She had stopped thriving
“Well why didn’t you say so?”
Border Patrol and the Trump administration are shocked, shocked, to hear of the horrific conditions at the Clint Facility. They had no idea. They have moved 300 children to the nearest Trump hotel.
Not really. They’ve been taken to a tent facility. In Texas. So that will be a huge improvement.
Almost 300 migrant children have been removed from a border patrol facility in Texas after media reports of lawyers describing “appalling” and potentially dangerous conditions, Department of Homeland Security officials told NBC News.
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The children have been taken to a tent detention camp also in El Paso, Texas, where they will remain under the custody of Border Patrol until they can be placed with the Department of Health and Human Services, the DHS officials said. The Associated Press first reported on the conditions at the facility.
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“I have never seen conditions as appalling as what we witnessed last week,” she said. “The children are hungry, dirty and sick and being detained for very long periods of time.”
“Children who are young themselves are being told by guards they must take care of even younger children,” Mukherjee said, adding that children as young as 7 and 8 were forced to care for 2-year-olds.
She said almost all the children had been separated from the adults they crossed the border with — siblings, aunts or grandparents, or even their parents.
Remember being a little kid? Remember what it felt like just to get lost in a shop for a few minutes?
Meanwhile, a different team of attorneys said they had also encountered children in similar conditions when they visited the Central Processing Center in McAllen, Texas, this month.
“It’s the same conditions,” immigration attorney Hope Frye said.
Frye said she encountered a 17-year-old Guatemalan mother with a premature baby at the crowded facility. The mother was wheelchair-bound after an emergency C-section in Mexico. When Frye met her, she was “caked with dirt” and neither she nor her baby had showered since arriving, she said.
Frye said she took a tissue to clean the baby and wiped off “black dirt from her neck.”
Frye described the baby as looking weak and said the mother told her she had stopped thriving while at the facility.
Frye said she felt she had no choice but to come forward to tell the young mother’s story. The teen and her baby have since been released from Border Patrol custody.
“She told me she believed if they did not get out, her baby would die,” she said. “There is no question in my mind that it was the extreme love of this 17-year-old mother that kept that baby alive.”
Your country is a festering shithole.
I was glad to learn from Wikipaedia that the inventor of Godwin’s Law, Mr Godwin himself, thinks it wholly appropriate to refer to these ‘camps’ for children (as well as others) as ‘concentration camps’. Pace chigau, I would say that another ‘festering shithole’ where refugees and immigrants is concerned is my own country, Britain, as a result of the policies adopted by Cameron and his all too eager Home Secretary, Mistress May, and the right-wing of the Tory party. (One might bring in Australia, too — it is not as though Anglo-Saxondom in general has been always been a beacon of freedom and light — far from it.) What appalls me is that most people don’t care or keep their heads down and affect not to notice — and at the same time assume their moral superiority to those Germans who did precisely the same, and perhaps with more reason (considering the murderous nature of its rulers). The Holocaust has, alas, because of the claims of its terrible singularity, been a useful resource and refuge for those, on the right or the left, who like to pretend that nothing was so bad as Naziism. For the right, and too many well-meaning people in Britain, in England, at least, it provides an excuse that the Germans are somehow congenitally Nazis in their souls and that therefore Brexit is justified and Britain’s treatment of immigrants and refugees is somehow harmless, as was its treatment of the Mau-Mau in Kenya (which also involved concentration camp, in which thousands died); for the left it provides the excuse that since the Communists had good intentions, their history of mass murder, in the USSR, in China, in Cambodia and elsewhere, somehow pales into insignificance in comparison with the crimes of the Nazis. And, more particularly, it permits nice white Western people to pretend that slavery and Jim Crow and the lynchings that continued up into the 1940s in the States also pale into insignificance (and in this, there is of course there is an underlying and unacknowledged assumption that since black people are inferior, the sufferings of black people are not so important as the suffering of the more civilised Jewish people – though those that have recourse to this trope are as likely to be anti-Semitic as they are racist; but the trope allows them to look vaguely virtuous, so they employ it). And at the same time the Communist ‘menace’ excuses American, British and Australian support for the massacres in, say, Indonesia in the sixties, or the American support for Pinochet and the Argentinian junta, just as, in the present, it permits support for the disgusting Saudi regime in its wars (the British and the Americans are the chief suppliers of arms to the Saudis) and its antipathy towards Iran (which I am perfectly willing to admit is far from being a ‘nice’ regime,but it is certainly better than the Saudis, and more likely to change for the better). It is the hypocrisy of Anglo-Saxondom, its unwillingness to look at its record, and its assumption that it alone is virtuous, so that the enormities it has perpetrated somehow do not matter, that disgust me.