Detained children, deplorable conditions
Mount Holyoke’s David Hernández spoke on The Takeaway about the horrifying conditions faced by immigrant children at the Texas border.
By Keely Sexton
Associate Professor of Latina/o studies David Hernández discussed new reports of squalid and dangerous conditions at a children’s detention center in Texas on radio station WNYC’s The Takeaway.
Host Tanzina Vega talked with Hernández and Elora Mukherjee, a professor and director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School, about the conditions detained children face, many of whom sleep in filth on bare concrete floors and are not given sufficient food or medical treatment.
Hernández noted that the conditions were a result of anti-immigrant policies that were implemented in the 1970s and ’80s, and the expansion of post-9/11 anti-terrorist policies to include immigrants from Latin America. The culmination of these factors has resulted in the current crisis and the known deaths of seven detained children this year.
“The squalor … the lack of medical treatment, the bungled medical treatment and the indifference to detainees — that runs across the system,” Hernández said.