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.

Check out the Australian detention centre in Nauru

that's about people in conditions markedly less awful that the current US conditions
Trouble is, we don't really know what the conditions are in british ones. Signs are that they are not good.

Suicides in immigration detention centres kept 'state secret' by Home Office, MPs told

These are deaths of people in the care of the state and there shouldn’t be any secrecy in that,’ former prison ombudsman tells Home Affairs Select Committee

www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/immigration-detention-centres-uk-suicides-prison-deaths-home-office-a8533366.html

If you were arrested tomorrow in Britain you could be detained by police for only 96 hours before being charged or released. This is as you’d expect in a country that believes in liberty and the rule of law

But if you were detained on immigration grounds, the experience would be wholly different. You’d be held in a place worse than prison, without automatic legal representation, possibly for weeks, months, years on end. A permanent prisoner with no guarantee of release

Parliament has never sanctioned this system. It has developed in the shadows under successive governments. In the 1990s, only a few hundred people were held in detention centres. Now, tens of thousands are detained annually

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/11/britain-treatment-migrants-shameful-detentions

Yes, immigration detention in the UK can be indefinite, unless the detainee agrees to leave the country "voluntarily".

It's iniquitous. Hugely, hugely harmful psychologically.

The current US situation seems much worse even than that.

IIRC (and sorry, I'm doing this from memory), parents were told that if they wanted to see their children again they should abandon their asylum claim and all go.

So some parents did. Then it transpired the US govt had lost track of their children and had no way to reunite them.

This is from October 2018:

DHS Had No Database to Track Migrant Children Separated From Their Parents, Report Finds
slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/10/dhs-database-separated-children-zero-tolerance-policy-immigration.html

The Department of Homeland Security was not prepared to execute the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy toward immigrants, according to a report released Tuesday by the department’s watchdog. Most critically, the DHS did not have a central database to track families separated under the immigration policy, contrary to what it had falsely claimed on June 23.

The zero-tolerance policy, implemented in April, separated more than 2,500 children from their parents. Although a U.S. district court judge ordered their prompt reunification in June, the DHS was, and still is, incredibly slow to do so. The DHS was also criticized for providing inconsistent numbers on how many kids it was holding.
[...]
The Rio Grande Valley Border Patrol sector exceeded the 72-hour maximum period that a minor can be detained for at least 564 children, while the El Paso sector did so for 297 children. One child was held for a staggering 25 days. These chain-link holding facilities, often lacking beds and showers, are meant for short-term detention.

In most cases, immigrant parents were not told that their children would be separated from them until it was too late. One parent the inspector’s office interviewed was told he would be reunited with his 5-year-old daughter after he appeared in court, only to be handed a flyer later that explained he would in fact be separated from her. Afterward, he was taken away in a bus to a detention facility without his daughter.

No means of linking families together was provided, either—no ID bracelets, fingerprints, or photographs.

This is the DHS's own document in May 2019:

Management Alert - DHS Needs to Address Dangerous Overcrowding Among Single Adults at El Paso Del Norte Processing Center
www.oig.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/assets/Mga/2019/oig-19-46-may19-mgmtalert.pdf

PDT’s seven general cells and three small isolation cells are unable to accommodate the number of detainees currently being held at the processing facility within TEDS standards. Further limiting available space is the need to separate detainees with infectious diseases, such as chicken pox, scabies, and influenza, from each other and from the general population.

Border Patrol agents told us some of the detainees had been held in standing-room-only conditions for days or weeks. According to Border Patrol’s custody logs, there were 756 detainees on site when we visited PDT on May 7, 2019. Of those, 502 detainees (66 percent) had been held at PDT for longer than 72 hours, with 33 detainees (4 percent) held there for more than two weeks. On May 8, 2019, we returned to PDT for another unannounced spot inspection and observed that some family units and adult females had been transferred, but overall numbers were even higher as additional detainees had arrived for processing. According to Border Patrol staff, on May 8, 2019, the total number on site was approximately 900.

Shocking, perking thanks for the links.

I just came home from a trip through the upper Plains states, and I can tell you many many people living there do not read much news at all. They do hear Rush Limbaugh, quite regularly; but not the NYTimes or New Yorker, etc. So they don't see what is happening, but they worry excessively about non-white immigrants eventually outnumbering the existing white, northern European ancestered peoples. It does not occur to the to think about Native Americans, or the child separation policy, or the conditions detained people are held under. And I did hear lots of people saying "Their parents should have thought of that first" as a justification for what is happening. They looooove Trump, and the Electoral College gives them way more political power in choosing a president than is fair considering their population.

The Democratic Party better get a whole lot better organized and start presenting a focused platform, and fast!!

What makes matters worse is places like US was founded by an "immigrant" (Christopher Columbus), the same man who encouraged slavery, helped in the extinction of the Taino people and who is still celebrated today (columbus day, October I think?)
Their history contradicts their own beliefs but at the same time the treatment of immigrants and even the indigenous people back then hasn't really changed.
Same as Australia with the aboriginal peoples.

