Recently, the New York Times published an article detailing how life is for immigrant children inside detention centers, using testimony from those who lived it in the flesh day-to-day, the children.
Most children broke down their daily activities into similar schedules starting with alarming morning wake-up calls, chores, and classes.
Diego Magalhães, a Brazilian boy who spent 43 days in a Chicago facility after being separated from his mother when they crossed the border in late May remembers having to clean bathrooms alongside the 15 other boys in his unit.
“I scrubbed the bathroom. We had to remove the trash bag full of dirty toilet paper. Everyone had to do it,” Diego said.
Now, most of us had chores growing up. From throwing out the trash, washing dishes, even cleaning bathrooms.
The difference here is that our chores were given to us by our parents or loved ones with the goal of teaching responsibility, and the benefits of hard work.
Unlike the chores Diego and his friends had to do, which had no purpose but to help avoid additional custodial costs, and the only gives children the benefit of hoping that the “chores” they do will set them free and reunite them with their family.
These are children being held captive, not children working to earn money for their leisure activities.
More alarming is what Diego says would happened to a little boy from Guatemala named Adonias who regularly would throw fits, refuse to clean, and throw things around.
“They applied injections because he was very agitated,” Diego said. “He would destroy things.”
Diego remembers that a person, whom he describes as “the doctor,” would come into the middle of class and inject something into Adonias everytime he acted up.
Then, “he would fall asleep.”
Do you remember being put down to sleep by injection when you had a tantrum or didn’t want to do you chores?
Who this “doctor” is, their qualifications, and what they injected into Adonias remains a mystery to Diego, Adonias, and those of us outside the detention center walls.
Also, apart from not being able to be with their parents or guardians, detained children aren’t allowed to touch each other at any given time inside the detention center, even if they are siblings or have some sort of relation.
Many children are “fortunate” enough to be detained alongside their siblings or relatives, not allowing them to give each other a hug, or even just a handshake seems like a tactic to keep these children mentally and physically shunned from any sort of comfort.
Detained children are being given an “education.” One that includes math, English, and “civics,” which according to Yoselyn Bulux, a 15-year-old immigrant teenager from Guatemala, included mostly history of American Presidents, Trump included.
Even so, what kind of an education wouldn’t encourage writing, especially outside the classroom?
Another detained young teenager named Leticia said she would write letters in secret to her mom from her dorm in a South Texas shelter. According to Leticia, on major rule: no writing in the dorms.
Her mom was detained hundreds of miles away in Arizona. Leticia would keep the letters hidden in a folder to give to her mother upon their reunion which is still on wait.
“I have a stack of them,” Leticia said.
Last week DHS reunited a little more than half of the 103 “younger children” under the age of 5 with their parents in order to comply with a court order issued by a federal judge.
The order was for them to reunite all 103 children by July 10th. Another order hopes all children detained under Trump’s zero-tolerance policy will be reunited with their guardians by July 26th.
At the moment, more than 2,800 are still being detained in these facilities following the prison-like routine of alarming morning wake-up calls, chores, and classes.