A view from a pediatrician on the inside for over ten years (she also draws a helpful comparison between HHS and CBP - see link).
Texas pediatrician on border crisis: ‘Kids don’t go in cages’
You said earlier that “it has gotten increasingly worse.” What do you mean by that?
First it’s the overcrowding. But the rhetoric around it in the last two years, the rhetoric about them being criminals, has made the atmosphere and the way that people talk about their time in the Border Patrol facilities more egregious than it was before.
When families come out, then what they talk about – about people kicking them, or about them abusing them – that has gotten worse. In the past migrants may have complained that it was cold, that they didn’t get good food and they kept the lights on all the time, but it wasn’t this constant, ‘Oh, and they abused us.’ You’d hear some, but not like this.
Maybe people are just frustrated because there’s so many. But this kind of behavior – we should be prepared for this. We don’t have to become animals.
What does that mean? That “we should be prepared for this”?
I think we can keep our core morality and our basic values in how to treat human beings when we’re faced with a humanitarian crisis. If we had just 10 arriving every day forever and ever and we treated them well, and then we suddenly got, for whatever reason, a hundred every day, we don’t have to start abusing them. You treat them like a human being, with dignity.
Sometimes I’ll fall down and cry. It’s like, this is not OK. It’s not what we would have our grandkids or kids be exposed to. And once you get to know them, once you see them and play with them, then it becomes a real atrocity. As long as it’s over there and you’re just seeing it in the news, it doesn’t hit you as much as if they’re running through here and you’ve got them in your arms. And then it’s, “Don’t you dare touch this kid.”
