A year ago, America awoke to the shocking images of children being held in cages – children who had been stolen from their asylum-seeking parents at the border by an administration that had no plan to reunite them.
Now, on the anniversary of that nightmare, the Trump administration is demonstrating again what seems to be a deliberate strategy of unmitigated, unrelenting cruelty toward people of color who dare to seek asylum in our country.
Once again, children are at the center of this real-life horror show.
Lawyers who visited a Border Patrol station in Clint, Texas, last week found hundreds of children living in intolerable conditions – hungry, deprived of basic needs and sleeping in concrete prison cells designed for adults.
The New Yorker wrote on Saturday: “The conditions the lawyers found were shocking: flu and lice outbreaks were going untreated, and children were filthy, sleeping on cold floors, and taking care of one another because of the lack of attention from guards. Some of them had been in the facility for weeks.”
In one case, guards punished children – for losing a comb – by taking away their blankets and mats, forcing them to sleep directly on the concrete floor.
There were also teen mothers with infants at the facility, along with several toddlers who were being cared for by other children, some as young as 8. The Associated Press wrote: “Three girls told attorneys they were trying to take care of the 2-year-old boy, who had wet his pants and had no diaper and was wearing a mucus-smeared shirt when the legal team encountered him.”
Read the full article: Southern Poverty Law Center
Photo by Reade Levinson/Reuters