Other voices: Refugee children

'It was cold, very cold': migrant children endure border patrol 'ice boxes'

Carla’s recollections are all too familiar to immigration lawyers and advocacy groups who have long complained about the brutal conditions in temporary holding cells for undocumented border crossers of all ages. But of all the stories that have been recounted, those involving children are the most visceral.

Imagine being taken into a room. It is cold – very, very cold – and you shiver under the single layer of clothes that is all you are allowed to wear. The room is concrete and entirely bare: nothing on the walls, no furniture, no bedding of any sort other than the thin sheet you have been given. The only window allows guards to look in at you, but gives you no view of the world outside.

You sit in the room, huddled on the cold, hard floor, seeking warmth under the sheet. The room is lit by neon lights that are kept on 24 hours a day, and after a while you lose track of time. Is it day, is it night – you no longer know. Though there are many other people in the room with you, they are all strangers and no one speaks to you. You are utterly alone.

And you are seven years old.

Carla (not her real name) was seven years old when she was picked up by officers of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) last June, after she crossed the Mexican border into the US near Hidalgo, Texas. At the end of a grueling 10-day journey from El Salvador, which she left to escape danger and poverty and in the hope of being reunited with her parents in New York, she was taken by border patrol officers to a temporary holding station.

For the first two days, Carla had the company of her cousin, a woman in her early 20s, who had made the journey with her. But then her relative was separated from her and released. For the following 13 days – as official immigration papers record – Carla was detained in the concrete room, surrounded by about 15 other undocumented immigrants like herself.

When she described the room to the Guardian she called it an hielera – “ice box” in Spanish. “It was cold, very cold,” she said, through a translator. “The lights were on all the time, and the floor was hard. I couldn’t sleep.”

She was fed an apple and milk for breakfast, the same for lunch, and a sandwich at night. “I was hungry all the time.”

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This is how the US government treats innocent children, who are fleeing for their lives. It is beyond disgusting. I wish we could welcome the children warmly and humanly, and send the people who participate in this kind of treatment to children straight to hell. 

The rest of the story here.