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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsMigrant kids were stripped, drugged, locked away. So much for compassion.
(Nemesis, where are you when we need you??)
Migrant kids were stripped, drugged, locked away. So much for compassion.
The Shenandoah Valley Juvenile Center near Staunton, Va. (Zachary Wajsgras/AP)
by Editorial Board August 5 at 6:27 PM
WHEN ACCOUNTS of abuse emerged in June from a detention center for migrant minors in Virginia children as young as 14 stripped naked, shackled, strapped to chairs, their heads encased in bags, left for days or longer in solitary confinement, and in some cases beaten and bruised it sounded like a scene from the Soviet gulag. This institution, the Shenandoah Valley Juvenile Center, near Staunton, couldnt possibly be in America. And if it was, it had to be an extreme outlier a place that, while overseen by the Office of Refugee Resettlement at the Department of Health and Human Services, simply could not typify the federal governments handling of children, undocumented or not, who make their way into this country. But abuses alleged at that jail in Virginia turn out to be no worse than those inflicted, on even younger children, at another facility under ORRs purview in Texas. Last Monday, a federal judge, incensed that underage migrants at the Shiloh Residential Treatment Center, south of Houston, had been routinely administered psychotropic drugs without parental consent, denied water as a means of punishment and forbidden from making private phone calls, ordered undocumented minors there transferred elsewhere. Not the Soviet gulag. These things are taking place in America.
Not just coincidentally, it is President Trumps America. True, documented abuses at both facilities pre-date Mr. Trumps administration; at Shiloh, in particular, there have been harrowing reports of mistreatment for years. Yet the president, who has referred to illegal immigrants as animals and rapists who infest the United States, is a serial, casual dehumanizer of immigrants, particularly Hispanic ones. The signals he sends, amplified by Twitter, are heard everywhere. If unauthorized immigrants are vermin, as the president implies, then its legitimate to treat them as such to tie them up, lock them away solo, dehydrate and drug them.
The most recent findings, concerning Shiloh, run by a private contractor and overseen by ORR, are shocking. Staff members there admitted they had administered psychotropic medication to children without bothering to seek consent from parents, relatives or guardians. Officials said extreme psychiatric symptoms justified medicating the children on an emergency basis a fine explanation, except that the drugs were administered routinely in the morning and at night. (And sometimes the children were told the drugs were vitamins.) The childrens testimony led U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee to reject the governments arguments, wondering how emergencies could occur with such clocklike precision. Some of the minors confined at Shiloh, which houses 44 children, three-quarters of them immigrants, described abjectly cruel treatment, prompting the judge to order officials at the facility to provide water as needed to those confined there and permit them private phone calls. That a necessity so basic as the provision of water is the subject of a judicial order is a measure of the official depravity that has gripped Shiloh.
The tools that normalized Japanese American imprisonment during World War II are being deployed against asylum-seeking immigrants today. (Kate Woodsome, Gillian Brockell, Konrad Aderer/The Washington Post)
HHS officials make a point of sounding compassionate when they describe their concern for the thousands of migrant children under their supervision. Those fine words are belied by actual conditions in real-world facilities for which the department is responsible.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/migrant-kids-were-stripped-drugged-locked-away-so-much-for-compassion/2018/08/05/84a779d0-95b4-11e8-a679-b09212fb69c2_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.96f27a0fc6f1
TEB
(12,872 posts)That destroyed these kids and families
niyad
(113,518 posts)oberliner
(58,724 posts)niyad
(113,518 posts)and the staff members of those facilities who are directly committing these heinous acts.
and, frankly, each and every person who thinks that what is happening to the children and their families is okay, along with all of the people who are getting money for running these torture chambers.
who do you think should be exempt? and why?
oberliner
(58,724 posts)For the abuses that took place during their tenure in office.
vlyons
(10,252 posts)and torture?
oberliner
(58,724 posts)mr_lebowski
(33,643 posts)of the abuse *recently* in the two facilities, simply because this articles says there's been reports of mistreatment at both in past (and apparently harrowing ones at Shiloh) ?
Perhaps it's coming to our attention now because it's gotten significantly more egregious/more abusive of late?
oberliner
(58,724 posts)Excerpt:
We have received more than 30,000 pages of internal government documents detailing this abuse between 2009 and 2014 throughout the southern border region. These records, obtained through an ACLU Freedom of Information Act request and subsequent litigation, offer a glimpse into an immigration enforcement system that had been plagued by brutality and lawlessness long before Trump was elected.
I am sure things are even more awful under Trump (as the article title indicates) - but it sounds like things have been really bad for a long time.
no_hypocrisy
(46,158 posts)I watched what happened to my-ex boss. He had a slight neurological condition where he could only shuffle his feet and couldn't button his shirt or type his legal briefs. With a sigh, he decided to go to a local nursing home where he could be treated and monitored.
I visited him shortly before he "checked in". He could still speak with precision and articulation. Could think, was in the moment. He just had coordination issues which were physical.
One week after he was in the nursing home, I was appalled to see the change in him. He was put in a wheelchair. (He could stand and walk 14 days prior.) His head was dropped to a perpendicular position, with his chin literally touching his breastbone. He could no longer speak. He murmured, fumbled for words. He could no longer eat or drink without assistance. I tried to help him as he was hungry and thirsty. (I cut up fruit to small pieces, held a drink with a straw, making sure he wouldn't choke.) It was heartbreaking.
It was obvious that along with his pre-admission prescriptions, he had been given tranquilizers or sedatives. I know he didn't sign up for that. He was fighting it by trying to stay awake, trying to talk to visitors. (NOTE: the vicious cycle is that the patients are "out of it" with those unwanted sedatives, thus reducing the number of people and the number of times they visit the patients.)
Bob finally died within six weeks of admission. Allegedly from a heart attack brought on by his determination to stand from the wheelchair to go to the bathroom independently. He was only 74. I can only guess that while he didn't want a heart attack, he had enough of the BS of a prison disguised as a nursing home.