This week, yet again, the world abandoned and betrayed children. Not some children. All children. On Monday, ProPublica published two stories: “The Children of Dilley” and “I Have Been Here Too Long: Read Letters from the Children Detained at ICE’s Dilley Facility”. On Tuesday, The Guardian published a story: “Israeli court blocks life-saving cancer care for boy, 5, due to his Gaza address”. On Tuesday evening, PBS New Hour aired a story: “Mother recounts weeks in immigration custody with her U.S. citizen children.” That you need not read or watch any of these to know what they are saying and how these accounts of torturing children, all in the name of “national security” and even “democracy”, will make you feel, says it all, doesn’t it?
The ProPublica reporters spoke to more than two dozen current and former detainees, more than half of them children. They also collected letters from “more than three dozen kids”. I’ll share one of those letters, written by Maria Antonia Guerra Montoya, a nine-year-old child from Colombia. Antonia was detained for 113 days. The letter is in Spanish, translated into English by ProPublica:
““Name Maria Antonia Guerra Montoya
Country I am colombian
Age 9 years
Locked in custody how long 113 Days
I am Maria Antonia Guerra Montoya and I have been 113 days in detention I miss my friends and I feel they are going to forget me. I am bored here. I already miss my country and my house, I came on vacation for 10 Days and they took me into an ice office an officer interrogated me 2 hours without my mom, I was traveling with flight attendant because my mom lives in new york, they only wanted to arrest my mom, because my mom didn’t have documents to live in U.S.A., I always traveled with my tourist visa but ice used me to catch my mom and now I am in a jail and I am sad and I have fainted 2 times here inside. When I arrived every night I cried and now I don’t sleep well, I felt that being here was my fault and I only wanted to be on vacation like a normal family.
They don’t give me my diet I am vegetarian, I don’t eat well, there is no good education and I miss my best friend julieta and my grandmother and my school I already want to get to my house.
Me in dilei [Dilley] am not happy please get me out of here to colombia.
Antonia”
Meanwhile, in “another part of the world”, “an Israeli court has rejected an appeal to allow a five-year-old Palestinian boy with an aggressive form of cancer to enter Israel for life-saving treatment, citing a government policy that bars residents registered in Gaza from crossing the border, even when they no longer live there.” The child is five years old. Since 2022, he has lived in the West Bank, where he has been receiving medical care he could not get in Gaza, but now he needs a bone marrow transplant or he will die. The court rejected his family’s petition, arguing that the petition was “an indirect challenge to the security establishment’s post-7 October restrictions, which have prevented Gaza residents from entering Israel for medical treatment.” Imagine the security threat a dying five-year-old child presents to the nation-State. As one local human rights organization explained, “The significance of this ruling is that the court is providing backing for an unlawful policy that effectively condemns children to death, even when life-saving treatment is in reach.”
PBS focused on Jackie Merlos, a Honduran woman who was returning from Canada to her home in Washington State. Ms. Merlos was accompanied by her four children, all of whom are U.S. citizens. The five were detained and sent to an ICE processing center in Tacoma, Washington, Ms Merlos and her four children were kept for four weeks in a windowless room. After four weeks, the children were released. Ms. Merlos spent another 100 days in custody. As PBS noted, Ms. Merlos has “a temporary legal status while her full visa is pending. She has no criminal history.” Here is part of what she said:
“They treat us not as human beings. They treat us more than animals. The detention center wasn’t good for — to have a family there. My kids started having so much hunger of all the stress and trauma that they were going through …. We live in fear. My kids live in fear. Those 14 days and four months that I spent in detention were really, really bad for them, because there’s been so much trauma ….They are not the happy kids that they were before our detention … My kids are living in fear. It’s, what we’re going to do with all this generation that are living in fear, even knowing that they are citizen of United States? They don’t have rights anymore …. How are we going to deal with this generation, with all the kids that are supposed to be playing and enjoying their life?”
How are we doing to deal with this generation? How are they going to deal with our question to them, “How would you like your execution, swift or slow?”
(By Dan Moshenberg)
(Illustrations: ProPublica)