Whatever the lies coming out of the Republican Party’s mouths right now actually mean in action during the coming days and weeks and months and years, the fact of the matter is that thousands of children, young and younger, will forever be changed by the experience of abuse they are going through now.
One of the refrains from “order followers” like Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and Attorney General Jeff Sessions is that everything looks great for these kids. They have people watching them, television, “three squares a day!” Of course, this belies the fact that these kids would give up “three squares a day" and television for the rest of their lives to be back with their parents. That’s how abjectly terrifying and inhumane this situation is.
In the New Yorker, Amanda Schaffer has a profile of ER physician Tara Neubrand, a pediatric emergency room doctor in Colorado. Schaffer wants to know about the toddlers Dr. Neubrand has seen. We are talking about children as young as three years old. Dr. Neubrand says she has seen toddlers in foster care for some time. But she hasn’t seen separated “detained” toddlers in foster care before now—and it’s completely different.
The children show none of the curiosity about their surroundings that virtually all children their age do. Instead they cling to the foster parent in the most desperate of ways, “little tiny clenched fists just wrapped around their foster mothers’ necks. And the mothers couldn’t put them down.”
And these are foster parents who have cared for abused children before, have watched young kids while messy custody battles take place. These are well-meaning people who are told nothing about these children and find themselves at a loss in how to handle these children—not because they aren’t trying, but because they have never dealt with such fear in a toddler.
“I see a lot of bad things in the emergency department. I see a lot of child-abuse cases, but I don’t see cases where someone has intentionally inflicted pain on children when it’s not a specific child-abuse case. It was so striking to me because—it really does, truly, feel like government-mandated child abuse.
“In a normal child-abuse case, I can identify the person who hit the kid, beat the kid, burned the kids. All of those stories are terrible. I wind up frequently testifying in those cases, and so I have some role in the protection, in the advocacy for those kids. And, in this case, I don’t have any role, I don’t have any way to advocate for them or protect them or make sure that they get justice.
Dr. Neubrand is an ER doctor specializing in children. She’s seen terrible things. But this time, it is on our government.