AI Justice’s report, “Do My Rights Matter? The Mistreatment of Unaccompanied Children in CBP Custody,” continues to confirm the abuses that advocates say have plagued these facilities for years. We’ve known officials have unlawfully detained children for days at a time. We’ve known officers have verbally and physically tormented children. We’ve known these conditions are deadly. But what this report provides is one of the most comprehensive looks into our nation’s inhumane detention system yet.
“Felipa, from Guatemala, was 17 at the time of her apprehension and spent five days in the perrera,” which translates to “dog kennel” and describes the physical conditions children are jailed in. “She said during her interview: ‘They gave us water, but it tasted like Clorox. I got sick because of the water that I was drinking,’” the report said. But when Felipa asked if she could see a doctor, she was threatened with even more detention. “They said that if I went to medical, I would have to stay detained for longer,” she said in the report.
“Most of the children we interviewed said they went hungry at the border facility,” the report continued, including CBP officers giving mothers completely inappropriate food items to feed to their babies. The report described other children going without food because what they were served was sometimes still frozen, or rotten.
“We spoke to 11 teens who were placed in CBP detention facilities with their babies,” the report said. “Of the 11, only four reported receiving age appropriate food for their infants. Instead, their babies were given the same food the older children received, which consisted of burritos, for example, which were often frozen or not cooked properly. This resulted in some of the babies vomiting or having diarrhea.”
CBP was given emergency humanitarian funds by Congress to address this exact issue, but the out-of-control agency instead illegally spent the cash on a canine program, dirt bikes, and computer network upgrades, the Government Accountability Office found earlier this year. “The GAO report did not indicate how much money was misused, but it said the expenditures were a violation of the law,” The Washington Post reported at the time.
“Aside from telling children the United States was not their country, CBP officers often insulted children based on their nationalities, telling them their countries were worthless,” the AI Justice report said, finding 895 children, many of them indigenous, reported verbal abuse. “While physical abuse was not reported as often as verbal abuse, it was still the experience of many detained minors,” the report continued. “Children reported being kicked, grabbed, pulled, pushed, dropped and slapped.”
In one instance, officials accused a 16-year-old teen who had arrived to the U.S. with his two younger cousins of trafficking them. When officers weren’t getting the answers they wanted out of the boy, one tried to beat it out of him.
“They were accusing me of something that wasn’t true,” the boy said in the report. “It eventually got to a point where they hit me. They told me that I was the father of the children and that I was trafficking them. … They told me that I was going to be put in jail for 10 years and that I was going to go back to Guatemala.”
The Post reports that an agency spokesperson claimed in response to the report that “CBP treats those in our custody with dignity and respect and provides multiple avenues to report any misconduct,” and that it takes “all allegations seriously and investigate all formal complaints.” Pure fiction. The American Civil Liberties Union said in September that “[a]ccording to data obtained by the American Immigration Council in 2017, the agency took ‘no action’ in 95.9 percent of complaints filed against the agency between 2012 and 2015. Despite independent advisory panel recommendations issued in 2016, CBP has still not fixed its disciplinary system.”
There must be a reckoning when it comes to immigration agencies’ treatment of detained people, but of children in particular.
AI Justice “has spent more than two decades documenting and litigating the mistreatment of asylum seekers, including children, at the hands of CBP,” the group said in the report. “How many more children have to die for CBP to effectuate change? The impact of these abusive practices on the children will be long-lasting. These vulnerable children deserve to be welcomed with compassion and respect as they seek refuge and a better life in the United States.”