhelmed by the surge of minors.Inside 'Las Hieleras' The complaints center on what happens inside the group holding cells that immigrants...

Mexico, Northern Triangle Governments Condemn Militaristic Approach. The governments of Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras have voiced their concern over Texas Governor Rick Perry’s decision to send roughly 1,000 members of the National Guard to the southern border. Governor Perry said he is going to mobilize the National Guard in order to secure the border. The Mexican government sent diplomatic notes to both the US State Department and the Texas governor to express their disapproval of the measure. Sergio Alcocer, Mexican undersecretary for North America, stated that sending the National Guard to the border does not contribute toward a...

According to the Border Patrol, the Arizona-Mexico border is the United States' most secure border. Last year marked the first time in 22 years that more undocumented immigrants were detained at the Texas border than the Arizona border despite the influx of unaccompanied Central American children attempting to cross. "Crossing in this area has diminished quite a lot in the past 10 years," Alejandro Martinez, Border Patrol chief in Douglas, Arizona, said.

The stretch of land between Texas and Mexico is a long, bumpy ride for Border Patrol agents. The Rio Grande Valley Sector covers land as big as the state of South Carolina and is monitored by more than 3,000 agents, along with Texas Game Wardens and Parks and Wildlife officials. Together, they're working to prevent the flow of illegal migrants coming from Central America. The Rio Grande serves as a natural divider, and from the American side you can see clear paths to the water. On the other side, beaten down brush shows where the illegal trek picks up again....

The Obama administration, after initially resisting the idea, is weighing whether to deploy National Guard troops to the southern border to help address a surge of migrant youth from Central America, many of them unaccompanied, a White House official told CNN. The Pentagon and the Department of Health and Human Services sent a team earlier this week to assess Border Patrol efforts in the Rio Grande Valley, the official said, where tens of thousands of children have poured into the United States this year. The administration's latest efforts in what most agree is a humanitarian crisis come as Washington struggles...

It had become a routine call. On June 21, Brooks County Deputy Elias Pompa was called to the Wagenschein Ranch in southern Texas. A U.S. Border Patrol supervisor escorted Pompa and a justice of the peace onto the property. The three walked a fifth of a mile and arrived at GPS coordinates N.27.05702-W.98.14811. There, the remains of a migrant lay on the dry, grassy ground. “The skeletal remains appeared to be from a small frame female. She was wearing a black shirt, blue bra, black pants and some black Puma shoes with some pink and purple lines on the side....

LYNN — The passion and polarization of the immigration debate was on full display here Tuesday afternoon, when more than a hundred protesters stood on the steps of City Hall to denounce Mayor Judith Flanagan Kennedy for saying that an influx of child immigrants from Central America is draining the city’s resources. Holding signs and chanting at times, the demonstrators stood behind a round of speakers from local community groups who criticized the mayor and the superintendent of the Lynn public schools, Catherine Latham, for comments they made to about the costs incurred by immigrant children. “The mayor’s comments provoke...

President Obama delivered a tough-love talk to his biggest boosters Wednesday, telling Democratic donors gathered in Los Angeles that they need to step it up before November if he’s going to get much done in his last two years in office. "You thought, 'OK, we elect Barack and that's it,’” Obama told a crowd big-dollar donors gathered in the lush Hancock Park backyard of TV producer Shonda Rhimes. “I have got to have a Congress that has some sense and is willing to work and is willing to compromise and is focused on the American people. And we don’t have...

Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel has offered to house an additional 5,000 undocumented children coming across the border into the U.S. and to extend the leases of three bases while the federal government seeks to determine their status.

Gov. Terry Branstad told The Carroll Daily Times Herald his counterpart in Nebraska is on the right track with a demand to the federal government for identifying details on the unaccompanied, undocumented children who crossed the nation's borders, most from Central America, in the last year and ended up in Nebraska. Branstad said he is outraged by what he described as a lack of communication from the White House on the situation. "I find out through the Omaha World-Herald," Branstad said. "There's no transparency, there's no openness, they never told us. This is not the way the government of the...

