Cleaning toilets, following rules: A migrant child’s days in detention
Do not misbehave. Do not sit on the floor. Do not share your food. Do not use nicknames.
Also, it is best not to cry. Doing so might hurt your case.
Lights out by 9 p.m. and lights on at dawn, after which you make your bed according to the step-by-step instructions posted on the wall. Wash and mop the bathroom, scrubbing the sinks and toilets. Then it is time to form a line for the walk to breakfast.
“You had to get in line for everything,” recalled Leticia, a girl from Guatemala.
Small, slight and with long black hair, Leticia was separated from her mother after they illegally crossed the border in late May. She was sent to a shelter in South Texas — one of more than 100 government-contracted detention facilities for migrant children around the country that are a rough blend of boarding school, day care center and medium security lockup. They are reserved for the likes of Leticia, 12, and her brother, Walter, 10.
The facility’s list of no-no’s also included this: Do not touch another child, even if that child is your hermanito or hermanita — your little brother or sister.
Leticia had hoped to give her little brother a reassuring hug. But “they told me I couldn’t touch him,” she recalled.
In response to an international outcry, President Donald Trump recently issued an executive order to end his administration’s practice, first widely put into effect in May, of forcibly removing children from migrant parents who had entered the country illegally.
Under that “zerotolerance” policy for border enforcement, thousands of children were sent to holding facilities, sometimes hundreds or thousands of miles from where their parents were being held for criminal prosecution.
Last week, in trying to comply with a court order, the government returned slightly more than half the 103 children under the age of 5 to their migrant parents.
But more than 2,800 children — some of them separated from their parents, some of them classified at the border as “unaccompanied minors” — remain in these facilities, where the environments range from impersonally austere to nearly bucolic, save for the fact that the children are formidably discouraged from leaving and their parents or guardians are nowhere in sight.
Depending on several variables, including happenstance, a child might be sent to a 33-acre youth shelter in Yonkers, New York, that features picnic tables, sports fields and even an outdoor pool. “Like summer camp,” said Rep. Eliot L. Engel, D-N.Y., who recently visited the campus.
Or that child could wind up at a converted motel along a tired Tucson, Arizona, strip of discount stores, gas stations and budget motels. Recreation takes place in a grassless compound, and the old motel’s damaged swimming pool is covered up.
Still, some elements of these detention centers seem universally shared, whether they are in northern Illinois or South Texas. The multiple rules. The wake-up calls and the lights-out calls. The several hours of schooling every day, which might include a civics class in American history and laws, though not necessarily the ones that led to their incarceration.
Most of all, these facilities are united by a collective sense of aching uncertainty — scores of children gathered under a roof who have no idea when they will see their parents again.
Leticia wrote letters from the shelter in South Texas to her mother, who was being held in Arizona, to tell her how much she missed her.
She kept the letters safe in a folder for the day when she and her mother would be reunited, though that still hasn’t happened.
The complicated matters of immigration reform and border enforcement have vexed U.S. presidents for at least two generations. The Trump administration entered the White House in 2017 with a pledge to end the problems, and for several months, it chose one of the harshest deterrents ever employed by a modern president: the separation of migrant children from their parents.