The following article by Alan Pyke was posted on the ThinkProgress.org website July 23, 2018:
From holding cells nicknamed the “hielera” or icebox, to the supposedly friendlier housing at “Casa Padre,” migrant kids describe a hellscape of cruel guards, sickening food, and psychological torture.
Children are being cussed out by guards and subsisting on meager rations of beans, crackers, and tortillas that leave them feeling ill in a converted Walmart in south Texas.
The new reports of harsh physical conditions, humiliating psychological abuse, and basic deprivation come from children held at the so-called “Casa Padre” facility in Brownsville, Texas, almost a month after President Donald Trump took symbolic steps to quash public outcry over his family separation policy aimed at punishing and deterring migrants.
The children and parents who swore out hundreds of affidavits to attorneys appealing the United States government’s treatment of migrants have mostly fled violence in Central America. The conditions in which they find themselves today in the world’s richest and most powerful country shock the conscience — and almost certainly violate the conditions of the legal settlement that’s bound American officials in treatment of minors in immigration detention for decades, lawyers say.