President Obama has said most of the undocumented children in the U.S. from Central America will not be allowed to stay. The process of deciding which ones will stay and which ones will go is often decided in court, but Tuesday, 18 of 20 undocumented children failed to show up to their first immigration hearing in Dallas federal court. The judge could have issued immediate deportation orders as far as Tuesday’s no-shows are concerned, but he chose not to, and reset the hearing for next month instead.

Idaho Gov. C.L. "Butch" Otter sent a letter to federal officials Wednesday voicing his opposition to using the state as "a destination or a staging area for the influx of unaccompanied and illegal immigrants entering the United States through our southern border." In the letter to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Leon Rodriguez, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, and Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell, Otter blames the federal government for creating the current crisis at the border, and says Congress needs to take action to enforce the law. "Idaho will not open itself to the unwelcome challenges...

MANVEL, Texas -- It's a small rural town stuck in a county that just made it clear undocumented children aren't welcome here, but the possibility they could be moving in to the Shiloh Treatment Center, an older facility along Bahler Avenue in Manvel is very real. "They're trying to squeeze them in anywhere they can," said Manvel resident Brian Priest. We searched federal records and found Shiloh’s received a little over $5 million in grant money. That money is coming from the US Office of Refugee Resettlement. That's the same group in charge of placing thousands of undocumented children crossing...

OAKLAND -- Wednesday was a day off from politics for former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who spent the morning in Oakland with babies, small children and their parents, talking about talking. It was the local kickoff for the "Too Small to Fail" campaign, an early childhood education effort designed to let parents know that talking is teaching when it comes to the youngest children.

While President Obama was raising hundreds of thousands of dollars at two Bay Area fundraisers Wednesdays, protesters urged him to keep a promise he made to ensure that the Internet remains a level playing field. Back in 2007, then-candidate Obama said during a campaign stop at Google that as president he would “take a backseat to no one” in terms of his commitment to preserving net neutrality. But Obama’s appointments to the Federal Communications Commission don’t back up that commitment. In May, three Democrats he appointed to the agency voted to allow broadband carriers to provide an online “fast lane”...

Montana Sen. John Walsh's thesis written to earn a master's degree from the U.S. Army War College contains unattributed passages taken word-for-word from previously published papers. The Democrat said Wednesday he was on medication and being treated for post-traumatic stress disorder from his service in Iraq when he wrote the paper. He said he also was dealing with the stress of a fellow veteran's recent suicide. Walsh said he made an unintentional mistake and did not intend to plagiarize. "I don't want to blame my mistake on PTSD, but I do want to say it may have been a factor,"...

Has the Obama administration competently and effectively managed the government? A Fox News poll released Wednesday finds a majority of American voters says no -- including about a third of Democrats. A 58-percent majority says the White House has not been competent at managing the federal government. Some 32 percent of Democrats join 67 percent of independents and 84 percent of Republicans in holding that view.

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The head of the IRS confirmed Wednesday that investigators looking into missing emails from ex-agency official Lois Lerner have found and are reviewing "backup tapes" -- despite earlier IRS claims that the tapes had been recycled. IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, testifying before a House oversight subcommittee, stressed that he does not know "how they found them" or "whether there's anything on them or not." But he said the inspector general's office advised him the investigators are reviewing tapes to see if they contain any "recoverable" material. The revelation is significant because the IRS claimed, when the agency first told Congress...

GOOGLE TRANSLATE: Univision decided to fulfill a single information function, commit and take a stand to defend the children of the border, those who come looking for a dream or reecontrarse with his parents in the United States and were arrested. Within the framework of the Annual Conference of the Council of La Raza (NCLR, for its acronym in English), Vice President of Univision, Bob Llamas, announced that the company would allocate resources to protect children from the border: "We can not let circumstances or the political and economic distract us from helping children. I guarantee that none of these...