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Wednesday, June 26, 2019

Doctor compares detention center for immigrant children to 'torture facilities'

Shoes are left by people at the Tornillo Port of Entry near El Paso, Texas, June 21, 2018 during a protest rally by several American mayors against the US administration's family separation policy. - President Donald Trump ordered an end to the separation of migrant children from their parents on the US border June 20, 2018, reversing a tough policy under heavy pressure from his fellow Republicans, Democrats and the international community. The spectacular about-face comes after more than 2,300 children were stripped from their parents and adult relatives after illegally crossing the border since May 5 and placed in tent camps and other facilities, with no way to contact their relatives. (Photo by Brendan Smialowski / AFP)        (Photo credit should read BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images)
Conditions at the nation’s largest Customs and Border Protection detention center “could be compared to torture facilities,” according to a doctor who was allowed in to assess the children there. Dr. Dolly Lucio Sevier works in private practice near the McAllen, Texas, facility and has no connection to the lawyers whose lawsuit threat forced authorities to allow a doctor’s visit. And she, like apparently all decent, humane people who get a look at Trump’s camps, was appalled.

Lucio Sevier’s description of conditions, obtained by ABC News, echoed other accounts of CBP’s abuse of migrants. She said the children, some of them infants, are held in “extreme cold temperatures, lights on 24 hours a day, no adequate access to medical care, basic sanitation, water, or adequate food.” It’s south Texas.

Extremely cold temperatures are expensive (and massively energy-wasting) to achieve. There’s no way that isn’t on purpose to make children—children—miserable and sick.

When she said no access to basic sanitation, she meant basic. Like no access to hand-washing, which she said was “tantamount to intentionally causing the spread of disease.”

Some infants in custody were with teen mothers, themselves children, who described being unable to wash their babies’ bottles—again, a question of basic, health-preserving sanitation—and babies over six months old weren’t being provided pureed foods that they could eat. “To deny parents the ability to wash their infant's bottles is unconscionable and could be considered intentional mental and emotional abuse,” Lucio Sevier wrote.

The Trump administration is intentionally brutalizing children, working to break their health and their spirits. And it’s doing that in part to appeal to Trump’s base. Don’t try to tell us about how this isn’t a political movement based on racism and cruelty.

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