"According to public defenders, immigration agents told some parents that their children were being taken for a bath, or taken briefly for questioning. It took hours for parents to realize their children had really been taken away indefinitely."
Shades of the Nazis, offering a nice shower but delivering poison gas.
"Nick Miroff of the Washington Post revealed that one father died by suicide in a detention cell, the night after his 3-year-old had been physically ripped out of his arms.
According to CNN, one mother reported that her child had been taken from her while she was nursing. The mother claimed she was placed in handcuffs when she tried to protest."
Update 6/16: The government admits to taking nearly 2,000 children away from their parents in the first few weeks of the program, an average of 48 a day. Some observers believe this is an undercount. A Border Patrol chief says that the current rate could soon double.
A doctor who visited a shelter for young children was interviewed by the Washington Post:
"But the first child who caught the prominent pediatrician’s attention during a recent visit was anything but happy. Inside a room dedicated to toddlers was a little girl no older than 2, screaming and pounding her fists on a mat. One woman tried to give her toys and books to calm her down, but even that shelter worker seemed frustrated, Kraft told The Washington Post, because as much as she wanted to console the little girl, she couldn’t touch, hold or pick her up to let her know everything would be all right. That was the rule, Kraft said she was told: They’re not allowed to touch the children.
“The really devastating thing was that we all knew what was going on with this child. We all knew what the problem was,” Kraft said. “She didn’t have her mother, and none of us can fix that.”
According to NBC news, there are as many as 11,000 children imprisoned: infants, babies, toddlers, young children, adolescents. Some have been kept in cages. But nobody knows the actual number. The media has seen only one facility--a converted Walmart--with more than 1500 boys, but nobody has seen others, particularly with infants, babies and toddlers. [see update above] Even at that one facility, reporters weren't permitted to speak with inmates or in most cases to take photos.
White House spokesperson S.H. Sanders was heavily questioned on Thursday about this human rights abuse. One outburst by a media rep has been widely featured, but not this one, noted by Politico:
“It's a policy to take children away from their parents," Acosta said. "Can you imagine the horror these children must be going to, when they come across the border, they're with their parents and suddenly they're pulled away from their parents? Why is government doing this?”
“Because it's the law,” Sanders said.
It is a policy established by AG Jeff Sessions, who also wants everyone to believe it is the law, as he justified it by quoting a Biblical passage from St. Paul, which out of context says that laws must be obeyed because they are the instruments of God.
As Ed Kilgore comments:
Those who are unacquainted with the Bible should be aware that the brief seven-verse portion of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans has been throughout the ages cited to oppose resistance to just about every unjust law or regime you can imagine. As the New York Times’ Yoni Applebaum quickly pointed out, it was especially popular among those opposing resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act in the run-up to the Civil War. It was reportedly Adolf Hitler’s favorite biblical passage. And it was used by defenders of South African Apartheid and of our own Jim Crow."
Sessions himself is pretty selective about which laws he thinks are God's will: the Affordable Care Act's guarantee that care will be covered for pre-existing conditions being one of them that must be the devil's work.
Senator Feinstein of California has introduced legislation that simply and directly reverses this policy and prevents families from being broken at the border. If Republicans are so flummoxed by the law let them vote to change it.
But no one expects that to happen. So Americans take to the streets--first locally, as in California on Monday, on a related aspect: the treatment of asylum seekers:
"In what is likely the first in a series of immigration-related protests, several hundred people came to a rally outside the Otay Mesa Detention Center on Sunday demanding the release of asylum seekers fleeing gang violence and state repression.
They were taking up the cause of asylum seekers who –for the most part–have voluntarily turned themselves at the border. Little did the protesters know their own participation in the event would lead to harassment by border authorities.
Protests are spreading nationwide in the wake of horrific reports of abuse and mistreatment by immigration agencies. People are speaking out against a President who refers to immigrants as ‘animals’ and implements policies inflicting punishment on people whose rights to due process are rapidly vanishing."
Conditions in one facility for these captives involved virtual slave labor.
The first national protests on the separation of children from parents and the imprisonment of children were held on Thursday, as thousands of Americans marched in an estimated 30 US cities and towns. That will have to be just the beginning of protest.
The New York Times coverage on the Los Angeles demo began:
"Drawing on an American history of cruelty, from the conquest of the Indians to the slave trade to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, activists in this city gathered on Thursday to voice outrage at what they see as the latest affront to American values by the Trump administration: splitting up migrant families at border crossings, and confining children in detention facilities.
“I think we are fighting for the heart and soul of America,” Yolanda Varela Gonzalez, a teacher and activist, told a crowd of several hundred protesters in MacArthur Park, before they marched to an immigrant detention center in downtown Los Angeles."
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