Trump Regime to Move Migrant Children in a Bid to Avoid Accountability for Harming Them

[Content Note: Nativism; child abuse.]

After reports that detained migrant and refugee children are effectively being tortured in the concentration camps where they're being held, the Trump Regime has moved "more than 300 children out of Texas Border Patrol station" and relocated them "to a tent detention camp in the El Paso sector and will remain in the custody of Border Patrol."

As I noted on Twitter, "perilous conditions" exist in tent-style concentration camps, too. This is a lateral move, at best.

Just over a year ago, I wrote a piece about the tent city that the Trump Regime was building in El Paso, in which I noted:

It is appallingly indecent that the United States government would even consider housing children in "tent cities" in the heat of the El Paso summer, which averages 95 degrees in July. Children are "more susceptible to heat illness than adults for many reasons, including a greater surface area to body mass ratio, lower rate of sweating, and slower rate of acclimatization. The prevention of heat illness is based on recognizing and modifying risk factors," like, presumably, not housing children in concentration camps in the El Paso heat.

Or anywhere else.

In addition to urgent threat to detained children's wellbeing, there is this: The Trump administration has previously admitted they do not have an effective tracking system in place to facilitate reunification of detained migrant children and their families.

In May, Jacob Soboroff reported at NBC News: "'[I]n short, no, we do not have any linkages from parents to [children], save for a handful,' a Health and Human Services official told a top official at Immigration and Customs Enforcement on June 23, 2018. 'We have a list of parent alien numbers but no way to link them to children.' ...The shortage of data has also complicated efforts to find many other children, potentially thousands, separated prior to zero tolerance. The administration's lawyers have said in court filings that reunification could take years."

Moving kids en masse between shelters is only going to make reunifications even more difficult.

Further, I also want to note that the deaths we know about which have happened in various facilities are known mostly because the families raised hell. There will be even less accountability if families lose track of detained children and don't know whether they're even alive or dead.

One imagines that is partly the objective. Not only is the Trump Regime attempting to avoid accountability for the appalling conditions at facilities from which the children were moved, but is hoping to avoid accountability for future deaths, when families can't even locate their children.

Malice is the fucking agenda. That could not be any more clear.

Any and all legal measures must be undertaken immediately to stop Donald Trump and his sinister regime.