Hundreds of thousands of migrant children being separated from their parents at the border between Texas and Mexico and we can all agree that something has to be done to change that. But Trump’s answer isn’t quite the solution we were looking for.
The Trump administration’s new “zero tolerance” policy allows children and families to be forcibly detained in US government custody, but now the Department of Health and Human Services already has over 11,000 children in it’s custody — much more than they can handle.
But instead of changing the policy to allow children to stay with their families, or developing a generally more humane way to treat the migrant children, Trump has reportedly decided to build tent cities at military posts to detain the growing number of children, as Vox reported on Wednesday evening. Tents. How nice.
These aren’t “tent cities” becuase the people sent there won’t be free to leave. The correct term is prison camps.https://t.co/WgBORAz7x1
— Samuel Sinyangwe (@samswey) June 12, 2018
These “prison camps,” as critics are calling them, will potentially be held in the Fort Bliss army base in El Paso and hold anywhere from 1,000 to 5,000 children. An interesting, expensive solution to a problem that could easily be solved by not taking children away from their families.
Clara Long, a US researcher at Human Rights Watch, criticized this idea in an interview with McClatchy.
“Detaining children for immigration purposes is never in their best interest and the prospect of detaining kids in tent cities is horrifying,” she says. “US authorities should focus on keeping families together, ensuring due process in asylum adjudications and protecting the rights of children.”
A Health and Human Services official also talked about the potential dangers that these children can face while being detained: “The lack of parental protection, and the hazardous journey they take, make unaccompanied alien children vulnerable to human trafficking, exploitation and abuse,” they said.
Let’s just hope this atrocity doesn’t actually end up happening.