Caged Migrant Kids and Adults at Grave Risk for Coronavirus. They Are Disposable to Trump. Not in Our Name.
March 3, 2020
An overcrowded, fenced area holds families at a Border Patrol station in McAllen, Texas, on 10 June 2019. (Thomas Cizauskas )
MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH
In the midst of an intense election campaign that may determine whether democracy survives, Donald Trump is employing his gaslighting expertise to try and divert and deflect attention, as is his daily strategy, to Soviet-style change the facts surrounding the Coronavirus and his utter incompetence in destroying our pandemic prevention and treatment program because it was formed by Barack Obama.
However, we would be inhumane if we ignored what has been largely forgotten amidst the election year contests and the arrival of the Coronavius on US shores, with a bumbling and duplicitous response by the Trump administration — we would be inhumane to forget that the lives of migrant children and parents from Mexico and Central America are on the line as Trump is apparently taking no precautions to prevent the transmission of the virus in the overcrowded detention centers. They are ripe for the rapid spread of a highly contagious, potentially deadly virus.
Should the Coronavirus strike the DHS, Customs & Border Patrol and ICE facilities, remember that the devastation that it will cause to child and adult migrants will have happened in our name. We could blame Trump, but we bear responsibility because we allow him to continue his remorseless persecution of migrants that could lead to a Coronavirus outbreak — and the deaths will be on us, not just Trump.
Migrants initially detained in the US in cages and cramped for-profit detention centers are often treated with cruelty, hostility, and abuse - because cruelty is the point of the Trump administration, and carried out under the watchful eye of racist Stephen Miller.
Congressional delegations who have been able to enter some of the “concentration camps” (a valid name because of crushed confinement in cages and for-profit facilities) have noted horrifying scenes of blood from female periods, feces, filthy clothes, inadequate meals, all amidst the smell of urine.
A Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) article noted that child separation was taking place as early as 2018, when in one two-month period 2000 children were separated from their parents. An SPLC story described one wretched “detention center” in McAllen, Texas:
June 17, 2018 – Journalists and human rights advocates tour an old warehouse in McAllen, Texas, where hundreds of children are being kept in a series of cages made of mental fencing. The Associated Press reports that overhead lighting stays on around the clock, children are sleeping under “large foil sheets,” older children are forced to change the diapers of toddlers and that children have no books or toys. One toddler is seen crying uncontrollably and pounding her fists on a mat.
The Trump administration under a federal court order is supposed to have stopped separating children from their parents, but an October, 2019, The Intercept article is headlined, “The [US] Government Has Taken At Least 1,100 Children From Their Parents Since Family Separations Officially Ended.” The story notes that more separations have taken place, because the Department of Homeland Security Record keeping is so bad, and even the location of many children is unknown.
According to Slate, “new government data shows the United States detained a staggering 69,550 migrant children in 2019.” Sometimes 13,000 or more children were detained at a time.
Meanwhile, according to Statista.com,
The number of immigrants detained by agencies of the Department of Homeland Security has been on the rise in the last decades. While in 1994, only an average of 6,785 people were in DHS custody on any given day, that number rose to more than 50,000 people in FY2019, almost doubling from approximately 28,000 in 2015 and surpassing the Trump administration goal of 45,000….
The treatment of the increasing number of DHS detainees has been under scrutiny recently, with disease outbreaks and deaths in custody making headlines. Yet, the Trump administration has said it is planning to expand the number of detention beds and that it is planning to detain a daily average of 54,000 immigrants on a daily basis in FY2020.
There have been several deaths of children in the detention centers, communicable diseases and untreated illnesses.
According to a December, 2019, Kaiser Family Foundation newsletter, the US Customs and Border Patrol does not give flu shots to migrants in the initial stages of detention, including children, and refused offers from doctors to provide them for free:
Several children died in U.S. custody because of the flu and the CDC recommended that migrants are given the vaccine. But officials say that trying to provide flu shots to everyone during the few days they spend in Border Patrol custody does not make sense. A group of doctors launched a protest in response to the refusal that spanned the past three days…..
