The coronavirus pandemic is predictably being used by the more reptilian opportunists in our society to further their terrible policies. One such example is Stephen Miller and Donald Trump’s use of Gestapo-like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) forces, along with private industry, to detain, separate, and potentially exile the children of undocumented immigrants. With the increasing of border closures under the pandemic, Trump’s private forces are getting creative with taxpayer money.
The New York Times has the chilling story about how one such private security firm has been using the Trump administration’s pandemic emergency border crackdown policies to enrich themselves. According to the Times, more than 100,000 children and families have been expelled under the order, and detentions have ballooned during the same time. Of course, detaining large groups of people means one needs spaces where they can be housed and so you and I, as taxpayers, are spending our money on hotel chains. That’s right. Hotel chains.
According to the report, “Children as young as a year old — often arriving at the border with no parents — are being put in hotels under the supervision of transportation workers who are not licensed to provide child care.” But don’t worry, ICE says immigrants are being “adequately cared for.” And when ICE says something, you can go to the bank with that information and then get slapped in the face and laughed at for believing it.
This isn’t simply a couple of hotels across the southern border of the United States being used to house a few people. “The federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has detained at least 860 migrants at a Quality Suites in San Diego; Hampton Inns in Phoenix and in McAllen and El Paso, Texas; a Comfort Suites Hotel in Miami; a Best Western in Los Angeles; and an Econo Lodge in Seattle.”
You can carry more of them than handcuffs
On top of that, the company that has been using this form of “detention” is really just a transportation company that has suddenly found themselves in the detention business because of the Trump administration’s resource-draining and inhumane policies. MVM Inc., according to the report, started by retired Secret Service agents in the 1970s, is an enormous company now that up until recently was mostly used to transport undocumented immigrants but is now taking their complete lack of experience and applying it to peoples’ lives. And it gets darker from there.
The Prison Rape Elimination Act and the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act are sets of protections that seem to not exactly apply to detention in a hotel scenario. This means that how these children and families are treated is not simply unknown; it may not even be protected by law.
“A transportation vendor should not be in charge of changing the diaper of a 1-year old, giving bottles to babies or dealing with the traumatic effects they might be dealing with,” said Andrew Lorenzen-Strait, another former deputy assistant director for custody management at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who worked with MVM during his time at the agency.
“I’m worried kids may be exposed to abuse, neglect, including sexual abuse, and we will have no idea,” he said.
MVM says they have a nondisclosure agreement with ICE so they can’t respond to media requests. I’m sure they would totally answer everybody’s questions about where all our money was being spent and how humanely they are treating the people in their charge.
The Choice hotel chain, one of the businesses that has been used for some of these detentions, says they have had no idea about any of this: “It has been our position that hotels should not be used as detention facilities, and we are not aware that any hotels in our franchise system are being used in this capacity. We ask that our franchised hotels, which are independently owned and operated, only be used for their intended purpose.” Another spokesperson for Hampton Inn in Phoenix says they do not support this and while they were not aware that this was happening, they will somehow “not accept similar business moving forward.”
The industry trade group The American Hotel and Lodging Association tells the Times that they have sent out advisories to membership to look for red flags that might clue people into the fact that their business is being used as a shadowy detention center.
The Times’ findings show an opaque detainment situation that stretches from the southern tip of Florida to the northwestern tip of the United States. According to the Times, their sources believe that most of the immigrants housed are either children or families because most single adults are kept at Border Patrol “housing stations.” When you couple this with the Trump administration’s truly abhorrent practice of not creating a database for identifying where children who come across the border end up (either sent back across the border or placed somewhere else), the use of these hotels just adds to the general Nazi flavor this administration has been cooking with.
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