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Billboards for World Children's Day Call for Freedom for Detained Children in the U.S.
For World Children's Day on November 20, Amnesty International USA is calling for the United States government to stop detaining children who seek safety in the United States, with new billboards targeting the Trump administration.
WASHINGTON
For World Children's Day on November 20, Amnesty International USA is calling for the United States government to stop detaining children who seek safety in the United States, with new billboards targeting the Trump administration.
As part of the I Welcome campaign, Amnesty International USA has launched billboards in Florida targeting the detention of children seeking safety. The human rights organization chose Florida after in-depth research into the Homestead, Florida facility, which Amnesty International USA found violated children's rights by holding them in prolonged and indefinite detention and keeping them in conditions that did not meet U.S. or international standards, violating the best interests of the child. A billboard that reads "You are now 7 miles away from where kids are locked up" was launched in Homestead, Florida, in a location where visitors driving towards Miami would see the announcement. Another billboard that reads "We don't believe in locking up children. Do you?" was launched in Orlando, Florida, 10 miles away from Disney World, where families would be especially addressed to spread awareness of what has taken place in their own backyard.
Both billboards include the web address, TruthAboutHomestead.org, a website to take action for detained children on World Children's Day, learn more about the campaign, or join a local banner drop. The web action enables individuals to hold the U.S. government accountable for the prolonged and indefinite detention of children based on immigration status-- for weeks, months, and in some cases, years longer than is permissible by international law, and to demand that no child seeking safety should ever be held in detention. The action also demands that the U.S. government close down the Homestead facility once and for all. Though the government stopped detaining children at Homestead recently, the facility has remained open, and could detain children again at a later date.
Trucks, as well as sidewalk pavement ads, were also set up with several messages including: "We don't believe in locking up children. Do you?"; "Florida: Amusement parks. Beaches. Detained children."; "Children should not be locked up for seeking safety"; "Children have the right to be with their families. Children have the right to seek asylum"; and "Children should not be locked up for seeking safety".
"World Children's Day is a day for children, yet children in this very country are denied their freedom. The Trump administration has detained children for the act of seeking safety," said Margaret Huang, executive director of Amnesty International USA. "These kids should be with their families, their loved ones, and their communities, instead they are locked away in facilities like Homestead with no foreseeable end in sight. This World Children's Day, we have used our resources to open people's eyes to the truth so that they can take action for these kids' freedom. People can no longer say that they did not know."
Background:
Amnesty International USA has repeatedly called on the U.S. government to stop the use and establishment of facilities such as Homestead, to stop the detention of children simply because of their immigration status, and to close the Homestead facility permanently,
In October, Amnesty International USA met with Jonathan H. Hayes, the director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, while visiting a facility that the office runs in Brownsville. During the visit, Amnesty International USA was told the Office of Refugee Resettlement does not view children held in its facilities as detained and therefore the generally accepted principle that children should be released from detention within 20 days was not applicable.
World Children's Day commemorates the day in 1959 the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of the Child. It is also the date in 1989 it adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which guarantees children's rights around the world.
For World Children's Day last year, Amnesty International USA called for all children held at the Dilley Detention Center in Texas to be freed alongside their families, and for the U.S. to end its plan of expanding family detention centers.
This statement is available at https://www.amnestyusa.org/press-releases/billboards-for-world-childrens-day-call-for-freedom-for-detained-children-in-the-u-s/
Amnesty International is a global movement of millions of people demanding human rights for all people - no matter who they are or where they are. We are the world's largest grassroots human rights organization.
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Appealing SNAP Ruling, Trump Is Determined to Make Sure Poor Americans Don’t Get Food Assistance
"The administration’s legal maneuver sends a clear and devastating message: that the well-being of America’s most vulnerable is not important," said the president of the Food Research & Action Center.
Nov 07, 2025
The Trump administration will not give poor Americans food assistance without a fight.
Instead of following a federal judge’s ruling Thursday that ordered officials to release Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) funds to 42 million Americans by the next day, the Department of Justice (DOJ) asked an appeals court to immediately block the ruling on Friday.
The Trump administration has argued that due to the government shutdown, the SNAP program, which provides food assistance to those making 130% of the federal poverty line or less, functionally does not exist.
In an emergency request to the 1st Circuit Court of the United States, the DOJ called the lower court's ruling, "unprecedented" and argued that it makes "a mockery of the separation of powers.”
Furthering what has been widely interpreted as an effort to pressure Democrats to cave on their demands in the government shutdown, the appeal stated that the lapse in SNAP funding was caused by “congressional failure, and... can only be solved by congressional action.”
US District Judge John McConnell of Rhode Island, in his second ruling against the administration's efforts to choke off SNAP benefits, wrote the previous day that the administration's plan to partially fund the program was insufficient. The previous week, McConnell had ruled that the administration had to tap a $5 billion contingency fund to fund the program and make up for the shortfall by drawing from other sources.
