Mistreating of refugee children in US

THE Trump administration’s practice of separating migrant children from their parents in an effort to deter unauthorised border crossing has stirred an uproar.

Aghast and enraged, opponents – ranging from chief executives to members of the clergy to average Americans – have called this practice and the detention of children cruel and illegal.

Protests have sprung up, and members of Congress have flocked to the border to decry the “inhumane” detention of children, calling it “un-american”.

But this practice is actually nothing new. The Trump administration is not the first to use child detention as a means of excluding and deterring unwanted migrants.

The US government’s harsh treatment of migrant children is the product of decades of rising anxiety about unauthorised migration and uncontrolled numbers of asylum seekers and is part of a well-established pattern of using punitive measures to attempt to drive unwanted migrants from American borders.

In the summer of 1994, an ongoing human rights catastrophe in Haiti, resulting from a nearly three-yearlong military coup, drove a wave of more than 20 000 Haitian refugees to seek safety on American shores.

Former president Bill Clinton had closed a refugee camp at the US Naval Base of Guantanamo Bay. But the new surge in Haitian and Cuban refugees caused the Clinton administration to reverse course and reopen Guantanamo as a refugee-processing centre.

American officials never intended the Guantanamo camp to be the primary solution to the Caribbean refugee crisis, however. To stem the flow of Haitian refugees, put an end to the bloodshed in Haiti and restore the democratically-elected Haitian president, Clinton ordered a US military invasion of Haiti.

Once President Jean-bertrand Aristide was returned to office, US officials began emptying Guantanamo once again, sending most of the Haitians back to their country while allowing the majority of the Cubans at the camp to enter the United States.

While the Clinton administration admitted Cubans as political refugees from a communist country, they closed their doors to Haitians which they justified by citing the formal restoration of democracy in Haiti in September 1994.

But Haitians still faced violence, insecurity and human rights violations, and so refugees had no desire to return home. They wanted safety in the US.

But Clinton said no. At a moment when a rising tide of nativism was facilitating the passage of harsh anti-immigrant laws like California’s infamous Proposition 187, Clinton administration officials feared paying a political price for admitting large numbers of poor, black refugees to the country.

Clinton and his aides remembered that when large numbers of asylum seekers from Caribbean and Latin American countries had showed up the previous decade, a furious backlash ensued, prompting the Reagan administration to reinstitute the long-dormant policy of immigration detention.

Clinton decided to use military force to restore Aristide to office in large part because he wanted to avoid having to deal with the flow of Haitian refugees that represented such a vexing problem for the previous three administrations.

And so, despite the calamity and danger that awaited them in their home country, the Haitian refugees at Guantanamo faced forcible return by the US government. The most vulnerable among those facing deportation were hundreds of unaccompanied Haitian children, some as young as two-months old, living in an area designated Camp Nine.

Theoretically, Camp Nine was not supposed to be a prison or a house of horrors. American officials provided the detained children with food, clothing, recreation and schooling, and they were looked after by Haitian adults designated as “house parents”.

But in reality, Camp Nine was an awful place. Children suffered terrible abuse. A 14-year-old girl was sexually abused by the president of the “house parents”.

In another part of the camp a 16-year-old girl was raped. Disobedient children were physically abused, forced to kneel for prolonged periods under the intense sun or were simply sent to a children’s jail.

And worst of all, perhaps, was the threat of being sent back to Haiti, where many of the unaccompanied children’s parents had been murdered by the military or paramilitary forces behind the coup. The detained children suffered severe depression, and some even attempted suicide.

In November 1994, the squalid conditions and the threat of deportation sparked action by the Haitian children of Camp Nine. Dressed in white, they held a prayerful demonstration and hunger strike.

Solidarity protests and rallies were organised by a coalition of some 40 organisations led by Famn Ayisyen Nan Miyami (Haitian Women of Miami). And national organisations like the US Catholic Conference and the National Organisation for Women, and a number of celebrities grouped under the organisation Guantanamo Watch added their voices to those urging attorney-general Janet Reno to exercise her “parole authority”, (which gave the attorney-general the discretion to admit any alien to the country), so that those who had relatives in the US could be reunited with their families.

The protests and political pressure intensified in March 1995 when the Clinton administration began forcibly sending the children back to Haiti. Two months later, the children of Camp Nine launched a rebellion, burning their tents and clashing with camp guards.

Finally, after months of protest, the campaign to free the Haitian children bore fruit when the administration announced that it would allow most of the remaining 123 child detainees humanitarian parole into the US. Resistance by the detained children and the solidarity actions by their American allies had freed them and ensured their entrance to the US. But not before more than half of the unaccompanied children had been sent back to Haiti.

The detention of children and the separation of families has a much longer history than even this relatively recent episode suggests. But a more honourable tradition also endures, and that is the determination of migrants and their allies to fight for freedom.

■ Lindskoog is assistant professor of history at Raritan Valley Community College and author of Detain and Punish: Haitian Refugees and the Rise of the World’s Largest Immigration Detention System SHE breathed heavily and complained of chest pains.

It had been three nights and her body yearned for its cracked chakras.

Acupuncture wouldn’t work, her nerve endings had snapped.

If only she could drag her feet on the rug.

If only there was a rug on the hospital floor.

She could create enough static to grow lightning bolts on her fingerprints; touch her chest, and re-spark her chi.

But it seemed her lifeline, a contaminated drip attached to her skin, and the fabric of her humanity were untangled at the seams.

She was attached to her detachment with the living even though she still had a pulse.

Faint as it was, a pulse is a pulse. And it slowly counted nurses footsteps echoing gongs measuring the distance to her final exit as they walked passed her dilapidating frame.

This was that third night and she was terrified of sleeping on the floor. Again.

The thin blanket failed to keep the cold floor at bay.

When that cold with coloniser tendencies came, it decided to stay.

By some strange osmosis, it binded to her bones.

It was as though her body grew roots of frost and planted itself on the hospital floor.

She would shiver. Gradually faded away.

She would quiver. Her voice dropped a few notches.

There were no doctors.

It had been more than enough days of Mabeleza seeing death play musical chairs with other patients in the admission ward at Chris Hani Baragwanath.

Waiting her turn.

She was 50 years old and loved me like I was one of her three.

For 72 hours, my aunt waited to get a bed at the hospital in 2014.

I remember that Monday when she fell ill.

Attempting to go to a local clinic, she struggled out her Mofolo, Soweto home.

Her bones, the same ones that would later meet the cold floor, crumbled.

She stumbled. She collapsed and was rushed to Bara that Monday. This was the first day.

This is where the contamination on her arm from the drip began.

This is where she was seated in a wheelchair and her wait began.

Tuesday came. My cousin, Origin, her oldest son skipped through other half-alive patients on the floor.

He had fruits for Mabeleza. She had no appetite.

He had tears in his eyes. She had death in hers.

He could see it lingering through this window to her soul.

He had a younger brother and sister to get back to.

She had the floor to lay back on. Wednesday came. Nothing had changed except her condition for the worse.

She begged him not to leave her. She could no longer bear her new spine of concrete.

She was still waiting for a bed. She never got one.

The hospital said she did. Whether she did or not, Mabeleza died in the early hours of Thursday morning after her condition had deteriorated.

I broke into half. And those half into others in an eternal domino effect.

To this day, nothing inside me is intact.

Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi said R90 of a our premium medical aid payment goes to brokers, who only make medical aids more expensive, meaning the poor suffer most.

Maybe if brokers were things of the past and medical aid was cheaper, Mabeleza would have had one. She may have had access to a bed. Maybe even a doctor.