Recent news came out about the living conditions of migrant children who are being detained near the United States southern border. The news is appalling, but not surprising. To put it mildly, overcrowding and a lack of necessities led to poor and utterly unacceptable conditions.
A legal team was permitted to enter one of the holding facilities last week, after negotiating access to the facility on the grounds of the Flores settlement, a Clinton-era legal agreement that governs detention conditions for migrant children and families according to Associated Press.
Border Patrol officials were also notified three weeks prior to the legal team’s visit, leaving time to clean up and cover up other aspects, though one would hope that conditions were no worse than the repugnant conditions that were described.
Children were said to have been forcibly caring for toddlers, with one report of a a young girl saying that a Border Patrol agent came into the room with a 2-year-old boy and asked, “Who wants to take care of this little boy?” Another girl said she would but lost interest a few hours later, leaving another young girl to take charge instead.
The boy had wet his pants and was wearing a mucus-smeared shirt when the legal team encountered him. “In my 22 years of doing visits with children in detention, I have never heard of this level of inhumanity,” Holly Cooper, who represents detained youth and is co-director of the University of California’s Davis’ Immigration Law Clinic, told The Associated Press.
The New York Times reported that one 17-year-old mother, encountered by lawyers at a Border Patrol Central Processing Center in McAllen Texas, was unable to stand due to complications from an emergency C-section and was caring for a sick, dirt-covered and premature baby.
“When we encountered the baby and her mom, the baby was filthy. They wouldn’t give her any water to wash her. And I took a Kleenex and I washed around her neck black dirt. Not a little stuff – dirt,” Hope Frye, who was leading the group, told the New York Times.
The overcrowding adds to the discomfort. According to the New York Times, in May, a border processing center in El Paso had up to 900 migrants being held in a facility meant for 125, meaning that some cells meant for 35 people were holding 155 people.
Detaining people, specifically minorities, in camps has never been the product of good intentions nor has it ever led to happy outcomes historically. These detention centers are eerily reminiscent of the internment camps where Japanese Americans were detained during World War II. So, while, it’s not a new trend in America, it’s certainly an unwelcome return.
Actor and activist George Takei made a comparison with his own experiences in those internment camps after Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, U.S. Representative for New York’s 14th congressional district, described the migrant detention centers as concentration camps.
“I know what concentration camps are. I was inside two of them, in America. And yes, we are operating such camps again,” Takei wrote on Twitter.
Thankfully, things seem to be looking up. A bill providing $4.5 billion emergency aid to these migrant families has been passed in the U.S. House and Senate. However, this won’t shut down the process.
One thing that anyone can do is call their legislators and ask them to help stop this dreadful process by creating and supporting legislation that does just that. You can find out who your representative is here: https://www.house.gov/representatives. You can find your senators here: https://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm.