In response to the Trump administration reopening detention facilities in the United States to enable the harmful and dangerous practice of family detention, Amy Fischer, Director of the Refugee and Migrant Rights Program at Amnesty International USA, said the following:
“No child seeking safety should be held behind bars, period.
“No child should have to worry about being brutally apprehended in a raid, snatched out of their schools and communities, and sent to a jail in rural Texas with a long history of abuses to be indefinitely detained.
“No parent should have to worry that the decision they made to come to the United States to provide a better life for their family would result in lasting trauma for their children.
“Any amount of detention can cause trauma in children, and can compound the trauma that many children have already faced in their home countries that they fled, the fear they feel in their communities today, and the dangerous journeys they take to the U.S.
“Reopening family detention facilities with devastating histories of abuses, trauma, and long-term psychological damage underscores that cruelty is the point of these Trump administration policies.
“Detaining people solely on account of their immigration status constitutes arbitrary detention, a violation of international law. And the detention of families violates the U.S.’s obligations toward the treatment of immigrant children.
“Family detention is an inherently cruel practice that results in significant trauma while filling the coffers of corporations exploiting agony and anguish.”
“From billion-dollar profits for private prison corporations, like GEO Group and CoreCivic, to filling the gaps of shrinking local budgets, detention contracts incentivize the incarceration of immigrants as a money-making scheme.
“Instead of spending billions of taxpayer dollars on mass detention and deportation, the U.S. government should invest that money in systems that benefit and bolster the human rights of all our communities, like housing, healthcare, climate resilience, education, and infrastructure to help our communities thrive.
“As Congress debates the fiscal budget for the upcoming year, Senators and Representatives need to step up to defend programs that provide a safety net and help to ensure access to human rights like social security, food assistance, and education, dismantle the deportation machine, and invest taxpayer money in real solutions that respect human rights, address root causes of forced migration, allow for safe and orderly pathways to safety, allow our neighbors to step out of the shadows with a pathway to citizenship, and meet the needs of communities at the border and in the interior of the U.S.”
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