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In early June, the Washington office of Representative Pramila Jayapal began to hear rumors about the women. They had crossed into Texas, where Border Patrol officers promptly arrested them. But now the women were somewhere around Seattle, the city Jayapal represents. Her staff made calls. Usually, undocumented immigrants in the area were held at the Northwest Detention Center, a private facility operated under a contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But the detention center had not received the women. There were too many of them for ICE to house. Instead, as Jayapal learned on June 7, the mothers were now inmates at a Bureau of Prisons facility near the Seattle-Tacoma airport. (Draper, 10/10)

Federal drug-trafficking prosecutions along the southwestern border plunged to their lowest level in nearly two decades this summer as the Trump administration launched a “zero tolerance” crackdown on illegal immigration that separated thousands of children from their parents. The decision to prosecute everyone caught entering the USA illegally flooded federal courts with thousands of cases, most of them involving minor immigration violations that resulted in no jail time and a $10 fee. As prosecutors and border agents raced to bring those immigrants to court, the number of people they charged under drug-trafficking laws dropped by 30 percent along the border – and in some places far more steeply than that, a USA TODAY review of court dockets and Justice Department records found. (Heath, 10/10)

Staff members at a Southwest Key shelter for unaccompanied migrant children in Youngtown physically abused three children, according to allegations detailed by federal officials on Tuesday. The federal contractor fired the staffers after the Sept. 18 incident, according to a statement from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (Philip, 10/9)