It really is as if the people attacking immigration law enforcement live in a vacuum where time and space don’t exist and where cause and effect have never been heard of.
A group of armchair expert doctors from Harvard and Johns Hopkins sent a letter to Congress this week warning that “poor conditions” at migrant detention centers may be contributing to the spread of disease among detainees, children in particular, putting their lives at risk. The doctors further wrote that they “suspect that the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Health and Human Services may not be following best practices with respect to screening, treatment, isolation, and prevention of” illnesses like the flu.
I suspect that many doctors overprescribe antibiotics, opioids, and other unnecessary drugs but I’m not a physician so maybe I’ll just leave that to the people who do the work.
Likewise, anyone who says that the spread of disease and the deaths of children in migrant detention centers at the southern border is manageable might want to leave it to the agents tasked with feeding and housing 10,000 people per week.
Oh, and those 10,000 people aren’t a random sample of Floridians. They’re Latin America’s most destitute, having crawled 2,000 miles or more through extreme heat. They’re often starved and dehydrated to the point of near-collapse, and many others are raped or abused by human smugglers.
The obscene numbers of Guatemalans, Hondurans, and Salvadorans showing up at the border and throwing themselves in to the care of U.S. Border Patrol are often showing up sick, including children, tens of thousands of which are often unaccompanied by a parent. That’s hundreds and hundreds of Central Americans by the hour that the struggling immigration system has to screen for identities and health issues. They all then need to be fed, hydrated, cleaned, and clothed while they’re processed through a strained legal system.
Back in December, then-U.S. Customs and Border Commissioner Kevin McAleenan described the crisis and its overwhelming impact on the agency’s resources. From a Washington Post report at the time:
Yes, seven children have died within the last year while in custody of Customs and Border Protection. We can expect more. So long as the pace of migrants crossing illegally in to the country is on track to hit about 1 million in 2019 and Democrats in Congress refuse to stop the chaos by changing the asylum law, it will happen.
The system can only care for so many people at a time, and it’s no secret that the detention facilities, despite having plenty of resources, were never meant to take on 10,000 people per week.
What changes do these doctors, sitting far away from the border in Massachusetts and Maryland, think could actually make a difference? Until they have a realistic answer (and they never will), they might leave it to the people who are doing what they can with what they’ve got.
