Migrant teens allege abuse by chair, mask

VERONA, Va. — Guards at a juvenile detention center for troubled immigrant teenagers had many ways of handling serious problems. At times, they resorted to the chair. Other times, the mask.

According to migrant teenagers and a former worker, the high, hard-backed metal chair had wheels so it could be tilted and moved like a dolly through the halls of the Shenandoah Valley Juvenile Center, a northwestern Virginia facility that houses U.S. and unauthorized migrant youths who have emotional, behavioral and psychological issues.

Teenagers as young as 14 were strapped to the chair — some stripped down to their underwear — with their feet, arms and waist restrained by cushioned leather straps and loops, they said.

One former worker said that those who guards feared might spit on staff got the mask — a mesh hood that covered their entire faces and heads.

Uses of the chair and mask are among the more extreme examples of complaints that have emerged from inside a handful of detention centers that house teenage migrants with a history of violence, mental health problems or, in some cases, gang affiliation. A few hundred a year are held in this separate network of jail-like facilities that also hold U.S. juveniles who have been sent there for a range of behavioral issues and crimes, including assault and murder.

The centers have tougher security measures than the immigrant-only shelters where a vast majority of the migrant teenagers are sent after entering the country illegally.

For years, the government has sent the most troubled migrant youths to these more restrictive facilities, and many complaints about these sites came well before the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration. Others, though, have been lodged in the wake of the recent surge of detained immigrant children and teenagers, accusations that include use of the restraint devices, injections of psychotropic drugs and long periods in solitary confinement.

The Virginia facility and the government commission that receives millions of federal dollars to run it is facing a classaction lawsuit. The center — operated by the Shenandoah Valley Juvenile Center Commis- sion, a three-county, four-city agency — said in a statement that it “takes all allegations of misconduct very seriously, including the complaints of abuse described in the pending federal lawsuit.” The center concluded that the allegations lacked merit.

Tom Brenner / New York Times Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar has defended the work of the agency and its contractors in detaining immigrant teens.