The administration agreed to use the contingency fund but offered a plan that fell several billion dollars short of fully funding the program and would have amounted to a 61% benefit cut for the average SNAP recipient, leaving millions without benefits altogether, according to an analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
While the administration has sought to pin the blame for funding lapses on Democrats in Congress and has asserted that its hands are tied, McConnell described the administration's maneuvering as a deliberate political stunt.
"This is a problem that could have and should have been avoided," McConnell said. “The defendants failed to consider the practical consequences associated with this decision to only partially fund SNAP... It’s likely that SNAP recipients are hungry as we sit here."
He added that Trump had essentially telegraphed his plan to defy the court order over the weekend, writing on Truth Social that “SNAP payments will be given only when the government opens.”
This, along with messages on the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) website blaming Democrats for the lapse in funding, McConnell suggested, was evidence that “SNAP benefits are being withheld for political reasons.”
“Children are immediately at risk of going hungry,” McConnell said. “This should never happen in America.”
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"Nearly 1.2 million SNAP households with roughly 4.9 million people—roughly 1 in 9 SNAP recipients—will receive zero benefits because their normal benefit amount is less than the planned benefit reduction," it says. "Only one-or two-person households receive a minimum benefit under SNAP rules, leaving some households with three or more members—which are primarily households with children—at risk of receiving nothing."
The USDA has also issued a warning to grocery stores telling them it is illegal for them to offer special discounts to SNAP recipients hurt by the freeze, even though the government is allowed to grant them waivers. On Thursday, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) introduced a bill that would allow grocery stores to voluntarily offer discounts to SNAP recipients whenever their benefits are affected by a government shutdown.
“Donald Trump is the most powerful person in the world,” Wyden said. “Only a monster would use that power to deny help to millions of families that don’t know where their next meal is coming from.”
As the CPBB has noted, contrary to its claims, nothing is stopping the Trump administration from transferring funds from other food assistance programs to fund SNAP fully. It has already done this twice to sustain the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), which a court ruled was legal.
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The paper's authors estimate that overpayments to MA plans—which are funded by the government and run by for-profit insurers—and private Medicaid managed care will likely cost US taxpayers a total of $1.92 trillion over the next 10 years.
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Far from aggressively taking on Medicare Advantage fraud, the Trump administration handed MA plans a major gift earlier this year by approving an average federal payment increase of roughly 5.1%—more than double the 2.2% increase proposed by the Biden administration in January.
The authors of the new paper noted that the huge raise for MA plans, which are notorious for denying necessary care in pursuit of ever-larger profits, will add $25 billion in waste to the US healthcare system next year alone.
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Big polluters led by the fossil fuel industry—which knowingly caused the climate crisis—are expanding their outsize presence and influence at the key event meant to tackle the planetary emergency, a report published ahead of this month's United Nations Climate Change Conference in Brazil revealed.
The report, published Friday by the Kick Big Polluters Out (KBPO) coalition, notes that "over 5,350 fossil fuel lobbyists have attended UN climate negotiations in just four years, with 90 of the corporations they represent responsible for nearly 60% of all global oil and gas production."
The analysis sounds the alarm on the "staggering scale of fossil fuel industry presence at the very negotiations that must urgently phase out their products" in order to meet the goal of keeping global temperature rise below 1.5°C as promised in the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement.
The world is failing to deliver upon that promise, and according to the report, "the primary reason for this failure is no secret—big polluters continue to be granted outsized presence, access, and influence at the very negotiations meant to address the crisis they knowingly caused."
"COP30 is set to proceed with effectively zero protections against interference in place."
"Among the world's largest fossil fuel corporations, Shell sent a total of 37 lobbyists to COP26-COP29, BP sent 36, ExxonMobil sent 32, and Chevron sent 20," according to KBPO. "These figures do not account for additional lobbyists from the fossil fuel industry's associated trade groups."
"As a result, they maintain a carefully orchestrated stranglehold on climate action, which consequently continues to fall way short of the strong and just global response we know we urgently need," the report states.
KBPO warned: "Despite the scale of fossil fuel industry presence revealed by this data, COP30 is set to proceed with effectively zero protections against interference in place. Ahead of COP30 happening in Belém from November 10-21, more than 225 organizations and networks around the world wrote to the COP30 presidency asking them to commit to a polluter-free COP by ensuring no fossil fuel ties or sponsorship and by advancing an Accountability Framework that protects the integrity and legitimacy of the [United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change].
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KBPO partner Fiona Hauke of Urgewald, an environmental and human rights advocacy group based in Germany, said in a statement Friday that “over the last three years, oil and gas companies that lobbied at COP have spent more than $35 billion each year looking for new oil and gas fields, exacerbating the problem the nations of the world had gathered to solve."
“These companies have defended their fossil interests by watering down climate action for years," Hauke added. "As we head towards COP30, we demand transparency and accountability: Keep polluters out of climate talks and make them pay for a just energy transition.”
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