On the morning that Time Magazine announced its new “Welcome to America” cover showing President Trump greeting a two-year-old Honduran girl crying at the US-Mexico border, the AP broke a story about immigrant children as young as 14 alleging abuse in a detention center in Virginia.
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Time’s cover:
“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,” Michael Biesecker, Jake Pearson and Garance Burke wrote in the AP Thursday morning.
The children are being housed in Shenandoah Valley Juvenile Center and the abuse allegations are a part of federal court filings.
It sounds like much that is wrong with Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, as teenagers describe the guards stripping them of their clothes, strapping them to chairs, and placing bags over their heads.
Some of these teenagers have been there for years. Immigration authorities have accused some of the children of being gang members, including Donald Trump’s favorite scapegoat of the moment MS-13. But the AP notes that in a recent congressional hearing, the top manager of the detention center said they children did not actually appear to be gang members, but actually to be suffering from trauma related to their home countries.
When Donald Trump decided to use children as a pawn in his ill-advised immigration games, he stepped willingly into the minefield of our broken immigration system. No one is claiming it was perfect before, but what Donald Trump has done is show the United States to be a place where abuse of children is condoned.
Conservatives as a whole do not seem to value upholding the law when it comes to the mercy this country used to stand for and upholding international laws against abuse of adult prisoners. There are basic reasons why we are not supposed to torture prisoners, including that we are supposed to stand for a freedom and liberty that do not permit such behavior and it also only helps recruitment for terrorist groups.
It should go without saying that we should not be torturing children. But apparently this is now something we have to say.
The Trump administration is also forcibly drugging children, according to a lawsuit. “Immigrant children are being routinely and forcibly given a range of psychotropic drugs at U.S. government-funded youth shelters to manage their trauma after being detained and in some cases separated from parents, according to a lawsuit.”
They moved young girls after midnight on the streets of New York, and put coverings over them as they put them into cars after reporters asked questions and they lied about who the girls were.
Many people over multiple states not only agreed to these orders, but are taking part in covering up the abuses. This is on ongoing moral crisis of such epic proportions it is impossible to articulate.
People must continue to speak out and demand that children are not only reunited with their families, but that Congress finally do its job and pass an immigration law that upholds American values and honors the spirit and intent of a country that was built by immigrants.
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Sarah has been credentialed to cover President Barack Obama, then VP Joe Biden, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and exclusively interviewed Speaker Nancy Pelosi multiple times and exclusively covered her first home appearance after the first impeachment of then President Donald Trump.
Sarah is two-time Telly award winning video producer and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.
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