Rim Country Gazette: Inside largest U.S. immigration processing center, traumatized children and...are those cages?

Monday, June 18, 2018

Inside largest U.S. immigration processing center, traumatized children and...are those cages?

The Trump administration allowed some reporters inside the nation’s largest immigration processing center in McAllen, Texas, on Father’s Day, with NBC News reporting that “Hundreds of young migrants are being kept behind metal wire — the type you’d see on a neighborhood batting cage or a dog kennel.” The hot debate now is whether this counts as cages, with Fox News’ Steve Doocy arguing that it’s not a cage, it’s just that the government "built walls out of chain-link fences.”

In other words, yes, the American government is keeping people, including children, in cages.

There are hundreds of children in the facility and just four social workers. At this facility, parents and young children are often kept together—until the parent is processed and prosecuted, when separation happens. So it’s a delay of a few days … and then, until they’re sent to internment centers for unaccompanied minors (including the ones who were accompanied until the Trump administration separated them from their parents), the children are alone with other traumatized children, the Border Patrol Agents in charge of traumatizing them, and four social workers.

One 16-year-old girl ended up taking care of a child still in diapers for three days:

“She had to teach other kids in the cell to change her diaper,” the AP quoted [the Women’s Refugee Commission’s Michelle] Brane as saying. “She was so traumatized that she wasn’t talking. She was just curled up in a little ball."

Which is mission accomplished for the Trump administration: traumatizing children to try to prevent their parents from legally asking for asylum.