04.16.26

'Baby jail'

A few days ago, I wrote optimistically about the ways that the resistance is slowing down Trump’s and Miller’s mass deportation campaign. In some ways it is. I also allowed that the state will find news ways to enact its cruel, racist policies. They already have.

The Marshall Project reports that Homeland Security is paying local police and “politically connected contractors” to take on more of the functions of immigration enforcement. It has so far trained between 13,800 and 15,800 local officers and deputies. In his confirmation hearings, Kristi Noem’s successor, Markwayne Mullin, told senators that he wanted to prevent the department from being “the lead story every single day.” What that means is doing as much damage, but more discretely.

But even more evil than trying to hide their misdeeds is ICE’s targeting of children, often as a way of getting their parents to comply with “voluntary” deportation.

Writes Sarah Stillman in this week’s New Yorker:

The suffering of children, including infants and toddlers, has become central to the Trump Administration’s immigration-enforcement strategy.

Marshall Project also reported on April 1 that DHS is detaining and deporting dozens of people who were granted legal status as part of a settlement over the disastrous immigrant family separations of the first Trump term, policies that, according to a federal judge, caused “lasting, excruciating harm” to young children.

Many of the safeguards put in place by the Biden administration, such as keeping ICE out of “sensitive” locations like schools and hospitals, including places “where children gather,” have been rescinded. In fact, ICE agents have been instructed to raid daycare centers and school playgrounds. In Trump’s second term, ICE has detained more than 6,200 children, a tenfold increase since Biden left office.

Stillman provides a heartbreaking and enraging account of the conditions these kids and their parents are facing in family detention, particularly at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, in Texas. The “baby jail,” as some law students call Dilley, is operated by CoreCivic, a private prison company that reported more than $2 billion in total revenue last year.

In detention, children are routinely denied medical care, in many cases for ailments that the kids have contracted at the facility. The illnesses worsen; kids die.

Threats of family separation and medical neglect of both children and parents “work hand in hand,” writes Stillman. A legal advocate told her about a mother with ovarian cysts who was denied her medication at Dilley and began to bleed profusely. “She agreed to ‘voluntary’ departure, with her daughter because she didn’t want to die of blood loss in front of her,” writes Stillman.

The advocate said:

Parents make these life-threatening journeys to the U.S. in service to their children, for their children’s safety, and so this Administration is very well aware of that parental psychology, that the parents would do anything to insure their child isn’t harmed. The evidence at Dilley points to the weaponization of that primal instinct.

If anyone doubted that immigrant detention facilities are not concentration camps or that Stephen Miller, the chief architect of these policies, is not a Nazi, the deliberate neglect of children’s bodies, to the point of great suffering and even death, is proof that they are.