For the first time, journalists have been allowed to visit one of the camps where children—most of them the children of applicants seeking to legally enter the United States on sanctuary applications—have been taken away from parents and warehoused. And it’s not as bad as you think it is. It’s worse.
MSNBC reporter Jason Soboroff was one of those who visited a facility in Brownsville, Texas, that is known as Casa Padre. In this location, 1,469 boys were housed inside the concrete blocks of a former Walmart. What Soboroff found wasn’t just an overcrowded warren of cells, and boys lined up to receive rations. He found a facility where children are given treatment usually reserved for the most dangerous inmates at a federal prison. They’re kept locked in for 22 hours each day, and given one hour of “structured time” and only a single hour of “free time” outdoors. Each boy gets 40 square feet of living space, which is the same as the minimum standard Texas uses for allocating space in a maximum security prison.
And perhaps the eeriest, most unsettling thing that Soboroff found in his tour of the facility: Donald Trump. As in, Trump’s face looking down from posters and murals complete with “inspirational” slogans. There were other posters, including one with Barack Obama … though it was not at all clear he’d be pleased by its presence.
To be fair, the facility, at least on the day when MSNBC was allowed to peek inside, appeared to be clean. But of course, it’s also new; one of several such facilities just built or currently under construction. Across America, empty big box stores left behind by Walmart and others have saddled towns with a puzzle over how to fill these massive spaces. It appears that Trump has an answer—self-contained isolation camps right in the midst of towns.
One thing that MSNBC also noted was that only the insistence on oversight by Democratic congressmen gained them access. The standard procedure of the facility when approached by a reporter was to call the police.
“I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations to propaganda.” — Dwight Eisenhower after visiting the Ohrdruf concentration camp.
Casa Padre isn’t Ohrdruf. It’s not Buchenwald. There are no ovens, and no lime-scattered pits.
But it is a prison for children who have been rended from their families only because their parents committed the “crime” of attempting to save them, often at great risk and after completing an arduous passage. For people who have believed the propaganda embedded in the song that Trump insists on celebrating, just applying to enter “the home of the free” means having their children torn away, often through deception, and warehoused like tiny prisoners in overcrowded facilities run under contract by private corporations.
There is no law that requires this. It’s just a policy, a separation policy instituted by Donald Trump. And these may not quite be concentration camps … yet. But that’s most certainly fascism. If these facilities are not to get progressively worse, they must be made much more transparent.