Thread by @ReichlinMelnick

🚨 Breaking! DHS Office of Inspector General releases report on "Dangerous Overcrowding and Prolonged Detention of Children and Adults in the Rio Grande Valley."

Conditions "represent an immediate risk to the health and safety of ... those detained."

The DHS watchdogs visited five Border Patrol facilities and two ports of entry in the Rio Grande Valley in the week of June 10th and found 8,000 people crammed into cells for days at a time. Some men had been held in "standing room only" conditions for days at a time.

Across the Rio Grande Valley Sector, the Border Patrol was holding families and children for days, or weeks, often longer than permitted by law.

There were 2,669 children held in these facilities, and 826 (31%) had been held longer than 72 hours.

According to the OIG, there were more than 50 "unaccompanied children" younger than 7 years old waiting transfer to HHS shelters. Some of them had been locked up for more than two weeks!

The kids in this picture (showing families crowded in cells) look miserable.

The OIG found that the government is violating their own policies (the 2015 Transport, Escort, Detention, and Search policy, or TEDS) by not giving children access to showers.

In two Border Patrol facilities, kids hadn't gotten any access to hot meals until the week of June 10!

The OIG noted that many men held in CBP custody were growing increasingly desperate. When they realized someone other than CBP was there, they banged on the windows to get OIG's attention.

One man wrote "Help 40 days here" on a piece of cardboard and pressed it to the window.

As @Haleaziz's scoop about a draft of this report revealed (buzzfeednews.com/article/hameda…), many adults had gone days or weeks without any access to a shower.

Many people had been fed nothing but bologna sandwiches for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for weeks—extremely unhealthy.

The conditions in CBP custody are truly awful—and to be clear, no person in jail in the United States is treated this badly.

In jail you get a bed to sleep on, hot food, showers, toothbrushes, and you're not crammed into a tiny cell with 40 other people.

Not so in CBP custody.

So what is DHS doing to alleviate this "dangerous overcrowding" in CBP custody which poses an "immediate risk to [] health and safety"?

Cramming more people into cells in *ICE detention*.

I've said it once, I'll say it before—the government cannot detain its way out of this.

Even the OIG itself suffers from a myopic focus on detention. They suggest that "DHS must transfer single adults to ICE custody as quickly as possible."

But ICE doesn't have space—so DHS must avoid violating the law by either detaining people humanely or releasing them.

In its Management Response, DHS lists all the things it says it has done to improve conditions in confinement. But not once do you see the phrase "alternatives to detention."

Instead, DHS again demands Congress eliminate humanitarian protections. There are other solutions!

For those looking for a copy of the report, it should be posted online here at @DHSOIG's website soon. oig.dhs.gov/reports/audits…

Addendum: Realized some of the pictures I posted were low quality because I was screenshotting a copy I had zoomed out for readability. Here are some better quality versions, less compressed. Now you can more easily read the "Help 40 day here" sign a man holds up to the window.