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The Trump administration’s treatment of immigrant children separated from their parents in detention facilities is not a new policy, but new stories about the substandard conditions that these children have been kept in have recently broken. Children have been forced to care for each other in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions, with migrants even being held at Fort Sill, a site that was used as an internment camp for Japanese Americans during World War II. Many children in government custody do not have soap or clean clothes. In response, House Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has compared the detention facilities to concentration camps. Since September of last year, a number of children have died in government custody (none had died for 10 years previously).
Vigils to close the camps are going to be held around the country in the evening of Friday, July 12. Find a vigil near you here and invite a friend to join you. If you can’t attend, plan to light a candle in your home at 9 pm in solidarity.
Bethany Albertson, an associate professor of government at UT–Austin, has started a Close The Camps movement on Magnify Your Voice. Check out her project and updates, and join for further information and to participate in organizing here.
Brittany Shammas of the Miami New Times reports on children’s stories from the Homestead Temporary Shelter for Unaccompanied Children :
Some feared they might never leave the facility, which one child described as "almost like being in a prison" where "all that’s missing are the cells." Another saw a boy try to run away and understood the impulse: "We’ve been held here for so long it feels like we are prisoners.”
