Donald Trump earns place in history with how USA treats migrant kids

Donald Trump earns place in history with how America treats migrant children

On a subject as fraught as immigration, there's plenty of room for disagreement about border security, workplace enforcement, paths to citizenship and other policies. But when the topic is the well-being of kids crammed into federal immigration centers on the southern border, there ought to be no room for debate.

For young children, toddlers and infants guilty only of being carried or led into the United States, it's unconscionable for federal officials to banish them for days or weeks to squalor.

At the facility in Clint, Texas, according to a report by The New York Times and the El Paso Times (which is part of the USA TODAY Network), children have gone hungry and without hygiene, beds, adults to care for them. They've been buffeted by outbreaks of scabies, shingles and chickenpox.

Adult migrants, many fleeing Central American violence for asylum in the USA, are crammed for days or weeks in holding cells designed for a fraction of their number. The stench in standing-room-only conditions with temperatures in the 80s is a mix of unwashed bodies, untreated diarrhea and urine. That's according to the Department of Homeland Security's own internal watchdog, known as an inspector general.

For those watching, this is what a national disgrace looks like.

And how has President Donald Trump responded? With his characteristic deflection and denial. ("We're doing a fantastic job under the circumstances.") Border officials concede it's a crisis, albeit exaggerated by monitors and media, and they're simply overwhelmed by a 124% increase in migrants over the previous year.

HOMELAND SECURITY: We've done all we could with limited resources

Maybe so, but border officers warned superiors for months that detention conditions were crashing — to no avail. Only when the inhumanity was exposed in photographs, news accounts and rushed inspector general reports did officials suddenly begin finding alternative housing for about 2,000 confined children.

Some of Trump's tough-guy policies for staunching the flow of migrants have only made matters worse. When he "meters" lawful asylum seeking at ports of entry down to a trickle, desperate migrants find other ways to enter the country. When he starts threatening deportation of U.S. residents willing to sponsor child migrants, sponsorship declines and children languish in holding cells. And when he cancels or limits programs that allow for release of migrants into the community wearing ankle bracelets or under successful community supervision programs, they're consigned to fetid, standing-room only cells.

Trump declared an end to his family separation policy last year, falsely claiming it began under President Barack Obama. But strangely, inspectors still find young children held without parents, raising the question of whether another new Trump policy, of using flawed evidence of gang affiliation to separate families, is making matters worse. After a decade of not a single death, at least seven migrant children have died under federal care since December.

Thankfully, the number of children in custody has eased of late. Housing for adults has expanded with the use of tents, and $4.6 billion in congressional funding will provide further relief.

Going forward, Congress could help safeguard children by:

►Creating a multiagency, pilot program to compassionately process children and families.

►Allowing lawmakers to visit sites without advance notice.

►Establishing medical care standards for children and adults in custody.

►Providing best-practices training for border officers.

For now, there's lasting damage — to the children. Many already traumatized by violence they fled in their home countries risk severe mental health consequences after being separated from parents and subjected to squalor in U.S. immigration centers.

"Most kids will have lasting scars from what they have seen or are enduring," Harvard Medical School psychiatrist and bioethicist Wes Boyd, who has studied asylum seekers, told Axios.

Trump covets a place in history. With his administration's cruelty toward Central American migrants, he might well have earned it.

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