EDITORIAL: The cruel consequences of detaining child migrants

It’s bad enough the Trump administration ripped apart migrant families at the southern border and put children, including babies, in shelters that in many cases were more like jails.

Making matters worse, Trump had no plan for reuniting children with parents. Since a federal judge stepped in and gave the government deadlines to return children to their parents, the administration has been scrambling to get it done.

Now we know more about the deplorable treatment kids have endured while in detention, leaving no doubt that the government has for years shirked its responsibility to treat migrant children justly.

Citing the mistreatment of children, two doctors who consulted for the government say the Trump administration should drop plans to build more family detention facilities. If Trump looks at migrants as human beings rather than as dangerous invaders, he will heed the doctors’ advice. If Republicans can find a collective backbone, they’ll derail Trump’s expansion plan.

Ten investigations of detention centers between 2014 and 2017, going back to President Barack Obama’s second term, “frequently revealed serious compliance issues resulting in harm to children,” the doctors, Scott Allen and Pamela McPherson, wrote in a letter to the Senate’s Whistleblower Protection Caucus, the New York Times reported.

Family detention is almost as bad as child detention, they said. It “poses high risk of harm to children and their families,” the doctors wrote. “In our professional opinion, there is no amount of programming that can ameliorate the harms created by the very act of confining children to detention centers.”

The doctors echoed what other experts have said in the last few months: Detaining kids can leave them scarred forever.

The doctors reported that, while in detention, a 16-month-old had untreated diarrhea and lost nearly 32 percent of his body weight. An infant had bleeding of the brain that went undiagnosed for five days. “Numerous children” received adult doses of a vaccine.

Migrant children who had been separated from and recently reunited with their parents described to the Washington Post disturbing instances of mistreatment and abuse while in detention. Two boys who had stayed at Casa Guadalupe in Chicago told the newspaper that a 5-year-old boy who had meltdowns had been injected with something that made him sleep at his desk during school time.

Heartland Alliance, the nonprofit that operates the shelter, said it is investigating the allegations. The Illinois Department of Children and Family Services also is investigating, and the inspector general for Health and Human Services is expected to add Heartland’s facilities to its investigation of shelters across the U.S.

Unlike corporations that run jails and detention centers for profit, Heartland is a human-rights organization that assists immigrants and refugees settling in the U.S., as well as victims of human trafficking. For 20 years, since a federal consent decree set guidelines on the treatment of migrant kids, Heartland has sheltered unaccompanied minors.

“Our model is designed to be a humanitarian, therapeutic, compassionate and healing environment in the least restrictive setting,” Evelyn Diaz, president of Heartland Alliance, told us.

Shelters were not designed to take in children forcibly removed from their parents — a practice that Diaz called “abhorrent” — but Heartland had enough therapists and other clinical staff to make adjustments for their care, Heartland officials said.

The Trump administration should support a top-to-bottom investigation of shelters and detention facilities, including border processing centers. Trump also should look to comply with the consent decree for the children’s treatment instead of looking to Congress for a law that would tear up the guidelines.

Instead, you can bet our president will plow ahead with his plans to build more detention centers, children’s rights be damned.

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