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Saturday, January 19th, 2019

The US detention center where sick children receive ‘the bare minimum’

Author:     Alexandra Villarreal
Source:     The Guardian (U.K.)
Publication Date:     Thu 17 Jan 2019 06.00 EST
 Link: The US detention center where sick children receive ‘the bare minimum’
Stephan:   You're a child, say eight years old, maybe 10. You have walked a thousand miles, often hungry and footsore, to get to a country your mother tells you will be a kind of heaven. Instead, you have been captured by the heaven people. They speak a language you do not know. They lock you up with hundreds of others boys and girls, all strangers, all similarly traumatized. You get sick, or maybe you are already sick. This is what happens to you. Never forget as you read this, that you personally are paying for all the inhumanity you are reading about. All this thanks to Donald Trump, and your tax dollars.

Those familiar with the ways in which DHS holds immigrant families say there is a long medical history of neglect, misdiagnoses and close calls associated with undocumented children.
Credit: Eric Gay/AP

At the Berks Family Residential Center, an immigrant detention facility in Leesport, Pennsylvania, advocates and former detainees say it’s normal for children held there to have health problems.

One mother, who asked to use her middle name Arely, told the Guardian that children often had fevers or vomited when she was detained at Berks. She said she watched helplessly as her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter threw up blood for three days.

Another woman – who asked to be referred to only by her middle name Fernanda because she still fears her antagonists in her home country – remembered children with the flu and respiratory illnesses, and how the on-site medical professionals would take their temperatures but never give out medicine. When Fernanda’s own daughter had fever, she had to go to the hospital just to get Tylenol, she said.

Since attorney […]

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