Donald Trump’s border detention camps are an international scandal, and the United Nations high commissioner for human rights is telling it like it is. “As a paediatrician, but also as a mother and a former head of State, I am deeply shocked that children are forced to sleep on the floor in overcrowded facilities, without access to adequate healthcare or food, and with poor sanitation conditions,” said High Commissioner Michelle Bachelet, a former president of Chile.
“States do have the sovereign prerogative to decide on the conditions of entry and stay of foreign nationals,” Bachelet continued, pushing back at a top Trump administration talking point. “But clearly, border management measures must comply with the State’s human rights obligations and should not be based on narrow policies aimed only at detecting, detaining and expeditiously deporting irregular migrants.”
Bachelet is not the first high commissioner to criticize Trump administration immigration policies. “The thought that any state would seek to deter parents by inflicting such abuse on children is unconscionable,” Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein said in 2018 of family separation.