VIDEO.
Inside Family Detention, Trump’s Big Solution.
▻https://www.themarshallproject.org/2018/06/22/inside-family-detention-trump-s-big-solution
▻https://d63kb4t2ifcex.cloudfront.net/famdetentionhed20180621/assets/icevideo.e7472e56.mp4
At first glance, it resembles a doctor’s office, or perhaps a rec center. Security footage depicts sterile gray hallways leading to common areas with office couches and rainbow-colored, child-sized chairs. At the door to an outdoor field, there are tricycles and assorted balls, and in a small chapel with wooden benches, a detainee sweeps the floor. Correctional officers, referred to as “residential counselors,” sport khakis and blue polo shirts. But the Berks Family Residential Center, located about 75 miles northwest of Philadelphia, is also a place where immigrant parents and children are held for indefinite periods of time without adequate healthcare, according to multiple complaints and lawsuits. In one 2016 case, a guard there was convicted of “institutional” sexual assault; his victim was a 19-year-old asylum seeker from Honduras who had been detained with her three-year-old son for 7 months. It is facilities like Berks — operating in a gray area between federal prison and childcare provider — that may begin to sprout up across the country following President Trump’s announcement on Wednesday that he will end his administration’s practice of forcibly separating migrant parents and children at the U.S.-Mexico border.“We are going to keep the families together,” Trump said, at a signing ceremony in the Oval Office for his executive order.