Young immigrants detained in Virginia center allege abuse

[demmiblue]

WASHINGTON (AP) — Immigrant children as young as 14 housed at a juvenile detention center in Virginia say they were beaten while handcuffed and locked up for long periods in solitary confinement, left nude and shivering in concrete cells.

The abuse claims against the Shenandoah Valley Juvenile Center near Staunton, Virginia, are detailed in federal court filings that include a half-dozen sworn statements from Latino teens jailed there for months or years. Multiple detainees say the guards stripped them of their clothes and strapped them to chairs with bags placed over their heads.

“Whenever they used to restrain me and put me in the chair, they would handcuff me,” said a Honduran immigrant who was sent to the facility when he was 15 years old. “Strapped me down all the way, from your feet all the way to your chest, you couldn’t really move. ... They have total control over you. They also put a bag over your head. It has little holes; you can see through it. But you feel suffocated with the bag on.”

In addition to the children’s first-hand, translated accounts in court filings, a former child-development specialist who worked inside the facility independently told The Associated Press this week that she saw kids there with bruises and broken bones they blamed on guards. She spoke on condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to publicly discuss the children’s cases.

...

Most children held in the Shenandoah facility who were the focus of the abuse lawsuit were caught crossing the border illegally alone. They were not the children who have been separated from their families under the Trump administration’s recent policy and are now in the government’s care. But the facility there operates under the same program run by the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement. It was not immediately clear whether any separated children have been sent to Shenandoah Valley since the Trump administration in April announced its “zero tolerance” policy toward immigrant families, after the lawsuit was filed.

https://apnews.com/afc80e51b562462c89907b49ae624e79

[duforsure]

1. I think the damages to these children will be

Coming out for years , They should be made right by us showing the world we are not like trump, and the children ripped away and their parents should be given full citizenship from what trumps done to them, or we're like him and the gop. All gop need to be voted out of office, period. There's no excuse for what they've done to damage these children and their families for life.

[Igel]

4. That's the usual response.

They've been better Americans than most Americans, simply by crossing the border and being.

But in this case a few keywords are relevant: "years" is one of them. I assume Trump's been doing this since at least summer 2016, meaning there was a coup and Obama was removed from office months before the election.

A second is "not": "They were not the children who have been separated from their families. ..."

These are kids who either self-ripped from their families to come to the US by themselves or whose adult members self-ripped themselves away from their kids to come here so that the kids are immigrating to join them. Obviously, ripping families apart is a bad, bad thing and hurts kids. So either the kids self-abused or their parents were bad for abandoning their kids. Such is life.

[blake2012]

5. Your post is interesting. Almost like you are minimizing the reports of abuse of minors in custody

[Demsrule86]

2. This is a fucking nightmare. We have to shut down the for profit jails for anyone but especially

the vulnerable undocumented population.

[LesleyMoTN]

3. Would love to see the UN Human Rights Council step in.

The irony would be lovely.