Trauma Upon Trauma for Children and Women in Immigration Detention Centers

March 8, 2016

Guest blogger: Lizett Rodriguez, second-year law student, University of San Francisco:

Are immigration detention centers being transformed into Japanese internment camps?

During the Summer of 2014, the migration patterns of thousands of Central American women and children increased as the rising violence in Central America forced them to arrive at the U.S. southern border with the hope of finding a safe place to live.

Rather than offering protection to the women and children that arrived at the border, the U.S. government responded by reviving what was thought to be an abandoned policy of jailing more than 66,000 mothers and their children in remote detention centers located in cities with limited or little access to legal services. Currently, there are three family detention centers located in Karnes City and Dilley, Texas and another in Pennsylvania.

Keeping children and women in family detention centers causes long-term damage to the mental and emotional well-being of a child, whether they are detained with or without their parents. Detention centers re-traumatize vulnerable individuals fleeing from violent traumatic experiences in their home countries when they are incarcerated in a secure facility with metal detectors, cells with bars, security protocols, guards, secure doors, and wired fences that separate families from the outside world.

The detention centers conditions seem to be a reflection of one of the most tragic institutions in American history; Japanese internment camps. Immediately after the Pearl Harbor attack on December 7, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an Executive Order that allowed United States military to performed the evacuation and mass incarceration of more than 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast as part of national defense.

Many of the persons rounded up were U.S. citizens or permanent resident aliens, half of whom were Japanese American children. They were incarcerated for years without due process in “remote camps surrounded by barbered wire and armed guards.”

Some Japanese Americans died in the remote camps due to inadequate medical care and the emotional stress they experienced. In 1998, Congress passed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, known as the Japanese American Redress Bill, which provided some reparations to those Japanese American internees who were still alive. Thousands of Japanese Americans continue to be mentally and physically affected by their traumatic experience in the internment camps.

Today, thousands of children and women have been detained in what the Obama Administration calls “processing centers,” as their initial goal was to keep women and children only for a few days until their immigration status is determined. But those few days turned into months for most, causing severe psychological damage to children and women housed in the detention centers.

In early May 2015, the Human Right Watch conducted interviews of 25 mothers with children in detention centers in Dilley, Texas and Karnes City, Texas. Many of the mothers shared with Human Rights Watch that their children were showing signs of depression due to their detainment. Ana, a 32-year-old women from Central America who was detained for eight months in Southern Texas with her 14-year-old daughter stated that she worried that her daughter will hurt herself because she had told her that she wanted to hang herself and kill her herself.

Carolina shared that her 15-year-old daughter, who was a victim of a sexual assault in Honduras when she was 9, did not want to be locked up anymore. Both had been detained for three months and her daughter stated: “she wanted to take her own life.” Another mother, Beatriz reported experiencing serious distress over their situation. She said, “I do not want my son to see me so I go to the bathroom to cry and cry. He starts knocking on the door saying, ’Mom, Mom, are you coming out,’ which makes her feel powerless as a mother.” Mothers feel powerless and children feel unprotected as the parent cannot do anything to remove them from the detention centers because their futures are in the hands of the Immigration Custom and Enforcement officers or immigration judges.

These immigrant women and children have witnessed or experienced systematic rape, murders of their loved ones, death threats, gang violence, domestic violence and extortion, from which they found no protection in their countries forcing them to risk their lives, crossing multiple borders. Unfortunately, what they end up finding in the country of the “American Dream” is a new traumatic story in the family detention facilities.

In Flores, et. al. v. Jeh Johnson, et al., U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee in Los Angeles ordered the government to follow the rules when holding any child. Regardless of whether the child is accompanied or not by a parent, the child must be held in the least restrictive setting appropriate for their age and needs. Judge Gee held that the current family detention centers violate the provisions of the Flores Settlement Agreement reached in 1997.

The evidence presented by the plaintiffs clearly established the unsanitary and unacceptable conditions of these secure facilities. A staff person from Karnes facility stated that the “children detained at Karnes had never been permitted outside the facility to go to the park, library, museum or other public places”. One of the detainees who testified described the detention centers as a “Perrera” (a dog pound) where she stayed with her baby and was given an aluminum blanket to keep warm in a place that was super cold.. Other detainees testified that detention centers were overcrowded. According to the plaintiffs, children, and their mothers were kept in a room for days “with 100 or more unrelated adults and children, which forced children to sleep standing up or not all.”. The plaintiffs evidence illustrated the severe psychological, mental development, and physical harm that the conditions of the immigration secured confinement inflict on children and women.

Human Rights First conducted interviews of about 30 mothers and their children, performed psychological evaluations, and provided crisis interventions. Some of the mothers shared how they worry about their children’s lack of appetite and weight loss. Some reported that their children would cry themselves to sleep, wondering why they were locked up and when they were going to leave. Many of the children experienced “severe separation anxiety, depression, hopeless, despair, and agitation, which some did not experience until their detention. In addition, one representative who visited the Karnes Family Detention Center in Karnes City, Texas stated that children subject to ICE family detentions, “are experiencing trauma upon trauma upon trauma,” living “in a facility in which they have no sense of their future,” and “witness their mothers’ vulnerability and helplessness.”

Sadly, the effects of incarceration follow children and women who are lucky to leave the facilities to start in new life in America. For example, at a Human Right First congressional forum when three-year-old Yunior’s mother was testifying, the child was taken to the bathroom by a congressional member. But the child was afraid that “she was going to jail him in the bathroom stall” after seeing the stall. Another mother recently testified that when she was at a supermarket, her four-year-daughter immediately ran after seeing a police officer, terrified that the officer was going to take her back to the detention.

These are some of the reasons on why detention centers are inappropriate for mothers and children, we cannot continue to cause more harm to children and women. According to Department of Homeland Security Secretary, Jeh Johnson, the detention centers were built to deter future migrants from coming to the United States and to quickly deport people. This attempt at deterrence is unacceptable. We cannot have a system that damages the lives of vulnerable children and asylum-seekers. Given a fair chance, they have the potential of becoming part of our society; 88 percent of these families can prove that they meet the credible fear standard that grants them asylum protection.

If the government really wants to keep migrants in a facility, they could adopt U.S. Rep. Raul M. Grijalva’s (D-Ariz) bill, The Justice Is Not For Sale Act, which advocates to end family detention centers and requires Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to use Alternatives to Detention, such as lower cost community-based monitoring.

According to the National Immigration Justice Center, this type of community program will be more cost efficient. The President’s FY 2016 budget prices family detention at $342.73 per person per day. In contrast, DHS estimates costs about $5.16 per day for every Alternatives to Detention participant. http://immigrant justice.org/sites/immigrant justice.org/files/TheRealAlternativestFamily Detention.pdf.

Thus, the government should end the use of family detention centers immediately and allow ICE the discretion to utilized ATDs for immigrant families. The children and women deserve a more humane environment away from the internment, prison model.