The youngest among us are experiencing PTSD. And it couldn’t be more ugly. Immigrant children separated from their mothers and fathers at the border are slowly being reunited, slowly but surely, but they’re just not the same anymore. Many of them stare into space and suffer from separation anxiety.
There are more than 700 young immigrants out of roughly 2,500 who have yet to be reunited with their families, according to the Department of Homeland Security. The deadline for reunification was July 26. But if these children are in fact reunited — if, not when — they return with different demeanors.
Immigration lawyer Leah Chavla told CNN about an 11-year-old boy she met with who had just been reunited with his family.
The boy would barely speak through the entire interview, only sometimes slightly nodding or shaking his head to answer simple — yes or no — questions. He only stared forward with an intent expression that looked like he was concentrating so as not to cry. His mother repeatedly told him to speak to us, but he could not speak.
Some children have gone from being type-A, outgoing and happy kids to being listless, introverted, gloomy, and detached when they reunite.
The New York Times zeroed in on the struggles of one five-year-old boy in a lengthy feature published last week. Upon returning to his mother after 50 days of separation, Thiago Fernandes begged to be breast fed and hid behind the sofa when people came to visit the family’s new home in Philadelphia.
The story tells of Thiago’s former intrigue in playing with the yellow, plastic Minion characters from Despicable Me. Now his favorite pastime is to pat down people and pretend to handcuff them, incidents he surely saw first-hand while in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody.
“Our volunteers are seeing the significant and real toll that these traumatic separations have had on these children’s and these families’ lives, which persist even after reunification,” Joanna Franchini, who is coordinating a national network of volunteers working with migrant children and their parents called Together & Free, told The New York Times.
But the true abomination is that Trump and his cohorts were warned about damaging the “best interest” of these children, according to an article in USA Today, which reported on a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing held on Tuesday.
“We’re here today because the Trump Administration has engaged in… a deeply immoral and haphazard policy that fundamentally betrays American values,” said California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the top Democrat on the committee.
These children were separated at the border due to President Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy on immigration. Previously, under different presidential leadership, most families caught at the border were released into the U.S. to await deportation hearings, a policy that has been dubbed by the Trump administration as “catch and release.”
Under the “zero tolerance” policy, families caught at the border illegally were charged with a criminal violation, meaning parents are sent to adult detention centers without their children. After extreme backlash from both Democrats and Republicans, Trump ended this practice in June.
Horrific anecdotes continue to stream in.
An article on the American Psychological Association’s website indicates that some Salvadoran kids placed with sponsors in the Boston area were evading gang violence in their home country — arriving in Massachusetts only to be recruited by local members of Salvadoran gangs.
The article further points out that there are higher rates of anxiety, depression, conduct problems, and PTSD found among unaccompanied immigrant youth when compared to their accompanied immigrant counterparts.
Not to mention the thousands of immigrants in the past 10 years who have reported sexual assault under ICE custody, as reported by the New York Times.
What’s happening to immigrants in this country is disgusting, inhumane, and un-American. What the United States has done under the auspice of President Trump is terrifying. The trauma these children have experienced will likely stay with them throughout adulthood, according to experts, indelible scars of PTSD that will haunt them for years to come.
Will our government be held accountable? That remains to be seen. Meanwhile, we are witnessing an urgent crisis and I only hope that these children can get the psychiatric help they need.
