Thread by @TornilloWitness

WITNESS JOSHUA RUBIN reports-Months ago, a team of volunteer lawyers were granted access for a few days to speak with children inside the green-tarped fences of Homestead prison for migrant children.1/12

These attorneys were allowed in under authority of a ruling that took place more than 20 years ago that set guidelines for how such children in custody of our country need to be treated to minimize damage that can be done in an institutional setting to vulnerable charges. 2/12

And this team went inside, driven on golf carts each day for nearly a week, from old Job Corp building marked Career Center into both sides of prison camp, one side where children aged 11-16 (although we now learn that there was one at least as young as 8 years)...3/12

...& also other side of prison camp, where nearly half the children were held & still are, the 17-year olds, the children on the edge of an adulthood that threatened them with solitary confinement while waiting for shackled transport to adult facilities in Broward or Krome.
4/12

Witnesses were there & we watched as leader Hope Frye & her team of volunteers began each day with some sort of consultation with prison camp’s assistant director, a man we see scooting about all day in his cart, his face impassive...5/12

...& then set off to ask questions & hear answers that we finally heard about yesterday. The answers that have stunned us, even those of us who knew a sense of horror & had committed so much of our lives to witness & protest. 6/12

From confinement in spaces known as Hielera & Perrera (refrigerator & dog kennel), in Texas borderlands, these children tell a story of a place where isolation, brutal regulation, and overlong stays, where tears and self-harm are regular features. The details are harrowing. 7/12

This place, characterized by either deluded or deceptive people as a 5-star hotel or summer camp, enforces its brutally regimented routine w/threats of extensions of confinement & deportation. Children isolated by their language sit quiet & sunk in depression, alone.8/12

Girls have their pens & pencils taken so that they cannot cut themselves in the dark of their teeming dormitories. Children force feed themselves to follow the rule that requires the plate to be empty, under those threats.9/12

Read it for yourselves. The details are published here on this page. I can’t begin to list all the horror we learned. I am grateful for the work of the inspectors, of the suit they bring to end this brutal regime, the one that earns the very makers of the policy...10/12

...that led to this atrocity big money, very big money, in this concentration camp for kids set up near the steamy Everglades of South Florida. But the wheels of justice turn slowly, & meantime the forces of cruelty & greed are grinding, & children, in the dark of night...11/12

...& in the many nooks & crannies of this house of horrors, weep & despair, & die a little. 12/12