merkelstan
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On 28 January 2016, a congressional report was released on a human trafficking ring that smuggled children from Guatemala to the US and forced them to work on an egg farm run by Trillium in Marion, Ohio for 6 to 7 days a week, 12 hours per day. On 17 December 2014, federal agents and police officers raided a trailer park in Marion and detained 40 undocumented Guatemalans from 16 trailers. Many of the victims were younger than 18. The Ohio trafficking ring promised to smuggle their kids from Guatemala to the US where they could receive an education and other opportunities. The families had to pay thousands of dollars to the trafficker. The traffickers threatened the children and their families with physical harm or even death if they were unwilling to cooperate. If the child was caught by border authorities, they’d be given an immigration hearing date and were handed over to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The HHS was responsible for finding a sponsor who would take care of the child until their immigration hearing. But the HHS didn’t really do background checks on the “sponsors” and actually released at least 8 children to the human traffickers in Marion, posing as a relative or friend of the family. From 2013 through 2015, the HHS performed home studies in less than 4.3% of cases. It’s a policy of the HHS that sponsors can simply refuse that case workers do a follow up on the child. If that “sponsor” was exploiting or abusing the child, he could simply deny permission to the case worker’s request. In an 18 month period, 40% of the minors did not arrive for their immigration hearings!

On 17 February 2017, Spain’s King Felipe VI’s brother-in-law, Inaki Urdangarin, had been sentenced to years in prison for fraud, by a regional court on Majorca. On Tuesday, Spain’s Supreme Court upheld his prison sentence of 5 years and 10 months (5 months less than the verdict of the lower court). This is the first time in modern history that a member of Spain’s royal family is sent to prison. King Felipe’s sister, Princess Cristina (wife of Urdangarin), had earlier been stripped of her title Duchess of Palma by royal decree. The lower court found Princess Cristina not guilty of criminal charges, but fined her about €265,000 ($312,000) for her involvement in the fraud. The Supreme Court cut that in half. In 2011, an investigation was started into Urdangarin’s business activities, after huge cost overruns for the construction of a cycling track on Majorca. It was concluded that his “non-profit” foundation the Nóos Institute (with Princess Cristina on its board) and real estate company Aizoon (co-owned by Cristina and Inaki) had embezzled more than $7 million. The Royal couple had been living in Geneva, Switzerland. Urdangarin still has a final chance to avoid or delay incarceration, by appealing to Spain’s Constitutional Court.