During
this holy season of Lent in the Christian calendar it’s time to reflect and act
to help the most vulnerable in our midst. With harsh assaults on undocumented
immigrants and refugees who must fear every knock on their door, many American
citizen children are afraid to go to school, afraid of being bullied, and afraid
to leave their parents who might be arrested at any moment. In Texas, these real fears are intensified
with stories about building new walls on the border and about children like
their brothers and sisters, refugees from the violence of poverty and gangs and
drug lords, locked in residential detention centers in their state.
A ban on crayons. That’s what it
came to at the visitors’ center at the Karnes County Residential Center in
Karnes City, Texas, one of three immigration detention centers that Immigration
and Customs Enforcement (ICE) currently uses to house mothers and children who’ve
been stopped seeking asylum in the United States. Six volunteer lawyers who
work with detained families wrote a letter to ICE explaining why they liked to
bring crayons when they met with clients: “Having
children color and draw provides a distraction for children while their mothers
relate incidents of trauma, violence and abuse. Other children sit outside the
interview rooms and draw at the tables, so they are not forced to listen to
their mothers’ harrowing narratives nor witness their mothers’ fragile
emotional states during these interviews.” But ICE determined some of the
children were doing “damage” to tables and walls in the visitors’ center while
coloring. The crayon ban was just another blow to children already essentially
being housed as prisoners by the federal government. The latest memos from the
Department of Homeland Security outlining plans for enforcing the executive
orders on immigration issued by President Donald Trump mean the numbers of
children and mothers being detained this way (in America) will only swell.
Family detention
centers are just one way current immigration policies hurt children. The Karnes County center is managed by ICE but
owned and operated by the GEO Group, a $2 billion for-profit private prison
company that seeks to double the number of
people it can hold there from its current
capacity of 532 beds. Across the state the Southwest Texas Family Residential
Center in Dilley, Texas can hold 2,400 people. Also managed by ICE, that center
is owned and operated by Corrections Corporation of America, also known as
“CoreCivic,” a for-profit company that makes upwards of $260 million a year housing
mothers and children at a rate of $300 a day, per detainee. In December a Texas court struck down a
regulation that would have allowed these two for-profit detention centers to
obtain state child care licenses. Children’s Defense Fund–Texas Associate
Director Dr. Laura Guerra-Cardus, a medical doctor, was among those who
testified that family jails are not child care facilities and that children
held there with their mothers are not physically or mentally safe. Bree Bernwanger, managing attorney of the Dilley
Pro Bono Project, commented, “Yet another court has found that locking up
children and their parents is not a form of ‘child care.’ It’s time for ICE to
recognize that detaining families is illegal and these facilities should be
closed.”
Following
that ruling 460 women and children were released from the two Texas detention
centers, flooding immigrant support networks in a surprise move officials said
was unconnected to the loss in court. Many of those women and children had to
be immediately hospitalized due to chronic conditions and other health problems
resulting from their detention treatment. The centers have been the source of a
number of controversies, including several
alleged sexual assault and abuse cases and
alleged use of solitary confinement as punishment for hunger strikes at the
Dilley center. At the third ICE family center, owned and operated by Berks
County, Pennsylvania, a group of 22 mothers imprisoned with their children
between 270 to 365 days wrote a letter last year explaining why they were
starting a hunger strike:
“We are already traumatized
from our countries of origin. We risked our own lives and those of our children
so we could arrive on safe ground. While here our children have considered
committing suicide, made desperate from confinement. The teenagers say that
being here, life makes no sense. One of our children said he wanted to break
the window to jump out and end this nightmare
. . . They grab the chord [sic] that holds their ID cards and tighten it
around their necks, saying they want to die if they don’t get out. And the
smallest children, who are only two years old, cry during the night because they
cannot express what they feel . . . We left our homes in Central America to
escape violence, threats and corruption. We thought this country would help us,
but now we are locked up with our children in a place where we feel threatened,
including by some of the medical personnel, leaving us with no one to trust.”
The new executive
orders on immigration could mean locking up more families and building more
detention centers. This may be fantastic news for the private prison stock business
and for-profit prison industry but it is terrible news for the thousands of
innocent children at risk of inappropriate cruel and unusual punishment. Now
there is another cruel twist: the Department of Homeland Security is considering
separating children from their parents at the border. Parents would be detained
while their children would be placed in the care of the government or sent to
live with relatives in the United States.
It’s hard to
imagine separating children and families even in familiar surroundings — and
certainly not in a new country and in the horrendous situations we have seen
these families face. I can still remember the overwhelming panic I felt the day
I became separated from my mother at New York’s large Abyssinian Baptist Church
right
before a worship service began when I was about seven. In the bustling
crowd going up into the balcony, I let go of my mother’s hand. Happily I was
among friendly people who summoned an usher who took me down to the pulpit
where the preacher embraced me and asked the congregation if anyone knew this
child. My mother who had been frantically looking for me in the balcony stood
and said yes and an usher reunited us immediately. But I remember the panic and
fear. Nothing
is worse than feeling abandoned and separated from a parent in a strange place with strangers. Is this how our
nation is going to treat “the least of these” — our little ones? Surely we are
better than this!
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Marian Wright Edelman is President of the Children's Defense Fund whose Leave No Child Behind® mission is to ensure every child a Healthy Start, a Head Start, a Fair Start, a Safe Start and a Moral Start in life and successful passage to adulthood with the help of caring families and communities. For more information go to www.childrensdefense.org.
Mrs. Edelman's Child Watch Column also appears each week on The Huffington Post.
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