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"A 2-year-old boy locked in detention wants to be held all the time. A few girls, ages 10 to 15, say they’ve been doing their best to feed and soothe the clingy toddler who was handed to them by a guard days ago." apnews.com/46da2dbe04f54a…
"Three girls told attorneys they were trying to take care of the 2-year-old boy, who had wet his pants and no diaper and was wearing a mucus-smeared shirt when the legal team encountered him."
"A Border Patrol agent came in our room with a 2-year-old boy and asked us, ‘Who wants to take care of this little boy?’ Another girl said she would take care of him, but she lost interest after a few hours and so I started taking care of him yesterday,” one of the girls said.
"Law professor Warren Binford, who is helping interview the children, said she couldn’t learn anything about the toddler, not even where he’s from or who his family is."
"She said an 8-year-old taking care of a very small 4-year-old with matted hair couldn’t convince the little one to take a shower."
"'In my 22 years of doing visits with children in detention I have never heard of this level of inhumanity,' said Holly Cooper, who co-directs University of California, Davis’ Immigration Law Clinic and represents detained youth."
"The lawyers negotiated access to the facility with officials, and say Border Patrol knew the dates of their visit three weeks in advance."
"Many children interviewed had arrived alone at the U.S.-Mexico border, but some had been separated from their parents or other adult caregivers including aunts and uncles, the attorneys said."
"Rules call for the children to be held by the Border Patrol for no longer than 72 hours before they are transferred to the custody of HHS. ... A teenage mother with a premature baby was found last week in a Texas Border Patrol processing center after being held for nine days."
"A 14-year-old girl from Guatemala said she had been holding two little girls in her lap. 'I need comfort, too. I am bigger than they are, but I am a child, too,' she said."
"Children told lawyers that they were fed oatmeal, a cookie and a sweetened drink in the morning, instant noodles for lunch and a burrito and cookie for dinner. There are no fruits or vegetables. They said they’d gone weeks without bathing or a clean change of clothes."
"San Francisco psychoanalyst Gilbert Kliman, who has evaluated about 50 children and parents seeking asylum, says the trauma is causing lasting damage. 'The care of children by children constitutes a betrayal of adult responsibility, governmental responsibility,' he said."
We're all going to hell.
Much more excruciating detail here on this appalling children's prison camp, direct from @clarychka, one of the observers who gained access. (Thread to follow.) hrw.org/news/2019/06/2…
As @clarychka notes, these kids are only supposed to be held in these camps for processing—a matter of hours, a day or two at most. The ones she saw have been languishing there, largely unsupervised, for weeks.
Many of these kids have parents or other family in the US. They could be released into the homes of people who love them, and in the past they would have been. The Trump administration is choosing to imprison them, covered in their own filth, instead.
"Based on our interviews, officials seem to be making no effort to release children to caregivers—and many have parents in the US—rather than holding them for weeks in overcrowded cells sleeping on concrete floors."
Again: These kids have parents who love them. In many cases, the government knows who and where those parents are. Instead of reuniting the families, the government is holding the kids hostage, in most cases refusing to allow them any contact with their loved ones, even by phone.
"Children at Clint told us they don’t have regular access to showers or clean clothes, with some saying they hadn’t been allowed to bathe over periods of weeks and don’t have regular access to soap."
"Many of the kids in the Clint facility are too young to wash or feed themselves, yet they are left to fend for themselves with the help of unrelated older children."
"Dr. Ewen Wang, a pediatric emergency physician at Stanford who formed part of our team, told me if a child came into her emergency room and reported this kind of treatment, she would be obligated to report it as child neglect."
Conservatives have been all over my mentions since last night saying this is a funding problem. No. This is policy. This is the Trump administration choosing to imprison kids whose parents are desperate to have them back. Choosing to subject them to squalor and disease.
These kids have families. These kids have people who love them waiting for them, with beds and soap and warm baths and clean clothes and good nourishing food. It would cost our government nothing to let them have all that.
Our government is choosing to torture them.
Our government is choosing to torture them.
Our government would rather spend money to torture these children than spend no money and let them be cared for by the people they love.
Tell me again these aren't concentration camps. Say it to my face.
Tell me again these aren't concentration camps. Say it to my face.
There are multiple bills pending in the House to address this crisis. Any or all of them could be fast-tracked today if one man, Mitch McConnell, were to signal his willingness to conduct a Senate vote. But he will allow no such vote.
If you haven't taken to the streets to protest this, please do. If you have, please do so again. I'm gathering information on upcoming actions, and will be tweeting about them soon.
If you know of actions—protests, direct actions, anything—and you'd like me to help you spread the word, tweet at me or DM me.
But here's a thing you can do right now, on your own: Tell people about this. Tell your loved ones. Tell your kids. Tell your dad. Tell them about the filthy children caring for other children while their jailers sit by and their parents cry themselves to sleep with worry.
Tell them that these kids want to go home, and that their parents want to bathe them and feed them and brush their hair tuck them in to a clean warm bed. Tell them.
Tell them that these kids came to the US with their families, fleeing fear and want and persecution. Tell them that they were ripped from their loved ones in defiance of law and past policy and basic human compassion.
Tell them that these kids are scared. Tell them that they're hungry. Tell them that they're cold and dirty and sick. Tell them that they want their moms. Tell them that their moms want them.
I don't know how we stop this. But I know how to speak the truth. And I know that speaking out on behalf those who are suffering and cannot speak for themselves is an obligation we all share.
I may be going to hell. But I'm not going to go quietly.
Update: Starting a thread of actions and other ways to oppose these camps. Click through here:
