Devastating
The email arrived in our in-baskets late last week. Numerous parents had been moved to private immigration detention centers in multiple states after having been separated from their children at the U.s.-mexico border. Their crime? Crossing into the United States to flee horrific violence in their home countries of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador; countries with some of the highest homicide rates in the world. The request was simple and heartbreaking. Were any medical providers willing to evaluate these mothers’ and fathers’ physical and mental statuses since their children were taken from them at the border by the U.S. government?
In the past two months, it has been reported that nearly 2,300 children, some as young as toddlers, have been separated from their parents by U.S. officials at our southern border. As a pediatrician and an immigration lawyer, we see the devastating and irreversible consequences that this cruel and immoral government policy has on parents, children, families, and our country as a whole. In our respective professions, we work with children and families. One of us medically treats, and the other legally advocates for children and families.
Pediatricians know of the medical complications that come from living under chronic stress and on a regular basis they witness and diagnose its aftermath. Toxic stress is a well-described medical phenomenon. Remove a child from their parents and put them in holding cells, private detention centers, or converted Walmart shopping centers, and their cortisol and adrenaline increase, chronically. It is the fight or flight response, and not for seconds, or hours, but months. Heart rate and blood pressure increase, chronically. Children do not thrive in this environment. They decline mentally, socially, and physically. This is a well-studied, researched and documented medical phenomenon.
Consider Jasmine, whose last name cannot be used, now a 19-year-old Honduran patient and her 2-year-old daughter. Her daughter is a product of rape by her former Honduran boyfriend, a gang member in Tegucigalpa. She was one of the lucky immigrants who was not detained at the U.S.
border, while pregnant. She and her daughter live with relatives that she previously had not seen since she was 4 years old. This patient now works and cares for her daughter as she awaits a decision on her legal status. She first came for medical care at 17 years old with a newborn, bewildered, shellshocked and trying to determine her place in a new city with family she did not remember.
It is hard to overstate the cruelty of a government, our government, intentionally separating parents from their children as they flee persecution and violence in their home countries.
The Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network (RMIAN) has met with dozens of parents at the Aurora immigration detention center who came to the United States seeking protection, and then were brutally separated from their children, some as young as five years old.
In talking with these immigrant advocacy attorneys and social workers at the civil immigration detention center, these mothers and fathers describe their last moments with their children, reliving the moments when their children were torn from their arms. Parents describe the horror of not knowing where their children are being held or who is taking care of them. Many parents are contemplating giving up their meritorious asylum cases because they have no idea where their children are, and the only thing that matters to them — in fact the reason they fled their home countries — is for their children’s safety. This dedication, this unbreakable bond between a parent and child, is universal to the human experience and an aspect of all of our lives, one which we would sacrifice everything to protect.
The immoral and socially reprehensible tactics of separating families fleeing persecution and seeking protection in the U.S. must end.
However, the president’s Executive Order issued on June 20 is not the answer; it merely trades one cruel policy for another. Increased detention of parents and children together in private detention centers with minimal oversight, medically or otherwise, is inhumane and perpetuates additional trauma on children and families.
Families should not be treated as criminals when they are doing what each of us would do if our children’s lives were threatened — seek safe haven. Children need their mothers and fathers and a nurturing environment, outside of detention, where they can thrive, grow and learn, while their immigration cases are justly adjudicated.
The United States prides itself on equal access to justice for all. Yet, immigrants in immigration removal proceedings — even children, and those in detention — have no right to court-appointed counsel. If we want to hold ourselves up as a country of laws, we must protect the integrity of the immigration court system. We must ensure that individuals, and especially children, who do not have the money to hire private attorneys, are provided an attorney to protect their rights in these often life-and-death court hearings. Similarly, more medical providers need to be trained to perform medical and psychiatric forensic exams, and to document the ways in which our country is causing untold harm through these brutal policies.
Today, we all should think long and hard about where our country is headed. We are all witness to the most pressing moral dilemma of our generation. Inaction is not the answer.