Children in detention camps in the US

[Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g]

www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/inside-a-texas-building-where-the-government-is-holding-immigrant-children

www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/four-severely-ill-migrant-babies-hospitalized-after-lawyers-visited-border-patrol-facility_n_5d0d3bbce4b07ae90d9cfe4f

twitter.com/reckless/status/1142428101038809088 - includes video of Trump official trying to argue in court that it's within the law not to provide detainees with soap, toothpaste and conditions that make it possible to sleep - good for the judges who are clearly aghast at what she's saying

This is unspeakable. I know I'm not being unreasonable. Nobody could justify the way these children are being treated. I'm sure things are even worse for the adults, but children don't make the decision to cross the border! Where's the UN?

The articles above make it clear that the child detainees don't have enough to eat, they're not warm enough, they don't get clean clothes, they aren't getting prompt medical treatment (several have died), they don't have soap or access to hot showers, they don't have toothbrushes and toothpaste, they aren't given beds to sleep on. Hundreds of them are in a cold air conditioned warehouse with no windows and they have to decide whether to put their one blanket on the concrete floor and sleep on it or sleep directly on the concrete and use the blanket to try to keep warm. In some places the lights are on all night, making it very difficult to sleep. Older children are being asked to look after little children. No education, no play facilities, no kindness. You have to wonder about whether they're safe from predators - clearly some of the guards employed there are totally unfit to work with children, judging by the casual cruelty going on.

Some of the children are there for weeks and as a final sign that the law is being ignored when they're finally moved on the little ones are not put in car seats or booster seats as the law requires.

And worst of all, of course, they've been illegally separated from their families.

Is there anything we can do over here? I've been so distressed reading about this.

Putting children in concentration camps is a ‘conservative political view’ now? God, conservatism has got pretty shit recently, hasn’t it?

Yep, exactly right, concentration camps. Keep up the rhetoric!

Yes, exactly right, concentration camps. Are you familiar with the history of concentration camps from South Africa onwards?

Isabella, we're talking about the richest country in the world putting babies, toddlers and primary aged children in a windowless warehouse away from their families and not even providing them with the basics of life. They are being treated like subhumans because of their nationality/ethnicity. This is not the policy of decent people. It's got nothing to do with being conservative or otherwise. If Obama had been doing this, and I'd got to know about it, I'd have been just as aghast.

As for your post saying it's the parents' fault, that's beneath contempt. The US has international obligations to accept asylum seekers, just like everyone else, and given the US's role in causing much of the political instability in Central America in recent decades, quite right too.

And u believe that the treatment of these people including children is an acceptable conservative political view?????

No, I don’t believe it’s acceptable, but neither did I say that’s a conservative political view, did I? I do think the parents of those children should never have put them in that situation, however.

IsabellaLinton can u answer my question as i never mentioned the wording u seem to take offence to and id like to know if ur american? As i doubt anyone else in world holds ur views as they r not exposed to same media

And one day when you don’t fit the conservative agenda?

Bluestitch, I didn't know about the Obama regime's treatment of detainees. Was it as bad as this? Did children die for lack of medical treatment?

I’ll just leave this here for those missing the point spectacularly:

Children in detention camps in the US
It is unspeakable OP

But Britain is doing the same.

www.polygeia.com/single-post/2018/08/01/Immigration-Detention-and-Migrant-Health-in-the-UK

Children are frequently taken from parents by HO too.

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/jul/03/uk-immigration-authorities-separating-children-from-parents

@IsabellaLinton I have a question.
When it was WW2 and families were forced to send their children away to evacuee homes, some never to be seen again and the children ended up abused or neglected because the temporary family would only be doing it for the money. Who was at fault?
The parents or the cause of the evacuation itself?

Look at the cause first.

IIRC, the Obama administration had to deal with children arriving unaccompanied; it did NOT deliberately separate children from their parents and fly them off to distant camps.

Which is what Trump admin has been doing – with such poor documentation that they're sometimes not even able to reunite families.

There are already multiple accounts of children being sexually abused while in detention. Surprise surprise.

I daresay Bluestitch will have more than adequate references if she wants to claim the Obama admin also argued in court that children did not need toothbrushes or washing facilities.

The pictures of children in cages in Obama's administration are almost identical to the current ones, to the point where a photo of 2 children lying in a cage was widely circulated last week with absolute outrage about Trump until it was revealed that the picture was taken in 2014 and then it's 'well that's different then'. I despise Trump and what he is doing but I'm so sick of the hypocrisy of the left particularly and the excuses and ignoring the same issues if it's being done by your 'team'.

If a single american born/British child was taken from their family, held captive in a room without wimdows, not given enough to eat and just a blanket for the floor, not seen to when sick...

It's the sort of sick twisted thing that gets turned into bestseller books/documentaries.

