2/26/21

By Josh Rubin

When the US government was sued by attorneys representing a little girl named Jenny Lisette Flores, a few principles were established that were intended to improve the experience of migrant children who were going through traumatic transition as a result of their migration to this country, often involving separation from their families.

It was determined that the most damaging thing you could do to children was to restrict them, in other words, to lock them up. So, the language, “least restrictive” plays a prominent role in the settlement. It has been interpreted to mean, first of all, that children should be transferred from border security facilities very quickly. Transferred to places that are usually referred to as “shelters.”

It is explicit that shelters are places that do not restrict children to the premises. Immigration activists can tell you what shelters are like. People stay for a bit until they find their feet, and then they go. Shelters help them with that process. They are happy to get that help.

The doors are not locked.

That’s an important point. In that lawsuit, it was clearly stated that the doors would not be locked. That locking kids up was the worst thing you could do.

Then there was Tornillo. Then there was Homestead. Now there is Carrizo Springs and son of Homestead, “Biscayne.”

Some of you may know that I spend a fair amount of time outside of these places. And one particular piece of absurdity is evident in all of them. If you ask the people running these places, they will tell you that the children can leave any time!

Now, children every so often would, in fact, try to leave. They would run, climb, leap to get out. And what would happen is that security officers, let’s call them guards, would scramble to find, subdue and return those kids inside. The use of psychotropic drugs is not unknown. Kids were always kept away from fences they might be able to scramble over. So, maybe you could say that the kids could leave any time they wanted, unless they wanted to leave. An Orwellian nicety.

So, I think we might want to think about it this way. It is a shelter if it helps you, and the doors are not locked.

If the doors are locked, and you can’t get out, it is a prison. And it is very likely that those places will be remote. Places that are hard to get to. In a desert. In a swamp. Because when people see them, people like Kamala Harris, who stood next to me on a stepladder and watched the kids in their orange prison hats and whose eyes welled with tears, they know what they are seeing.