An Associated Press report on Thursday detailed a lawsuit wherein a juvenile detention center for illegal immigrants was accused of neglect and abuse of its detainees. The AP report initially neglected to note, however, that the alleged abuse began while President Barack Obama was in office.
The original story said multiple teens have accused Shenandoah Valley Juvenile Center near Staunton, Va., of forcing them to be “handcuffed and locked up for long periods in solitary confinement, left nude and shivering in concrete cells.”
It also said many of the accusers, including the plaintiff, identified as 17-year-old Mexican “John Doe,” suffer from mental health issues, some or all of which began after they were placed in the detention center.
The complaint, filed in October 2017 by the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, said that Doe was apprehended at the Southern border in August 2015 and that he was transported between multiple detention centers before ultimately being sent to Shenandoah Valley Juvenile Center in April 2016, where he has remained ever since.
The complaint said that, “In each of these placements, Doe failed to receive the mental health services necessary to allow him to live in a community setting …”
It said that just six weeks after Doe arrived at the Shenaodah Valley Juvenile Center in 2016, “Doe first disclosed … that he had engaged in self-harm” and that “prior to his arrival in the United States, Doe had not engaged in self-harm. He reports that he learned this behavior while in … custody.”
All of this would have happened under the Obama administration, but that is noted nowhere in the Associated Press report.
The report does say that the accusers “were not the children who have been separated from their families under the Trump administration’s recent policy and are now in the government’s care,” but it at no point mentions Obama’s name.
A spokesperson for the Associated Press did not return a request for comment by the Washington Examiner on Thursday, though the story was updated after the request was made to include one mention of the Obama administration.
“Robert Carey, who served as director of Refugee Resettlement under the Obama administration, said Tuesday he only heard about the complaints at the Shenandoah center after he left office in January 2017,” the report said after it was updated. “Had he known, Carey said, he ‘would have been all over that trying to figure out what needed to be done, including termination of contracts.'”
Trump is mentioned four times in the article.
“Many of the children were sent there after U.S. immigration authorities accused them of belonging to violent gangs, including MS-13,” the story said. “President Donald Trump has repeatedly cited gang activity as justification for his crackdown on illegal immigration.”
The Trump administration has drawn intense scrutiny from the media, Democrats and some members of his own party for the president’s zero tolerance enforcement on the border, which resulted in illegal immigrants being separated from the children they brought with them.
