SUFFER THE CHILDREN
Outcry over kids separated from parents at border Trump defiant: We will not be migrant camp
President Trump said he won’t stop separating illegal immigrant kids from their parents, such as in this chain-link cage in McAllen, Texas, until he gets his border wall.
Audio and video released Monday offered a heartbreaking look inside Border Patrol detention facilities — where kids who have been separated from their parents wail for their moms and dads and are held in cages.
Children cry out “Mami” and “Papá” over and over in one clip smuggled out of an unspecified facility — while a Border Patrol agent callously makes jokes.
“Well, we have an orchestra here,” the agent is heard saying in Spanish in the audio recording posted by Pro-Publica. “What’s missing is a conductor.” The nearly 8-minute audio clip captures the sobs of 10 Central American children ages 4 to 10 and was made last week, about a day after they were ripped from their parents, the news site said.
One Salvadoran girl begs to speak with her aunt, reciting a phone number she memorized.
“My mommy says that I’ll go with my aunt, and that she’ll come to pick me up there as quickly as possible,” the 6-year-old tearfully tells a consular official.
Immigration detention facilities — and the mental state of the children inside them — have come under scrutiny since the Trump administration unveiled its “zero tolerance” immigration crackdown, which it says has resulted in some 2,000 kids being taken from their parents.
Even video released by the Border Patrol Monday is chilling.
The footage — taken inside a facility in the border city of McAllen, Texas, during a brief press tour Sunday — shows detainees under foil thermal blankets in crowded cage-like cells.
Among the more than 1,100 detainees in the former warehouse are hundreds of youths — from babies to teens — some with their parents and others without.
The detainees are divided into groups — unaccompanied minors, adults on their own and families — and placed in chainlink cells across the 77,000square-foot facility.
In one cage, 20 children are housed together.
About 130 unaccompanied minors are processed at the McAllen center daily, and 15 to 20 of them have typically been separated from their parents, officials told the Los Angeles Times.
But more than 250 lone youths were being processed Sunday morning. Others remained with their parents because federal criminal court was closed for the weekend, the LA Times said.
Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) claimed many more youngsters had been bused out of the center ahead of the tightly controlled tour since his last visit there several weeks ago.
“I was told that buses full [of children] were taken away before I arrived. That was one of my concerns, that essentially, when you have to give lengthy notice, you end up a little bit of a show rather than seeing what’s really going on in these centers,” he told CNN.
The journalists on the press tour were not allowed to speak with detainees or take photographs or videos.
But people who have met chil-
dren there paint a dark picture.
Michelle Brane, an advocate who spent an hour inside Friday, said she met a teen who was caring for a 4-year-old girl she didn’t know because the child’s aunt was elsewhere in the center.
“She had to teach other kids in the cell to change her diaper,” recalled Brane, director of migrant rights at the Women’s Refugee Commission.
She also said she saw officials scolding 5-year-olds — who were given no toys or books — for playing around in their cage.
Even more heartbreaking was one boy who wasn’t joining in the play — just clutching a photocopy of his mom’s ID card.
Border agents in the area have prosecuted 568 adults and separated 1,174 children since the zero-tolerance policy began in May, but 463 of the children were reunited with their parents in “a matter off hours” when they re-returned fromrom court,court, officials there told the LA Times.
It wasn’tn’t clear what happened to the otherther 711. By law, unac-unaccompanieded minors must be turned over the Departmentpartment of Health andnd Human Services within 72 hours, butut it usu-usually happenspens in 50 hours,rs, the newspaperper re-reported.
At a presspress briefing Mon-Monday evening,ening, Homelandnd Se-Security Secre-Secretary Kirstjenstjen Nielsen said she had not heard the ProPublica audio or seen the Border Patrol video — even as reporters in the room played the audio recording.