Traumatized 6/7/2018

7, June 2018                                            Traumatized

Since 2014, legal service providers like Human Rights Imitative have witnessed a steady pace of immigrants from the Northern Triangle: Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras escaping mind-numbing violence.

Meanwhile, Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, followed through on his promise to separate immigrants from their children. Headlines and social media reported that more than 1,500 migrant children had vanished and parents would now be prosecuted as criminals. On a visit to McAllen Border Station processing center, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), witnessed hundreds of children sleeping on concrete floors in large cages made of fencing and wire nets.

Video footage of traumatized children has gone viral creating mounting outrage.

Many of these immigrant children are considered “unaccompanied” and shuttled through the same legal process as a child who crosses the border alone. The potential for sexual and physical abuse is enormous.

Due process is replaced by “group court sessions” to accelerate the process with lack of English adding to the confusion.

In some cases, children were carelessly turned over to labor and sex traffickers who posed as relatives. This administration continues to take a humanitarian crisis and treat it as a criminal justice problem. This results in children being ripped from their parents' arms and the parents placed in jail. This is neither necessary nor humane. A chronic shortage of legal help forces children to represent themselves in a Dicksonian style tragedy. This is an absolute travesty