A group of doctors on Wednesday ended a three-day protest against the U.S. government's refusal to allow the flu vaccine be administered to migrants, following the arrests of six demonstrators outside a Border Patrol regional headquarters in San Diego. Dr. Bonnie Arzuaga said Customs and Border Patrol officials met briefly with her and other protest leaders and vowed to pass her organization's request to start a pilot program to inoculate migrants in detention facilities in San Diego up their chain of command….
Dr. Mario Mendoza, a retired anesthesiologist, said it would take less than half an hour to administer the vaccines to more than 100 children via the free mobile flu clinic they set up directly outside the CBP facility. “We have the team here. We have the vaccines. It would not take 72 hours to do,” said Mendoza, adding that denying children the basic healthcare being offered was intentionally cruel and inhumane….
Concerned physicians are not giving up, however, and in February, Houston Public Media reported:
Pediatric disease experts are urging the U.S. government to implement widespread flu vaccines for adults and children in Customs and Border Protection custody.
Since September 2018, at least seven children have died in CBP custody, including three from complications from the flu. Prior to that, the immigration agency hadn’t reported any deaths in a decade.
“We believe that these outbreaks and deaths point to the urgent need for mandatory influenza immunization for children and an opt-out vaccination policy for adults in CBP detention centers, as well as required influenza immunization for employees at these centers,” said Dr. Carlo Foppiano Palacios, Dr. John Openshaw and Dr. Mark Travassos in the New England Journal of Medicine.
In the commentary, the physicians wrote that migrants are held in close proximity without proper sanitation or medical care and undergo stress, which can weaken their immune systems.
That is the foul and unhealthy environment that the Coronavirus can best travel as a contagion, transmitted like a wildfire to detained child and adult migrants alike. The virus has an approximately six foot radius for transmission between individuals, and the harsh, merciless confinement implemented by Trump and Miller is providing the tinder wood for rapid Coronavirus infection if it reaches any of the detention centers, among those detainees crushed together and treated as though they are being mercilesly punished for the “crime” of seeking asylum or a better life.
To repeat the quotation from the Kaiser Family Foundation Report, “the physicians wrote that migrants are held in close proximity without proper sanitation or medical care and undergo stress, which can weaken their immune systems.”
This, again, makes for an ideal incubator for the Coronavirus.
In his past week’s rabid, racist, incompetent and incoherent remarks, Trump suggested at his Charleston, SC campaign rally that he may close off the Mexican border because the Coronavirus might be transmitted by Mexicans and Central Americans crossing into the US, as if his dream of a wall could prevent a virus from infecting people in the US. His knowledge of disease transmission is that of a troglodyte. Trump knows how to use racism to incite his base, so now he is even implying a pandemic virus may be associated with non-whites. However, and in unfortunate circumstances, unlike the servile DC press corps Trump transcriptionists, the Coronavirus is indifferent to Trump’s bombast, bluster and duplicity. It infects regardless of Trump’s derangement and self-aggrandizement.
Furthermore, there are tent and shanty town cities just over the Mexican border as part of Trump/Miller’s “Remain in Mexico” asylum Mexico program that are also prime targets for a contagion that thrives in concentrated environments of people. That too is being done in our name, and we remain quiet at the peril of our consciences being marred by our silent consent to the policies of Trump and Miller.
Amidst all this, there is the nefarious political incestuousness that Mike “Pray Away the Coronavirus” Pence’s chief assistant responsible for coordinating all communications regarding Coronavirus to be funneled to Pence is the wife of Stpehen Miller (they were just married, with Trump in attendance), Katie Miller.
Meanwhile, the children and adults in inhumane detention conditions are at high risk for the Corona Virus, and there remains little news or concern about their plight.
Update: The highly vulnerable situation of Latinx migrants also applies to the more than two million prisoners in the US. Where is the plan to prevent prisons and jails from becoming petri dishes for the Coronavirus, with untold dead? Would there even be enough capacity to treat the incarcerated?
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