The Trump Administration Detained a Record 69,550 Migrant Children This Year, Exposing Them to Incalculable Trauma
Earlier this month, a federal court ruled that the Trump administration was legally required to provide mental-health services to parents and children swept up in its family-separation policy. The judge in the case said that the "deliberate indifference" of the administration resulted in a "state-created danger," traumatizing thousands of people, many of whom were following the legal processes of applying for asylum.
It's a groundbreaking ruling, establishing that the government has an obligation to address the trauma that it arbitrarily inflicts on migrant families. But it only applies to the people affected by the administration's family-separation policy, which by Trump's own admission was meant to cause so much misery that it would dissuade other Central Americans from trying to come to the U.S. at all. "If they feel there will be separation, they don’t come," he said in 2018, providing no evidence to support his claim. Unfortunately, family separations are only one part of the trauma.
Government data out this month shows that the U.S. has detained a record-breaking number of children for the last fiscal year—69,550 infants, toddlers, children, and teenagers, according to the Associated Press. That's a 42 percent increase from the year before, and on average they were held in custody for longer than in previous years.
Jack Shonkoff, director of Harvard University’s Center on the Developing Child, told the AP that young children are especially vulnerable to psychological trauma because their brains and nervous systems are still developing. "Stable and responsive relationships promote healthy brain architecture. If these relationships are disrupted, young children are hit by the double whammy of a brain that is deprived of the positive stimulation it needs, and assaulted by a stress response that disrupts its developing circuitry," he said.
AP reporters also spoke with a Honduran man, who was separated from his three-year-old daughter earlier this year when immigration officials separated them and sent his daughter into foster care. He spent three weeks not knowing where she was, and after that it reportedly took a month before the new caregiver would put his daughter on the phone with him. Per the AP:
After being forcibly separated at the border by government officials, sexually abused in U.S. foster care and deported, the once bright and beaming girl arrived back in Honduras withdrawn, anxious and angry, convinced her father abandoned her. He fears their bond is forever broken. "I think about this trauma staying with her too, because the trauma has remained with me and still hasn’t faded," he said, days after their reunion.
Accusations of assault and sexual abuse are not uncommon in these facilities. Since 2014, the Department of Health and Human Services has received more than 4,500 complaints about sexual abuse of unaccompanied minors while they were in U.S. custody.
Many parents haven't even been reunited with their children. There are massive holes in the detention and deportation machine that the Trump administration has bolstered in the past three years. In October, another AP investigation found that state judges had the authority to put detained children up for adoption in the U.S.—without notifying their parents. Hundreds of parents have been deported to their home countries while their children remain in custody here, in effect enabling state-sanctioned kidnapping.
The Trump administration has made terrorizing immigrants a central part of its political project, but even Americans aren't safe from immigration enforcement if they aren't white. This March, Border Patrol detained a 9-year-old girl who is a U.S. citizen for 32 hours, refusing to believe that she was an American. In July, 18-year-old Francisco Erwin Galicia was held for 24 days, despite providing documents proving that he, too, was a citizen.
On March 15, when a white supremacist livestreamed his mass shootings of a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, a country with one of the world's lowest gun homicide rates was stunned to silence. But only momentarily. The deaths of 51 New Zealanders, mostly Muslim immigrants, would not be met with a tepid countermeasure but a swift, clear response. Sean Flynn reports from Christchurch about the day of the massacre—and the days that followed.
Originally Appeared on GQ
