The U.S. Government Is Engaged in the Human Trafficking of Children

Cover of next week's New Yorker evoking the Statue of Liberty and also
Dickens' "A Christmas Carol"

The horror just accelerates as we learn more.  Numerous reports of children separated from their mothers at the border being secretly transported--leaving and arriving in the dead of night-- to be imprisoned in other parts of the country.

They are in New York City, Chicago, Seattle, Pittsburgh, the Bay Area, Los Angeles and elsewhere.  They were transported without the knowledge of local or state officials, and currently without granting access to these officials, including health officials.

 There as well as near the border, no one is permitted to see or talk to these children, or to see inside facilities, and report on what they've seen.  (Some do anyway.)  No photos, no images come out of them except a few smuggled photographs and those that the government creates and distributes.

Moreover, there is widespread agreement that the identities of these children are unknown--unknown!--not only to the public but to their captors, agents of our government.  They don't know the names of these children and they have not kept records that tell them who their parents are.  Information that some children had with them was reportedly taken away from them.

The new tent prisons are among those that are created and controlled by corporations who are, according to the New York Times, making a billion dollars.  Conditions inside such facilities in the past have included maggots in the food, child abuse and sexual abuse.  Meanwhile the Administration has applied to the relevant court to suspend the requirement for state and local licensing of these prisons, which means potentially worse conditions and certainly more secrecy.

The secrecy, the stripping of identity and secret transport goes beyond child abuse, goes beyond the concentration camp.  It is now the human trafficking of children.

This is the legal definition of human trafficking: The transportation or commercial exchange of an individual by coercion or deception for the purpose of exploitation.  These children are being coerced and transported for the purpose of commercial and political exploitation.  Everything about it fits the definition, even before we start asking questions about where particularly the youngest are likely to end up--in the hands of adoption agencies perhaps.

An immigration judge is quoted as pointing out that standard procedure means that if the government takes your wallet you get a receipt.  But this government is taking children without any accountability.

These prisons are refusing to disclose information or permit inspection by public officials.  The totalitarian nature of this is scheduled to increase as reports are that the U.S. military is being ordered to prepare prisons for 20,000 migrants, and military lawyers (known as JAGs) are being ordered to act as prosecutors of migrants.  This coming just after the current administration ended funding to support legal advocacy for children caught in the system.

The lives of at least 2300 children have been harmed forever, with physical and psychological effects that will last their entire lives.  There are babies who have lived an eighth of their lives imprisoned and separated from their mothers.

What this is doing to the rule of law, to human rights, to human decency is incalculable and ongoing.