The “Missing” Warehoused Immigrant Children

The Trump administration, in addition to continuing the unconscionable separation of Latin American immigrant children from their parents and siblings at official border crossings and other places on the southwest border, has admitted it has no realistic plans to reunite those families. That is, border patrol and DHS officials have been swift to tear families apart and warehouse them separately in dozens of locations across the country but have failed to set up a system to ultimately reunite them.

It’s a question of priorities. Tearing apart is much easier for an autocracy than bringing back together. To rend asunder takes force or the threat of force. Keeping families separated merely requires incompetence of the most inhumane and appalling kind.

Which the Trump administration has perfected in the image of its Great Leader.

To date, there are as many as three or four child and “tender age” shelters for babies and small children located in south Texas and operated by private contractors. The exact locations of these shelters have been mostly undisclosed although enterprising reporters and insistent legislators have located some of them. In addition, foster care facilities all over the country have received children for care, many of whom were surreptitiously transferred in the middle of the night.

Most of the direct care personnel contractors have instructions not to touch the children.

Not to touch a toddler who is sobbing? An infant who needs cuddling? An abandoned child whose world has collapsed?

Over 11,000 children are now being held in those shelters, and this number could double in the next six weeks or so.

MSNBC newswoman Rachel Maddow indicated on air, in tears, about visits to the shelters from

“lawyers and medical providers who had visited shelters where migrant children were being held in the Rio Grande Valley, describing play rooms full of crying, preschool age children.”

One or more audiotapes and then videotapes smuggled out of those rooms reveal hopelessly desperate young children sobbing without avail. It was all too much for anyone with a heart.

Preparations are being made to hold some older children on military bases, and others are already living temporarily in tents in the desert where air conditioning is lacking and outside temperatures often rise to 100º or more.

As parents were denied their petitions for asylum and thence were swiftly deported, there have been no concurrent actions undertaken by DHS or HHS to reunite families torn apart at the border and held incommunicado from each other for days, weeks, or even months.

Most significantly, there is no one overall system with input by all the parties concerned—DHS, HHS, contractors, military, border control, social work employers—to connect families still in the States or deported back to Central or South America as their minor children wait anxiously for them in child internment camps all over the country.

The adjudication systems are not in sync. This means that once parents have gone through an expedited purported quasi-judicial hearing to determine if they are entitled to asylee status—and fail to convince the presiding fact-finder that their imminent fears of persecution in their countries of origin are justified—they have been hustled onto a flight south out of the country without generally being able to see, hear, or speak to their children. Few have the resources or the knowledge to retain legal counsel to appeal an initial negative finding.

All immigrant participants in this charade, adults and children, are assigned numbers (on armbands, like yellow stars?), but it would appear that the numbers of all individuals in the same family do not match and cannot be computer-syncronized. Older children know their names, their parents’ names, the locations of their previous homes, and very likely a telephone number or two. But babies haven’t even learned their own full names, let alone any other data, and a numbered armband is nothing but an obscenity to anyone attempting to keep a family together.

Finding historical parallels to this developing tragedy isn’t difficult.

The Argentinians did it with the newborn babies and small children of the “disappeared” or murdered young parents during their dirty war of 1976 to 1983. An estimated 500 of these children were “handed or sold to military families and to others considered ‘politically acceptable’” for adoption by the Argentinian junta which ruled the country without mercy.

Even with forensic genetic DNA testing, fewer than 25% of the disappeared Argentinian children have been identified. The rest continue to live a lie and their true families continue to search for them, with a new younger generation persevering in these efforts as the mothers, siblings, and especially the grandmothers—“the angels” of the missing children—age out and die.

And this in one self-contained country that is a quarter the size of the United States.

The Spanish also illegally adopted out as many as 300,000 newborn babies beginning in the decade following the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939 and continuing even after the death of dictator General Francisco Franco in 1975. Babies were taken from vulnerable women who supported the Republican cause—i.e., women who were imprisoned or widowed or both. Some mothers were told that their babies had died. Others—prisoners who understood what was happening—were shot after their babies were forcibly removed.

The Catholic Church collaborated, including both nuns and priests. Lax Spanish adoption laws were easily circumvented. Court cases against elderly physicians plus DNA testing are continuing at the present time to reestablish family ties and uncover the truth about these infant abductions.

In Trump’s ethnocentric America, small children being stranded in the U.S. trace their heritage mainly to Central America, with some deriving from families even further south, hundreds if not thousands of miles from the U.S. border. Searching for the families of the detained immigrant babies and children is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Most of the home countries have become failed states and/or exceptionally violent. The families who flee are in fear for their lives. They are legitimately seeking refugee or asylee status.

We now know that the task of reuniting families torn asunder by the Trump policy is hopelessly beyond the capability of the wardens of these babies and children, the myriad U.S. caretakers including some foster families in northern cities, and government record-keepers. The speed and casualness with which separated children were whisked away from their parents and/or ports of entry now prevent quick detection of the children’s current circumstances.

The New York Times has reported that:

“In part because of the Argentine experience, international accords now recognize certain fundamental human rights. The Convention on the Rights of the Child, approved by the United Nations General Assembly in 1989, asserts that nations must ‘respect the right of the child to preserve his or her identity,’ a requirement that extends to one’s name and family relationships. In 2006, the General Assembly affirmed that a ‘forced disappearance’ that is part of a systematic attack on a civilian population qualifies as a crime against humanity.”

Hence, can we justifiably describe the internment of asylum seekers on our southwest border as “a systematic attack on a civilian population” and hence a “crime against humanity”?

Just ask the mothers, fathers, grandparents, and their tiny wailing children warehoused without understanding, without hope, without comforting arms.

Just ask the implacably determined Trump administration led by the execrable President himself—whose sole governing mantra has been to get his own way—if the future for these warehoused babies and children has promise. Just try to get an answer. He speaks in his usual roaring platitudes and twisted logic. He has now, under pressure, signed an “order” purportedly to unite families which fails to clarify how this can be accomplished.

He publicly labels immigrants “animals.” His base cheers.

Thousands of futures hang in the balance. They appear to be hopelessly compromised. The fragile emotional and psychological well-being of these young children is at stake.

Only the federal courts, which have been importuned by plaintiffs represented by the ACLU and at least 18 attorneys general of the states and the District of Columbia, have responded with initial injunctions for immediate communications between and swift reunification of family members. Let us hope that the hundreds of volunteer attorneys who have been on the front lines can assist the courts to reconnect these immigrant parents and children.

[Updated June 27]