Teens Awaiting Immigration Hearings at Virginia Detention Facility Reportedly Beaten and Abused
On Wednesday, Donald Trump signed an executive order that, he claimed, would solve the problem of child separation at the U.S.-Mexico border, a problem that he started at the urging of his racist adviser Stephen Miller. But this is far from a win. Trump's solution to imprisoning parents and children separately is to imprison them all together—indefinitely. The new "zero tolerance" policy, announced by Jeff Sessions in April, will remain in effect, meaning every person who presents themselves at the border to legally request asylum will be treated as a criminal and summarily locked up.
While the Trump administration's policy of forcing apart family members has kept the focus on abuse of immigrants at the border, other detention facilities spread across the country are no less likely to be scandal-free. According to an Associated Press report out on Thursday, a new lawsuit accuses guards at the Shenandoah Valley Juvenile Center of abusing young detainees, claiming that immigrants as young as 14 were "beaten while handcuffed and locked up for long periods in solitary confinement, left nude and shivering in concrete cells."
The abuse claims against the Shenandoah Valley Juvenile Center near Staunton, Virginia, are detailed in federal court filings that include a half-dozen sworn statements from Latino teens jailed there for months or years. Multiple detainees say the guards stripped them of their clothes and strapped them to chairs with bags placed over their heads.
The Shenandoah Center is a separate apparatus from the camps where migrants and asylum seekers are being held as a result of Trump's "zero tolerance" policy. And despite the fact that many of the youths are there on charges of being connected to gangs, a top manager for the facility testified at a congressional hearing that "the children did not appear to be gang members and were suffering from mental health issues resulting from trauma that happened in their home countries—problems the detention facility is ill-equipped to treat." On top of that, half of the population is made up of immigrant teens who are in the midst of deportation hearings or asylum claim processing—meaning they haven't been convicted of any crime.
Independent of the firsthand accounts of the children who allege to have been abused, a child-development expert who visited the facility told the AP she "saw kids there with bruises and broken bones they blamed on guards." On top of the reports of physical abuse, the lawsuit also claims that guards regularly verbally abuse the immigrant detainees, frequently calling them racial slurs like "wetbacks."
A 16-year-old who said he had lived in Texas with his mother since he was an infant ended up at Shenandoah in September after a police officer pulled over a car he was riding in and asked for ID, which he couldn’t provide. As one of the few Latino kids who is fluent in English, the teen would translate for other detainees the taunts and names the staff members were calling them. He said that angered the guards, resulting in his losing such modest privileges as attending art classes.
“If you are behaving bad, resisting the staff when they try to remove you from the program, they will take everything in your room away—your mattress, blanket, everything,” he said. “They will also take your clothes. Then they will leave you locked in there for a while. This has happened to me, and I know it has happened to other kids, too.”
Undoubtedly, there are people, Fox News hosts in particular, who would point to the existence of art classes as evidence that these children aren't being treated harshly enough to merit concern. But the conditions they're kept in are far from comfortable:
The immigrant detainees said they were largely segregated from the mostly white juveniles being held on criminal charges, but they could see that the other housing units had amenities that included plush chairs and video gaming consoles not available in the Spartan pods housing the Latinos.
In their sworn statements, the teens reported spending the bulk of their days locked alone in their cells, with a few hours set aside for classroom instruction, recreation and meals. Some said they had never been allowed outdoors, while the U.S.-born children were afforded a spacious recreation yard.
This highlights just how tremendously insufficient Trump's actions are. Or rather, they would be insufficient if Trump were interested in anything other than detention or deportation. But he isn't.
