Democrats Seek Info About Virginia Immigration Facility After Abuse Claims

This image provided by the Shenandoah Valley Juvenile Center shows part of the interior of the building in Staunton, Va. Immigrant children as young as 14 housed at the juvenile detention center say they were beaten ... This image provided by the Shenandoah Valley Juvenile Center shows part of the interior of the building in Staunton, Va. Immigrant children as young as 14 housed at the juvenile detention center say they were beaten while handcuffed and locked up for long periods in solitary confinement, left nude and shivering in concrete cells. The abuse claims are detailed in federal court filings that include a half-dozen sworn statements from Latino teens jailed there for months or years. (Shenandoah Valley Juvenile Center via AP) MORE LESS
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WASHINGTON (AP) — Virginia’s two Democratic senators asked the Trump administration Friday for answers about operations at a juvenile detention facility in the state where immigrant children said they were bound, beaten and isolated in solitary confinement.

Sens. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine sent to the head of the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement questions about the Shenandoah Valley Juvenile Center. The Associated Press reported Thursday that six Latino teens had made sworn statements detailing severe abuse they said they endured between 2015 and 2018, under both the Obama and Trump administrations. In court filings, lawyers for the detention facility have denied all allegations of physical abuse.

The senators asked whether regulators had received any past complaints involving the facility located near Staunton, Virginia. The Democrats also want to know whether there is a system in place to discipline staff members who abuse children in federal custody.

Officials at the Department of Health and Human Services, which includes the Refugee Resettlement office, have refused to provide any comment this week about when they first learned of the abuse allegations and whether any action has been taken to determine the veracity of those claims.

Hours after AP’s initial reporting Thursday, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, also a Democrat, directed the state’s secretary of public safety and homeland security and the Department of Juvenile Justice to report back to him “to ensure the safety of every child being held there.”

The Shenandoah lockup is one of only three juvenile detention facilities in the United States with federal contracts to provide “secure placement” for immigrant children who had problems at less-restrictive housing.

The center was built by a coalition of seven nearby towns and counties to lock up local kids charged with serious crimes. Since 2007, about half the 58 beds are occupied by male and female immigrants between the ages of 12 and 17 facing deportation proceedings or awaiting rulings on asylum claims. It received $4.2 million in federal funds last year to house the immigrant children.

On average, 92 immigrant children each year cycle through Shenandoah, most of them from Mexico and Central America. Though incarcerated in a facility similar to a prison, the children detained on administrative immigration charges have not yet been convicted of any crime.

As part of a federal class-action lawsuit, young immigrants held at the Shenandoah facility said in sworn statements said they were beaten while handcuffed and locked up for long periods in solitary confinement, left nude and shivering in concrete cells.

Children as young as 14 also said the guards there stripped them of their clothes and strapped them to chairs with bags placed over their heads.

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  1. Shut it down! Drill, Baby, drill! There have to be charges brought and examples made of these abusive assholes. It won’t hurt if this is all shaking out around October and November.

  2. Good move, governor.

    Let’s see whether this Republican administration is great or just a con job.

  3. I think we’ve already found that out. From day one and the largest inauguration crowd ever assembled.

  4. Avatar for paulw paulw says:

    Let us make sure that the investigation doesn’t stop at the lower-level perps. There had to be a chain of management that was enabling them.

  5. So, a thing I find really, really important has been on my mind of late, because of the fact that no one in the MSM seems to think it’s worth noticing.

    We are surrounded by gigantic red flags, deafeningly cracking and popping in a gale force wind that say “COVER UP!” As soon as a few decent people in Congress started showing up, demanding entry, we saw them engaging in activity indicative of a frantic, panic stricken effort to cover up things that they deem worthy of panic-stricken frantic cover up activity. And we keep getting hints and glimpses of greater horrors that no one in the goddamn MSM seems to realize are also red flags. We have refusal to let member of Congress see what they’re doing, the sudden pulling of rules out of their ass about how they will only let press and members of Congress in on two weeks notice.

    And we have this, right here, we have tales of children under ten herded onto airplanes in the dead of night and flown across the country, we have a story about kids being drugged into compliant mush, for fuck’s sake. AND WE HAVE THE FACT THAT, EVEN UNTO THIS DATE, WE HAVE YET TO SEE A SINGLE GIRL, A SINGLE TODDLER, A SINGLE BABY!!!

    We have a program hurried improvised at the last minute at a regional level, no central plan, no single authority or administrator, no additional funding to deal with a foreseeable upsurge in population and the use of a system thrown together to deal with a different problem (unaccompanied minors). And we have the most vulnerable possible population, babies, toddlers, elementary, tweens, and teens, traumatized by separation, completely cut off from communication with their parents with no representation, no advocacy, NO GODDAMN RECORDS KEEPING, no transparency into their treatment. No apparent oversight or vetting of the jailers.

    These are all things that historically, and by the exercise of a modicum of goddamn common sense-are necessarily going to result in atrocities–sexual abuse, mental and physical abuse, injuries, death. And even now that the program has supposedly ended, we learn that there is no plan to return the kids already fed into them maw of the monstrosity to their parents and, indeed, we learn that they didn’t even goddamn bother to take information that would enable that!

    As a mother pointed out on a heartbreaking twitter feed yesterday, children between the age of 0 and 5 have a tendency to die unless they have a full time caregiver. Their body temperature is not well-regulated, they don’t always tell you when they feel bad, infections can take hold and kill them before they even cry, they are constantly seeking out new ways of hurting themselves. For God’s sake, any parent knows that the first years of parenthood are a constant struggle to keep the kid from dying or killing itself because that’s the price we pay for having such gigantic brains that our babies have to be born before they are fully developed and then spend years outside the womb finishing. And without constant love and attention, babies and toddlers “fail to thrive,” wither up close in and die.

    Which brings me back to the part where WE HAVE NO GODDAMN IDEA WHAT THEY HAVE DONE WITH THE BABIES AND TODDLERS! We don’t know where they are, we haven’t seen any of them. Good God, has anyone even heard a single story about a single one of these kids being taken to a hospital? How is that possible?

    The sky is full of these giant red flags warning that, through incompetence, lack of planning and active malice, we have created a situation where kids have already died, are now being exploited and abused and that people in charge are giving all the signs of consciousness of guilt and yet, somehow, NO ONE IN OUR GODDAMN CRACKERJACK MSM SEEMS TO HAVE NOTICED THEM! I have seen not one goddamn sign of that the evidence of a coverup has triggered a single goddamn mainstream journalist to wonder what’s being covered up and stop digging.

    Indeed, the MSM’s lack of curiosity about where the babies, girls and toddlers are is itself sinister, indicative of a widespread subconscious fear of finding out. They are still focused on Trump’s mind and how it plays and not at all, as far as I can tell, on what the hell has happened to these kids. They’re telling soothing stories about how the kids that can’t be accounted for probably aren’t really “missing” (without noticing that “probably” doesn’t go with “not missing”).

    We have all the signs that the worst has already happened, that kids have already been buried in potter’s fields, in graves hopefully at least marked with a number rather than just buried secretly, and that terrible things are happening. And no one seems to give a rat’s ass about looking into it because hey, we have a few pix from inside a few carefully selected shelters already, so it’s Old News. And never mind that what we found even in the theresienstadt shocases is bad enough to provoke outrage.

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