Immigrant rights advocates, some holding their children’s hands and others carrying babies in their arms, walked out of a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing Tuesday in protest of the Trump administration’s effort to keep migrant children detained longer, perhaps even indefinitely.
“They’re talking about numbers, but they need to see babies,” said demonstrator Jorge Silva as he held his baby daughter Isabel. “They need to see parents with their babies in their arms. When they talk about beds, and when they talk about numbers, we hope they see that this is what they’re talking about.”
The administration is attempting to replace family separation with family detention by modifying a decades-old agreement, which, though flimsy, limits how long and under what conditions kids can be detained. But children do not belong in detention, period, and the government’s attempt to eviscerate this agreement stands to harm kids permanently. “Even brief stays in detention,” said Sen. Gary Peters of Michigan, “can lead to psychological trauma and lasting mental health risks.”
Abuses are rampant in immigration detention. This past summer, migrant moms stepped forward to reveal being sexually, physically, and emotionally abused by guards at migrant family jails, including T. Don Hutto Residential Detention Center in Texas and Berks Family Detention Center in Pennsylvania. “I didn’t know how to refuse,” an asylum seeker described only as “E.D.” said, “because he told me that I was going to be deported.”
This is horrific. We don’t need more family prisons to jail families indefinitely: we need proven and humane alternatives to detention, like the Family Case Management Program, which “kept families out of detention while successfully getting them to hearings more than 99 percent of the time.” It worked—well, it did work, until the Trump administration ended the pilot program last year.
Demonstrators at the Tuesday hearing pledged to keep holding legislators accountable, and, if they refuse to act in the best interests of vulnerable people like asylum seekers and their children, they’ll sweep in new legislators who will. “If Congressional Republicans don’t hold the administration accountable for ripping kids away from their parents arms,” said Pili Tobar, who brought her daughter Lily, “then the American people will in November. Looking at you, GOP.”
The administration is currently accepting public comment on the proposed change for the next few weeks—click here and demand that no child be locked up.