How on earth is it acceptable for hundreds of children!?

The thing about the Trump regime, is it has an actual policy of separating children from parents – it's done intentionally to bully the parents into not making an asylum claim (because the claim might well succeed), and pour encourager les autres.

The numbers are therefore comparatively large and the facilities deliberately overwhelmed.

The UK immigration system leaves a lot to be desired (understatement), but in that Guardian link above James Cleverly MP denies there is family separation. He's clearly wrong, but it's happening in individual exceptional cases. Of course, even one case is too many. But there is a difference between this and the Trump admin revelling in and boasting about the fact it does this.

Cleverly still has to act like it's not OK and not happening, even occasionally.

Trumpians have passed that boundary.

Perking an article on Obama's migrant camps if you are interested, unless you were being sarcastic? Not sure due to the eyeroll.

www.google.com/amp/s/m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_55db850ae4b04ae49704188e/amp

Bluestitch isnt that just a whatabboutism? And also trump is forcing the families apart , which isnt what obama did. And the outrage isn't that they r being held as their needs to be some sort of system in place, its that they r separated and the conditions they are in

I got into a long twitter argument about this last night and couldn't believe the number of people saying that it's the parents fault, as though that somehow justifies the end result.

The simple, humane, moral conclusion is that YOU DO NOT PUNISH CHILDREN BY LOCKING THEM UP WITH LIMITED FOOD AND NO BASIC HYGIENE.

Their parents could have come through the border, slitting the throats of everyone they saw and it would still be wrong to lock the child up, make them sleep on a concrete floor with a foil blanket, barely any food, no one to look after them when sick, no one to comfort them when scared.

I just cannot comprehend how anyone with a conscience can think this is right.

If anyone is arguing that it's okay now because it's been done before, then that's not okay. I mean, think about the path that argument leads down.

What we need to talk about is that children, children just like our babies, are being taken from their parents, not provided with the basic necessities of life, no care, no love, and yes, some are dying. If you're okay with that, (maybe because it's happened before, maybe because it's their parents fault because they shouldn't have put them in that situation, even if what they were seeking to escape was something you couldn't even begin to imagine), then maybe you need to look at your babies again. And remember that we all love our kids the same. And all kids deserve to be treated with care and kindness. And this is not a third world country, this is a country that prides itself on being 'the greatest'. Faugh.

IIUC the reason for the children being separated from their parents is because the adults are being charged with a crime (illegal entry) and held in prison, where the children can obviously not be kept with them. This was a deterrent to encourage immigrants to use the proper legal process to enter the US.

They are not being 'deliberately ripped apart'. The parents knew the risk and took it so their children suffer. Of course conditions should be much better but the numbers seem to be overwhelming from what I've read. Hundreds of foster placements can't just be magicked up every week.

Your article does not claim the Obama admin argued in court that children did not need toothbrushes, washing facilities or enough space to lie down.

I see plenty to criticise about the centres where the Obama administration detained parents with their children. But from what I've seen there's a stepchange between that and what the Trump admin is doing.

I could be wrong, of course, but the introduction of a policy of deliberate separation seems to have completely changed the numbers. It also requires a different mindset, because staff are now the ones manufacturing an additional crisis.

You have heard wrong, TooOldForAllThatShit.

This is happening to many families who crossed legally, following the legal process.

What’s going on in these camps isn’t about the government being short on resources. It is punishment. They are taking clothes away from children. They are leaving lights on 24/7. They are currently arguing, in court, that they don’t have to provide toothpaste or soap because those aren’t necessary for sanitary conditions. They are having to be ordered by lawyers to take seriously ill babies and toddlers to hospital.

The guards in these camps have been referring to the children as ‘bodies’.

This isn’t about the government being overwhelmed.

If anyone is arguing that it's okay now because it's been done before, then that's not okay. I mean, think about the path that argument leads down.

I'm not arguing that. My initial post was really a response to an earlier comment that wondered why the democrats weren't further ahead in the polls, as if this is an issue that can be split along party lines rather than something both parties have engaged in. And you are right that we should learn from the past, I'm just not sure how that is possible when there is such tribalism and any criticism of earlier policies leads to accusations of whataboutery and excuses for Obama, and when former members of his own administration are criticising images until they learn that they were taken during their tenure and then suddenly it's 'different'.

Remind me if the prison guard experiment fro. Psychology :( Power changes people.

Your article does not claim the Obama admin argued in court that children did not need toothbrushes, washing facilities or enough space to lie down.

No just detaining people in violation of law as a deterrent to others, denying adequate medical care, sexual harrassment and inhumane conditions. My first response to this was horror, not a favourable comparison against Trump.

(BTW If it matters to anyone, I'm in the UK and yes, I have campaigned about immigration detention in the UK.

And that's about people in conditions markedly less awful that the current US conditions.)