WEEK THAT TORE AMERICA’S CONSCIENCE
Even Trump diehards are horrified. TOM LEONARD reports from a warehouse on the Mexican border where children, separated from their migrant parents, are caged – and reveals it happened under Obama too
HIDDEN inside a former fruit and vegetable warehouse on an industrial estate in the Texas border town of McAllen is a highly controversial experiment in dealing with the problem of illegal immigration.
One wing of the dark, 77,000 sq ft refrigerated building is home to hundreds of children who live in a collection of cages made from chain link fencing. Up to 20 youngsters — aged up to 17 — are in each cage, and scattered around the concrete floor are water bottles, giant bags of crisps and large foil sheets instead of blankets on the thin green mats laid out to sleep on. Overhead, the lighting stays on continually. There are no toys, games or books.
The cages, about 30ft by 30ft, open into a common area where there are portable lavatories, but the children cannot get into the other wings which hold single adult detainees and parents with children aged under five, who are generally left intact as a family.
One teenage girl said she had been caring for a four-year-old child separated from her aunt at the border, and that she’d had to explain to other youngsters in the cage how to change the child’s nappy. Many of the ‘ inmates’ are illiterate, and some speak only obscure national dialects. Visitors have said they were shocked such conditions exist outside prisons.
In all, around 1,100 people — including some 200 unaccompanied children and 500 younger ones with their parents — are being held here at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency’s biggest immigration processing and detention centre. It is known as Ursula — although inmates call it La Perrera, Spanish for ‘dog kennel’ — and is the central processing facility for immigrants captured in the Rio Grande Valley in the southeastern tip of Texas, the busiest area for America’s border police.
It was images and reports from Ursula detention centre about children being systematically separated from their parents under the White House’s ‘zero-tolerance’ immigration policy that have sent shockwaves around the world.
They also inflamed the debate convulsing Europe over just how much immigration First World countries can take, and how much right nations have to defend their borders.
As Donald Trump was plunged into the greatest public relations crisis of his presidency, not only senior Republicans but every living First Lady — including, most significantly, Melania Trump — attacked his policy as heartless.
The narrative over the immigrants changed dramatically on Wednesday when the President made a very rare concession to hostile public opinion and actually backed down. Or at least he appeared to back down. Trump signed an executive order to cease his own administration’s practice of separating families. BUT
within 24 hours, railing at political opponents and at Mexico for thwarting his efforts to protect America’s borders, Trump gave conflicting signals as to whether he really does intend keep these families together.
While he made clear the U.S. has to be able to detain adults indefinitely while it considers their cases, under the law children must be released after 20 days. How, then, can families remain together?
Mrs Trump arrived unannounced in McAllen on Thursday, dropping out of the skies during an almost biblical downpour.
Her visit was intended to show solidarity with immigrant children as she visited a care centre.
However, as tends to happen with the Trumps, the gesture was overshadowed by instant controversy after the First Lady was photographed boarding her helicopter in a parka coat adorned with the graffiti-style message: ‘I REALLY DON’T CARE, DO U?’
The White House unconvincingly claimed there was ‘no hidden message’, but America was left wondering if she meant it as a jibe at her husband’s immigration policy, or a rebuff to immigrant families. Mr Trump insisted it was aimed at the ‘fake media’ but critics agreed that, whatever the truth, the wardrobe choice had been tone deaf.
Confusion reigns in Washington as to what will happen now. In particular, a question mark hangs over the more than 2,340 children aged four to 17 who have so far been separated from their parents after crossing the southern U.S. border since early May, when the Trump administration introduced its ‘zero-tolerance’ policy.
Some have been bussed thousands of miles to longer-term shelters in cities such as New York. The Office of Refugee Resettlement says the average child stays in such facilities fewer than 57 days, but some have been detained for months longer. The organisation can house 10,000 immigrant children, but is running out of space.
One temporary solution is the air- conditioned tent city near El Paso, Texas. Alarming aerial photos this week showed youngsters marching between tents there — surrounded by chain-link fences — like inmates in a prison camp.
The Pentagon has said it has been asked to supply 20,000 beds for immigrant children on military bases in Texas and Arkansas. Until now the plan has ultimately been to find them family members or foster parents to take them in while their parents are detained.
Parents being deported may request their children leave with them, or decide to leave them in the U.S. to pursue their own immigration claim. Some parents have claimed they’ve been deported before recovering their offspring.
It presents a brutal picture of ‘civilised’ America, but Trump — elected on the battlecry that he would ‘build the wall’ on his southern border — has always said getting tough on illegal immigration would be a priority.
There’s no doubt parts of the U.S. are afflicted by ultra-violent Central American-based street gangs, many of whose members are in the country illegally. Trump has highlighted them to justify his immigration concerns, and polls show many Americans agree he’s right to worry about thugs infiltrating the border.
His opponents counter that most illegal immigrants are innocents fleeing that violence.
It was in April that Attorney General Jeff Sessions said all adults arrested at the border would face criminal prosecution for illegal entry to America, and that while they were in custody they would be separated from any accompanying children. ‘If you don’t like that, then don’t smuggle children over our border,’ he said.
Now, after outrage in Washington and across the U.S., Mr Sessions has conceded Americans don’t like seeing families, even those of ‘fence jumpers’, being split up.
Some of the claims that have been made about the treatment of the separated families are certainly damning. Some parents insisted their children were taken away on the pretence that they were going for a bath at the McAllen centre — a claim with ghastly echoes of how the Nazis led concentration camp inmates to the gas chambers by telling them they were going to have a shower.
Government officials rejected these claims as ‘completely false’, and insist parents have been kept fully informed about absent offspring. (Leaflets are given to them explaining the separation process before they go to court, but given many immigrants are illiterate, this may not have helped.)
U.S. officials say that of the 12,000 children they hold, 10,000 either came alone or with traffickers. The remainder, who came with parents, inevitably tend to be younger.
The most heart-wrenching piece of evidence against the government policy is an eight-minute audio recording purporting to be of immigrant children, aged four to ten, crying uncontrollably after being separated from their parents. The recording, reportedly made on the Texas border within the past ten days, also appears to feature the voice of a mocking U.S. border patrol agent. ‘Well, we have an orchestra here,’ he says as the
children bawl in unison. ‘What’s missing is a conductor.’
Beata Mariana de Jesus MejiaMejia, from Guatemala, decided to sue the U.S. government when she was separated from her sevenyear-old son two days after they were seized at the border.
She said she hadn’t seen him for a month, which she described as ‘being like a knife in your chest’.
She insists officials refused to tell her where he was, allowing her to speak with him on the phone just once. A day after Mr Trump’s climbdown this week, the mother was told they could be reunited.
Such stories have appalled Americans, who have shown that — for all the toxic divisiveness gripping U.S. politics — they still possess a passionate belief in the sanctity of the family.
However, questions are now being asked about whether these emotive images and audio recordings are being exploited by Trump’s opponents, in the hope of damaging him in crucial Congressional elections in November.
Forexample, the cover of the latest issue of the influential Time magazine features a picture of a crying two-year- old Honduran girl mocked-up next to a glowering Trump. Intriguingly, it turns out that the girl was in tears as her mother was questioned, but was never separated from her family.
Trump’s critics — most of them Democrats — have glossed over the fact that Barack obama’s administration resorted to similar border tactics in its efforts to hold back a rising tide of illegal immigrants from Latin America.
Prominent liberal Trump opponents, including the ex-mayor of Los Angeles, and former obama speechwriter Jon Favreau, spectacularly stumbled in their desperation to demonise him when they shared pictures of young immigrants languishing on the floor in cages on social media. Those photos turned out to have been taken at an Arizona detention facility in 2014 — when the sainted obama was in power, at which point Trump’s accusers rapidly deleted their tweets.
obama established prison-like family detention centres and was sharply criticised for keeping children locked up with their parents when they could have gone to live with guardians or relatives.
His supporters insist there was a crucial difference from Trump: their administration didn’t separate families as a blanket policy, as Trump has done.
That’s correct, but immigration experts revealed this week that the obama White House did resort to splitting up families and caging children as it struggled to cope with a rise in child migrants, that saw nearly 70,000 minors flood the U.S. in 2014 alone.
Democrat Texas congressman Henry Cuellar, told CNN this week that the family separations were ‘kept very quiet under the obama administration’.
His revelation came just days after the Left-wing American Civil Liberties Union made bombshell allegations that immigrant children were abused physically, sexually and emotionally in custody during obama’s administration.
The ACLU — no friend of Trump — says it has 30,000 pages of documents detailing the ‘monstrous’ behaviour of obama’s border patrol force during an administration that admitted it was alarmed by rocketing numbers of children trying to get over the border.
These claims certainly don’t excuse the behaviour of the Trump regime, but they illustrate the hypocrisy surrounding America’s immigration debate (obama has been vocal in condemning his successor’s tactics). For all the attempts by some on the Left to establish an immigration free-forall through open borders, even a high-minded liberal like obama accepts that a country has a right to vigorously defend its borders. When I spoke to locals in McAllen this week, I found little sympathy for an administration that has been relentlessly hostile towards Mexicans, not least because 85 per cent of people are Hispanic here and generally Democrat.
An interfaith candlelit vigil was held in the town on Wednesday night to protest about the family separation policy. A rabbi told the story of the St Louis, a ship carrying Jewish refugees from Germany that was turned away by the U.S. in 1939. The implication was clear — America is sending immigrant families back to a bleak fate in violent central America.
THefollowing day, opponents of Trump’s policy claimed victory at McAllen’s main court when illegal entry charges against 17 immigrant parents were dismissed when it became clear they crossed the border with children.
one dissenting voice came in McAllen’s local paper, the Monitor. ruben Navarrette, a MexicanAmerican defender of illegal _ immigrants, lambasted ‘partisan Democrats with bad memories’ about the ‘ atrocities committed by the obama administration’.
He said: ‘ During the obama years, more than 40,000 U.S.-born children whose parents had been deported were dumped into foster care.’
This week the Trump administration denied separating families was a ploy to deter immigrants. But CNN reported from the MexicoGuatemala border that horrified mothers with children had heard the news and vowed not to go on.
Some Americans feel such desperate people should be let into the U.S. others clearly agree with their President that, after 50 years of indulging undocumented immigrants, it’s time to do whatever it takes to secure America’s vulnerable southern border.