Tens of Thousands of Immigrant Youth Brutally Imprisoned—In the USA
June 9, 2014 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
A monstrous crime against humanity is unfolding right now in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. Tens of thousands of young people—teenagers and children—have been fleeing U.S.-imposed devastation and wrenching poverty in their Central American homelands. They set out on desperate, terrifying thousand-mile journeys to South Texas, most of them trying to get farther north. Many have been captured by Mexican authorities; others have been killed by police or smuggler gangs while trying to make it to the United States. But for many, their perilous treks end when they are captured by the Border Patrol and other U.S. authorities.
Children who were separated from their families while crossing the border into the U.S. are taken into custody by Border Patrol agents in 2006. Photo: AP
The number of unaccompanied youth and children captured by the authorities in South Texas this year is expected, by the U.S. government's own predictions, to be over 60,000—about 10 times the number of youth captured in 2013.
Barack Obama announced June 2 that there is an "urgent humanitarian situation" in South Texas. He didn't mention two essential aspects of that situation. One is that its cause is the system of capitalism-imperialism that he represents; the other is that the measures his administration is taking in response to this will worsen the suffering and pain of the young people captured by the system's enforcers.
Decades of U.S. Domination
The Central American countries of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras have suffered under decades of brutal U.S. domination: invasions and coups, genocidal wars, savage exploitation, dislocation of the peasantry, and destruction of the environment. NBC News last year described Honduras, which has the highest murder rate in the world, as "a country in meltdown." Guatemala has some of the most fertile and productive agricultural land on the planet—but, according to the United Nations' World Food Programme, it has a malnutrition rate of 49.8 percent for children under five.
The heart of Obama's "humanitarian gesture" is a 1,000-bed detention center for children at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. Obama also announced that another detention center for children and youth pulled into the Border Patrol dragnet in South Texas will be on a Navy base in faraway Ventura County, California.
The number of children swept into the U.S. detention snare this year is actually likely to far surpass the government's estimate of 60,000. The number of teenagers and young children picked up by the Border Patrol has risen dramatically in the last month. One day in late May, more than 400 unaccompanied children, all of them "Other than Mexican," in the hateful racist language of the Border Patrol, were taken into custody in South Texas.
Most were put into Border Patrol holding cells that immigrants call hieleras—ice boxes—because of the frigid temperatures maintained in them. The hieleras are supposedly intended to hold adults for a few hours. They have no beds, only concrete benches and floors for the children to sleep on. Federal law states that unaccompanied children are supposed to be turned over to a federal agency, the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) within 72 hours, for long term placement. But a Department of Homeland Security official acknowledged that over half of the 2,000 children at the main hielera in South Texas had been there for more than three days.
Savage Assaults, Traumatized Children
A woman who had worked in the San Antonio detention center told a TV station there that over 1,000 teenagers have been moved into the detention center since early May. She said her first impression of their condition and the way they were treated was "complete disbelief." "We have had a break out of medical conditions such as lice, bed bugs, scabies, different types of illnesses that are occurring: strep, sore throat, coughs.... Many of the children were traumatized by their journeys to the United States. Many of them have incurred abuse, rape, they incurred starvation." She reported that there are nurses, but no doctors or psychiatrists working with the children.
Children caught up in this system of confinement are often subjected to further horrific cruelty and torment—abuse that is consistently covered up—on top of the traumas they have already experienced. The Houston Chronicle reported that "the full extent of sexual and physical abuse in the federal shelters is unknown."
The ORR claims that it is unable to track allegations of rape, abuse, and assault upon the children under its supervision. But documents released under the Freedom of Information Act detail 101 "significant incident reports" in the two years from March 2011 to March 2013. The incidents involved rape of both girls and boys, sexual harassment, assaults, constant abuse, and threats. These incidents occurred in "shelters" in Texas, Florida, and New York. In the very rare instances where state criminal charges have been brought against one or more of the children's guardians, they have almost always fallen apart because the children were moved, the cops never followed through, the authorities claimed they didn't know who was responsible, and other cover-up excuses. As the Houston Chronicle reported, "No shelter worker has been prosecuted under a 2008 federal provision that makes sexual contact with a detainee in ORR's care a felony."
The full scope of these savage assaults on immigrant children will probably never be known. Many children are threatened that they will be punished further, or be deported and never again see their families, if they tell anyone about what has happened to them. One boy who was raped by a guard told a reporter "he said something bad would happen if I told anyone."
If the violence inflicted on the youth of Central America were the only crime this system is responsible for—that would be reason enough to be part of the movement for revolution and working to put an end to it. But the intense pain and torment poured upon these young people is no aberration. It is not a result of “mistaken policy,” or inept political leadership. It is an expression—particularly brutal, but not at all out of the ordinary—of the way capitalist imperialism functions. Here, and in even more intense and horrific ways in Central America, as we shall explore in the second and final installment of this series.
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