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The Trump administration is portraying the prison camp for migrant children in Homestead, Florida, as an orderly “shelter” where kids can have talent shows and movie nights during the weekends, but advocates who visited the prison camp aren’t so convinced about the tidy image officials are trying to project.
Attorneys and experts who have permission to inspect children’s detention facilities as part of a years-old court agreement described cold rooms where kids are packed “like sardines” in rows of bunk beds. Some children they spoke to burst into tears, describing how they’re not allowed to hug one another. “Some of them have been there for months on end,” said Neha Desai of the National Center for Youth Law, “with no freedom of movement, no privacy, no human contact.”
In an effort that totally screams “we have nothing to hide,” reporters who also got to visit the Comprehensive Health Services-operated prison camp said that they were forbidden from speaking to the children. No photos were allowed. “Some said ‘hello,’ and a group of girls in pink sweatshirts offered a ‘good morning’ in English and Spanish,” the New York Times reported, “but others avoided eye contact.”
The prison camp currently jails nearly 1,600 children, but could soon expand to 2,350. They are all unaccompanied minors, or kids who came to the U.S. by themselves. They may have been aiming to reunite with a parent or relative here. Instead, they’ve been jailed there for as long as nine months, advocates say, and teens who turn 18 while at Homestead then have the misfortune of being turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement so they can be jailed in an adult facility.
This is an American obscenity. Homestead became the largest prison camp for children following Tornillo’s closure, and like Tornillo, Homestead is operating without a license because it’s supposedly a “temporary” facility. Like Tornillo, it needs to be shut down. “Our taxpayer dollars are being used to traumatize children by keeping them in a child prison camp instead of in the arms of their families,” said Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley. “This is evil.”
