In Chicago Tribune Op-Ed, Professor Claudia Flores Addresses Migrant Child Abuse
Commentary: We must protect migrant children from abuse by U.S. Border Patrol
We talk a lot about protecting children. We want to protect them from violence in our neighborhoods and schools. We want to protect them from abuse and neglect in our institutions and homes.
But what happens when the kids are not our kids? Do we still care about children even when they happen to be born elsewhere? What if those children are being held by our government? What if they are being apprehended, guarded and detained by our government agents and dependent on those agents to treat them with dignity and humanity? Do we care what happens to these children then?
How do we feel about these children being punched, kicked, tased, dragged along the ground, grabbed on the buttocks, made to sleep in freezing rooms on cement floors covered in garbage, denied medical care and threatened with having their food withheld by our civil servants?
These are the conditions detailed in a report released Wednesday by the ACLU and the International Human Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School. The report accompanies approximately 30,000 pages of documentation obtained by the ACLU through the Freedom of Information Act that describe abusive treatment of children in the custody of the Department of Homeland Security’s Customs and Border Protection.
This is not the first report of abuse of migrants by Border Patrol agents at the U.S. southern border and of the culture of abuse and impunity that seems to have developed in our immigration enforcement. Earlier this year, Francisco Cantu published a memoir of his time as a Border Patrol agent that described a practice of institutional violence and dehumanization of migrants. Reviewers balked at his admission that agents regularly destroyed stashes of water hidden by migrants in an effort to survive the unforgiving desert climate.
It turns out that was just the tip of a very disturbing iceberg. CBP officials threaten and humiliate children, physically assault them and detain them in unhygienic conditions, according to the new report.
Read more at The Chicago Tribune