The fact of the matter is it all comes down to power. Always has and always will be the case.
What a world we live in, this is what freedom is for the average white heterosexual highly educated conservative person

I cant imagine being told the USA had lost my child but they're in a detention centre with awful lack of care and no way to get them back :(

The trauma is unbelievable. I cant understand how its legal.

They must have become "non persons" in the eyes of those interacting with them.

It's hard enough to comfort a child whose parents are away for a brief time. But to throw them somewhere like that and provide ko comfort or reassurance they will see their parents.

Its beyond awful.
And how on earth will they reunite any of them without any form of I'd!?

Obama was doing the exact same thing throughout his presidency. Where was the outrage then?

To be honest I’m not surprised at the Trump defenders who think it’s ok to treat innocent children this way.

They quite readily lack empathy and certainly cannot scrap any ounce of sympathy for anyone who looks different to them.

It’s racism and fear at its core

Fucking ironic given the history of America and Native Americans. Or, perhaps not.

All I can say is, that life must be shit for those people desperately seeking a new home for their children.

It’s disgusting.

Obama was doing the exact same thing throughout his presidency. Where was the outrage then

Incorrect.

Obama was doing the exact same thing throughout his presidency. Where was the outrage then

Honestly, I think these people lack comprehension skills. Obama had detention centres, but that is as far as it goes. The detention centres did not deny detainees basic hygienic needs. They had beds. They weren’t crammed in. If sick, they were looked after. And remember, we are talking about kids, some of them toddlers.

Also the detention centres did not separate children from their caregivers.

That came under Trump. Who then signed some order to stop it after a massive backlash. Or have we forgotten that?

Trump certainly has as he claims he didn’t even introduce it in the first place which is bullshit.

All the racist Trump supporters carry on with your fake news.

Where are the missing children? I'm deeply concerned there is an underground trafficking operation happening as a result of these horrific policies.

YOU DO NOT PUNISH CHILDREN BY LOCKING THEM UP WITH LIMITED FOOD AND NO BASIC HYGIENE.

One more time for those at the back.
Good grief, this is absolutely horrific. I though they had stopped doing this after the outcry before. Can the UN intervene, can other governments take them to court, what can be done about this?

"Obama had.. " No he didn't, learn to read.

Incorrect whataboutism of the highest order.

Trump is down in the polls in many swing states btw. The partisan nature of US politics means that any election or poll is never going to look like a landslide victory.

www.snopes.com/fact-check/obama-trump-child-separation-meme/

eu.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/06/23/trump-falsely-says-obama-started-family-separation/1540733001/

Honestly, I think these people lack comprehension skills. Obama had detention centres, but that is as far as it goes. The detention centres did not deny detainees basic hygienic needs. They had beds. They weren’t crammed in. If sick, they were looked after.

There are pictures from 2014 of children sleeping on the floor in cages. A judge ruled that some detention centres were breaking the law and children were being denied basic medical care. Why is it necessary to pretend Obama didn't do wrong? Why can't you criticise both his policies and Trump's?

I do think the parents of those children should never have put them in that situation, however.

Bit of a Sophie's Choice isn't it. Stay in your home country and let your children be raped/murdered by the drug cartels/government, with no education, no money, no food and no hope, or risk a 1000's of miles journey in the vain hope that you might get to enter the US and make a better life, but ultimately knowing that even being abused in a concentration camp is a step up from your current situation.

I don't blame the parents at all. I blame the governments. The answer isn't punishing the immigrants, it's forcing the governments to address the human rights situations in their countries.

"There are pictures from 2014 of children sleeping on the floor in cages"

True, but these weren't children separated from their parents, nor were they subject to the extreme conditions that the children are currently. They also responded positively to a court ruling and the numbers of children held fell dramatically, in 2016!

It is possible to be critical of both, but to bring up Obama is whataboutism.

There are pictures from 2014 of children sleeping on the floor in cages. A judge ruled that some detention centres were breaking the law and children were being denied basic medical care. Why is it necessary to pretend Obama didn't do wrong? Why can't you criticise both his policies and Trump's?

The Obama administration was also facing an unprecedented amount of families trying to cross the border and struggled to handle them. Hence people sleeping on floors in temporary holding shelters. Trump is facing far less numbers of immigrants, so where is his excuse?

The criticism being levelled at Trump is that he encourages the separation of children from adults.

Encourages it.

It’s fucking disgusting.

We can also criticise Obama and previous governments but let’s look at who is in charge now, right now.

It’s like a child being told off for punching someone and saying “but he did slapped Johnny”.

It’s just one big distraction from the fact that Trump currently is encouraging this. He’s the President.

This article's from just a few days ago.

Attorneys: Texas border facility is neglecting migrant kids
www.apnews.com/46da2dbe04f54adbb875cfbc06bbc615

“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 inspected the facilities because they are involved in the Flores settlement, a Clinton-era legal agreement that governs detention conditions for migrant children and families. 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.