CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Save the Children…From ICE!

Photograph Source: Fibonacci Blue – CC BY 2.0

ICE currently detains hundreds of migrant children, many for over 20 days, and if you thought Kristi Noem’s deserved firing from the Department of Homeland Security would improve things for these kids, well, think again. Her departure has not been accompanied by any mass exodus of the under-12 set from federal detention. In fact, expect her successor, Markwayne Mullin, to continue the same barbaric policies she put in place.

According to the Marshall Project, over 3800 children have been detained in the past year, in unsanitary, poor conditions that include bugs, mold and crappy food, while the average stay in custody has stretched out to almost six months. Meanwhile it’s well known that parental separation and detention have profoundly awful impacts on kids, including anxiety, developmental delays and PTSD.

Back in February, the story of five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father, detained in Minnesota by ICE, then held in Texas, made headlines when a judge ordered them released. The government claimed “the boy’s father entered the U.S. illegally from Ecuador in December 2020,” reported PBS February 1. “The family’s lawyer said he has an asylum claim pending that allows him to stay in the U.S….Images of the boy wearing a blue bunny hat and Spiderman backpack and surrounded by immigration officers drew outrage about the Trump administration’s crackdown in Minneapolis…Neighbors and school officials say that federal immigration officers used the preschooler as ‘bait’ by telling him to knock on the door to his house so that his mother would answer. The Department of Homeland Security has called that…an ‘abject lie.’”

The New York Times reported February 13 on a 7-year-old in Oregon, a 5-year-old in Chicago and a teenager, all of whom ended up confined with a parent in Texas. Nearly all of the........

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