One cage had 20 children inside
What’s it like for children separated from their parents and held by the Border Patrol? Oh it’s very nice.
Inside an old warehouse in South Texas, hundreds of children wait in a series of cages created by metal fencing. One cage had 20 children inside. Scattered about are bottles of water, bags of chips and large foil sheets intended to serve as blankets.
One teenager told an advocate who visited that she was helping care for a young child she didn’t know because the child’s aunt was somewhere else in the facility. She said she had to show others in her cell how to change the girl’s diaper.
They get bags of chips. And nice big pieces of foil.
More than 1,100 people were inside the large, dark facility that’s divided into separate wings for unaccompanied children, adults on their own, and mothers and fathers with children. The cages in each wing open out into common areas to use portable restrooms. The overhead lighting in the warehouse stays on around the clock.
That’s ok. They can just pull the foil over their heads to block out the overhead lighting.
An advocate who spent several hours in the facility Friday said she was deeply troubled by what she found.
Michelle Brane, director of migrant rights at the Women’s Refugee Commission, met with a 16-year-old girl who had been taking care of a young girl for three days. The teen and others in their cage thought the girl was 2 years old.
“She had to teach other kids in the cell to change her diaper,” Brane said.
Brane said that after an attorney started to ask questions, agents found the girl’s aunt and reunited the two. It turned out that the girl was actually 4 years old. Part of the problem was that she didn’t speak Spanish, but K’iche, a language indigenous to Guatemala.
“She was so traumatized that she wasn’t talking,” Brane said. “She was just curled up in a little ball.”
Brane said she also saw officials at the facility scold a group of 5-year-olds for playing around in their cage, telling them to settle down. There are no toys or books.
But one boy nearby wasn’t playing with the rest. According to Brane, he was quiet, clutching a piece of paper that was a photocopy of his mother’s ID card.
I can’t add anything to that.
So Gitmo for kids. And when they start dying….another kind of camp altogether.
So who are the heartless bastards staffing these places? I’ll bet they’re just following orders. Or. perhaps enjoying it, too. Trump attracts all the best people.
I can’t remember where I read it or who wrote it, but I keep being reminded of a line I read a year or two ago regarding how Trump’s supporters ‘don’t notice themselves slipping towards something so ugly it will surprise even them’
I worked with a Zimbabwean coworker for years. Her family were more or less in exile due to the Robert Mugabe regime, which meant that she spent years without getting to see her mother, and her father kept a low profile.
I remember talking to her about when the army finally deposed Mugabe, and how Zimbabwe now had a chance. She told me that she had lost years of knowing her mother, would Mugabe’s fall change that?
This is the evil of what Donald Trump has brought to America – the harm your presidential child snatcher is doing here is not something that can be undone by removing him, it is not something that can ever be made up for, he is taking something that cannot be replaced.
There isn’t much we can do for those children, except remember. For those of you who are in America and can vote, remember this when next you go to the polls.
I’m not seeing any meaningful distinction between this and the Japanese-American internment camps (also wasn’t it suggested that they’d do that during the campaign but with Middle Easterners?).
Less than a hundred years later and without the excuse of a war. “National security” now just means whatever the fuck a president feels like doing.
I want to rip these monsters apart…
I think that what Trump is doing is worse – at least the internment camps didn’t deliberately separate children from their parents.
Surely there is something that the citizens of the US can do right now? Waiting for elections seems so callous. I’d love to be able to do something, even from my sick bed on the other side of the Atlantic. Why aren’t there huge numbers of people demonstrating outside the camps? Why aren’t there massive campaigns by lawyers to be allowed into the camps? Is everyone in the US just going to sit back and wring your hands, moaning that nothing can be done, in the shameful way Australians have behaved over similar atrocities?
Sorry, Ophelia, this has been making me so angry. The so-called opposition to Trump seems to be as spineless and helpless as a beached jellyfish. What use are stings/rights if you can’t/won’t use them?
Tigger, recall the massive, record-breaking demonstrations against Bush and his cronies on the eve of the Iraq War, and how effective they were at either preventing that awful quagmire or motivating people to ultimately vote its architects out of office. Recall how fairly and competely the US media covered the protests.
In short, demonstrations are necessary, but they are not by any means sufficient. The people must vote, while they still can. They must focus their protests on driving up and affecting the votes of those who can be helped, or heckled, or persuaded. And they must do so without any expectation of fair or complete coverage by any member of the media. Yes, it isn’t fair. But it’s all there is.
tiggerthewing
What Seth said – but also, the midterms are coming in November. Getting enough butts into legislative seats could do a lot to limit the excesses of Trump’s presidency.
I think people are doing things right now. Demonstrations make a difference only if they get news coverage, and it may be that various forms of journalism work with or without demonstrations (or in combination with them). Certainly the administration is feeling pressure; on the other hand Trump interprets pressure as the swamp fighting back or Crooked Hillary’s Revenge or some such shit, and Russian bots complicate everything. Trump listens only to Fox News, and the same goes for about 30% of the country. I think we’re trying to do things.