KIDS IN CAGES
Trump’s America
Trump Administration officials have been sending babies and other young children forcibly separated from their parents at the US-Mexico border to at least three “tender age” shelters in South Texas, AP has learned.
Lawyers and medical providers who have visited the Rio Grande Valley shelters described play rooms of crying preschool-age children in crisis.
The US Government also plans to open a fourth shelter to house hundreds of young migrant children in Houston, where city leaders denounced the move.
Since the White House announced its zero tolerance policy in early May, more than 2300 children have been taken from their parents at the USMexico border, resulting in a new influx of young children requiring government care. The Government has faced withering critiques over images of some of the children in cages inside US Border Patrol processing stations.
Decades after the child welfare system ended the use of orphanages over concerns about the lasting trauma to children, the Administration is standing up new institutions to hold Central American toddlers that the government separated from their parents.
“The thought that they are going to be putting such little kids in an institutional setting? I mean it is hard for me to even wrap my mind around it,” said Kay Bellor, vice-president for programmes at Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, which provides foster care and other child welfare services to migrant children. “Toddlers are being detained.”
Bellor said shelters follow strict procedures surrounding who can gain access to the children in order to protect their safety.
By law, child migrants travelling alone must be sent to facilities run by the US Department of Health and Human Services within three days of being detained. The agency then is responsible for placing the children in shelters or foster homes until they are
united with a relative or sponsor in the community as they await immigration court hearings.
But US Attorney-General Jeff Sessions’ announcement last month that the Government would criminally prosecute everyone who crosses the US-Mexico border illegally has led to the break-up of migrant families and sent a new group of hundreds of young children into the government’s care. The United Nations, some Democratic and Republican lawmakers and religious groups have sharply criticised the policy, calling it inhumane.
Not so, said Steven Wagner, an official with the Department of Health and Human Services. “We have specialised facilities that are devoted to providing care to children with special needs and tender age children as we define as under 13 would fall into that category. They’re not government facilities per se, and they have very well-trained clinicians, and those facilities meet state licensing standards for child welfare agencies, and they’re staffed by people who know how to deal with the needs — particularly of the younger children.”
Until now it’s been unknown where they are. The three centres — in Combes, Raymondville and Brownsville — have been rapidly repurposed to serve needs of children including some under 5. A fourth,
planned for Houston, would house up to 240 children in a warehouse, Mayor Sylvester Turner said.
Turner said he met officials from Southwest Key Programmes, the contractor that operates some of the child shelters, to ask them to reconsider their plans. “And so there comes a point in time we draw a line and for me, the line is with these children,” said Turner.
As children are separated from their families, law enforcement agents reclassify them from members of family units to “unaccompanied alien children.” Federal officials said that since May, they have separated 2342 children from their families, rendering them unaccompanied minors in the government’s care. Officials from both law enforcement and Health and Human Services said they didn’t know how many children were under 5, under 2, or even so little they’re nonverbal. — AP