Flores Visit to CBP Border Detention
Facilities in the Rio Grande Valley 2019
Executive Director Hope Frye led a team of specially selected lawyers on a Flores monitoring visit to the Rio Grande Valley (RGV) Border Patrol facilities from June 10-14, 2019. Attorneys on her team interviewed 103 children and parents with children at the Ursula Processing Center and at the Weslaco, Brownsville, Rio Grande, Donna, McAllen and Fort Brown Border Patrol Stations. She has this to say about the visits:
“The stories we heard were remarkably consistent and universally disturbing. Children held in different places who never interacted with one another, reported similar conditions and the same cruel and inhumane treatment. We heard similar stories of brutality and sadism. Here are the words of the children in declarations submitted in a court action filed June 26, 2019, which will allow you to hear from them directly.
We met children who were too traumatized to interact with us. Others were barely there. A two-year-old at the Weslaco detention center in the RGV, his tiny face almost completely covered by a paper surgical mask sat slumped and motionless for two hours. His eyes were blank. He ignored food and wet his pants without noticing, drenching his 13-year-old uncle who was holding him. This pre-adolescent uncle was also taking care of his six-year old nephew whose ear was jammed with a wad of dirty cotton because his ear drum had burst. They all had the flu. The uncle looked to me like a torture victim, shattered and despondent.
The uncle had each of the boys three aluminum “blankets” which he wrapped around his waist and precariously pressed between his arm pits, trying to carry them, while he also carried the two-year-old. When he sat down, he looked wrapped in trash, a fitting metaphor for the way he was treated.
Children as young as 8-years-old were trying to take care of even younger children. Guards would bring in the little ones and demand of the slightly older children, “who wants to take care of this one?” We met with a girl tasked with caring for a two-year-old boy who wasn’t wearing a diaper. He never speaks, she reported. He peed in his pants and all over the chair while meeting with us. This two-year-old didn’t travel alone to the United States. Who is his primary caregiver? How will we ever reunite them?
The children stay with me. I smell the fetid smell of them see their faces – tear tracks through the dirt. And I hear them crying. I will never forget them. They are tattooed on my soul.”
