13,000 migrant children in detention: America's horrifying realityWrong again. The were waiting to be picked up by foster parents. They went into the Texas foster care system.
13,000 migrant children in detention: America's horrifying reality (opinion) - CNN
Pretend you are a child far from home. Without warning, federal officers rouse you in the middle of the night, put you on a bus and send you across the United States to live in a tent city constructed in a desert wasteland, where summer temperatures hover around 100 degrees.
You will not be provided schooling, classes of any kind or books. You will spend the next few months with thousands of other children, wondering if and when your childhood will be returned to you.
You have fled unimaginable violence, have crossed entire countries alone, only to find that your right to request asylum requires that you first survive a camp that more closely mirrors a place for interned prisoners than for children.
According to The New York Times, this is the reality for some 13,000 migrant children being held in detention centers across the country. The aggressiveness of the Trump administration's policies toward migrant children has created a new term -- "tender age shelters" -- language which ironically obfuscates the truth about the billion-dollar business of holding children in shelters run by some of the same private companies that operate prisons.
As the Trump administration ramps up the construction of tent camps, what remains clear is that the big business of detention centers for migrant children will only continue to grow, and that few safeguards are in place to ensure the health and well-being of those children.