News Release

* ICE Contracts Former CIA Interrogator * Who Speaks? Bush and Obama Policy

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KEN KLIPPENSTEIN, kenneth.klippenstein at gmail.com, @kenklippenstein
An independent journalist, Klippenstein broke the story: “Veteran CIA Interrogator Training ICE Officers” (for TYT Network), which states: “Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has contracted a private security firm run by a former top CIA interrogator to train ICE officers in ‘intelligence collection’ and ‘counterterrorism elicitation,’ federal documents show. The documents indicate that the training is to help ICE officers collect information from ‘terrorist suspects.’

“The $91,812 no-bid contract was awarded on May 7 — three days after the Department of Homeland Security,which oversees ICE, authorized its controversial new policy of separating undocumented families caught crossing the border.”

ROBERTO LOVATO, robvato at gmail.com, @robvato
An independent journalist, Lovato’s past pieces include “Central American deportees fear yet more trauma and violence back home” and “The Guantanamization of Immigrant Detention.”

He tweeted today: “Watching U.S. media, it would appear that Republican and Democratic Party operatives are better-suited to speak to these child separation issues than we Central Americans are. The amount of spin baked into much of the reporting on Trump’s child policy is as astonishing as it is tragic….

“I remember visiting S. Texas facilities that Laura Bush and Michelle Obama’s husbands built. I also remember interviewing Satsuki Ina, a Japanese psychologist, who as a child, was interned in a Texas concentration camp she compared to those Texas child refugee prisons Bush & Obama built.

“Between 2009 and 2014, I heard stories of and saw one to five-year-old Salvadoran kids who cried before being handed over to foster care after their parents were ripped from them by ICE.” Before becoming a journalist, Lovato supported refugee and displaced communities in wartime El Salvador.

See piece by The Onion: “Laura Bush Publishes Courageous Op-Ed Calling For Imprisonment Of Whoever Created ICE.”