The man in charge of holding thousands of children in detention camps sat in a TV studio in Washington on Sunday, 2,000 miles from a growing humanitarian crisis on the southwest border, and said everything’s fine.
“There’s adequate food and water,” Acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan said on ABC’s “This Week.” “I know what our standards are, and I know they’re being followed.”
Except they are not. Or the standards are a joke. And it’s high time the Trump administration quits claiming otherwise.
Two compelling reports in the last week have revealed conditions in migrant detention facilities that should shame the nation. The reports describe children going without hot meals for days, and without clean clothes or showers for a month or more. They describe outbreaks of diseases of squalor among the children — scabies, shingles and chickenpox — and the packing of adults into rooms so crowded that they cannot lie down.
One of the reports, an expose by the New York Times published this weekend, has already been shrugged off by President Donald Trump and his team as “fake news.” On Sunday, McAleenan dismissed it all — the inadequate food, the stench, the sickness and the desperation — as “unsubstantiated.”
But the other report, issued earlier last week, was written by the Department of Homeland Security’s own acting inspector general, Jennifer L. Costello.
She is a Trump administration hire, not some “deep state” operative or a holdover from the Obama administration.
Together, the reports drive home the point that, whatever our nation’s overall policy might be with respect to immigration, we have an obligation to care in a humane manner for those who arrive at our borders — and we are failing.
We would like to think that failure is unintended, reflecting the difficulty of the job and a shortage of funding. We would hope the $4.6 billion emergency funding bill passed by Congress two weeks ago leads to improved conditions.
Given the Trump administration’s open hostility toward the Central American migrants, though, we can’t help wonder if every small cruelty is being inflicted by design. Treat desperate people with decency, the thinking goes, and more desperate people will follow.
More than once, Trump has said that if the refugees in the detention facilities are unhappy, they can turn around and go home. As if returning to lives of abject poverty, war and violence were a viable option.
The New York Times report focuses on a Border Patrol facility in Clint, Texas. Based on interviews with current and former Border Patrol agents, lawyers and elected officials, it confirms accusations that civil liberties lawyers have been making for months.
“The stench of the children’s dirty clothing was so strong it spread to the agents’ own clothing — people in town would scrunch their noses when they left work,” the Times reported. “The children cried constantly. One girl seemed likely enough to try to kill herself that the agents made her sleep on a cot in front of them, so they could watch her as they were processing new arrivals.”
Beds were taken from children to make more space in holding cells. The kids slept on the floor. Teenagers were asked to care for younger children because the Border Patrol agents were overwhelmed.
And none of this, the Times wrote, was lost on big bosses in Washington.
Homeland Security’s “leadership knew for months that some children had no beds to sleep on, no way to clean themselves and sometimes went hungry,” the Times reported. “Its own agents had raised the alarm, and found themselves having to accommodate even more new arrivals.”
When we debase others, we debase ourselves. Both the Times and inspector general reports emphasize the emotional toll the poor treatment of the migrants is taking on many Border Patrol agents. There is also, the IG warns, a growing physical danger.
“We are concerned that overcrowding and prolonged detention represent an immediate risk to the health and safety of DHS agents and officers, and to those detained,” the IG wrote.
If the true policy of the Trump administration is to not give a damn, the president and his aides should just say so. It’s not like they’re fooling anybody.
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