A 2018 state investigation into a Virginia detention facility found that, yes, staff did strap migrant teens to chairs and sometimes place bags over their heads as punishment, but none of it, investigators claimed, reached the threshold for abuse. “A few months later,” Mother Jones reports, “US District Judge Elizabeth Dillon ruled in December 2018 that there was enough evidence to proceed to trial on claims that staffers used excessive force and restraints” on the children, “but she rejected [a child’s] claim that the juvenile hall provided mental health care so inadequate that it violated his constitutional rights.” These were outrageous decisions in an outrageous case—but the teens now have new and powerful advocates in the ongoing litigation.
Mother Jones reports that dozens of current and former state attorneys general, elected prosecutors, corrections leaders, criminal justice leaders, and disability rights leaders have filed a legal brief with the Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit in support of the six teens, who were as young as 14 years old when they were held at the Shenandoah Valley Juvenile Center over periods of time from 2015 to 2018. The teens, who arrived in the U.S. alone, had previously testified in sworn statements that staffers had shackled them naked to chairs for as long as two and a half days. “This happened to me,” said one teen, “and I saw it happen to others, too. It was excessive.”
The leaders filing the legal brief agree. “Plaintiffs in this case have been harmed in numerous ways because Shenandoah Valley Juvenile Center has egregiously and repeatedly departed from accepted professional norms—including failing to provide adequate mental health treatment to children in its care with known mental health issues and using punitive measures including lengthy solitary confinement,” they wrote, saying, “The district court erroneously rejected Plaintiffs’ claim that SVJC was required to provide trauma-informed care. In so doing, it allowed a facility where children with mental health conditions are met with physical restraints and draconian punishment—rather than needed treatment—to continue to operate in a manner that exacerbated harm.”
Child welfare experts have said that even short amounts of detention, as well as forcible separation from parents, are harmful to children and can cause trauma that lasts for years. “In accordance with internationally accepted rights of the child, immigrant and refugee children should be treated with dignity and respect and should not be exposed to conditions that may harm or traumatize them,” the American Academy of Pediatrics said in 2017. “The Department of Homeland Security facilities do not meet the basic standards for the care of children in residential settings.”
“Of particular pertinence to this case, children are different from adults in the ways in which trauma impacts them,” the leaders continued in their brief. “’Trauma’ is defined as the result of ‘an event, series of events, or set of circumstances that is experienced by an individual as physically or emotionally harmful or life threatening and that has lasting adverse effects on the individual’s functioning and mental, physical, social, emotional, or spiritual wellbeing.’ The more traumatic events a person—any person—suffers, especially if the trauma is not promptly and appropriately addressed, the more likely they will exhibit health and behavioral problems, and loss in life potential.”
Children do not belong in detention, period—and they certainly don’t belong at Shenandoah. “Punishing kids for behavior that is the consequence of trauma exacerbates the preexisting harm to which they’ve been exposed,” said Hannah Lieberman, an attorney for one of the teens in the lawsuit, according to Mother Jones. “It’s antithetical to acting in accordance with any kind of professional judgment.”