Since last October, 890 immigrants and 31 detention facility employees have contracted mumps at 57 Customs and Border Protection (CBP) or Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities in 19 states, the majority privately operated.
Nashville immigration attorney R. Andrew Free, tracking facilities with mumps outbreaks from advocate reports and lawyers representing detainees, said:
"This has all the makings of a public health crisis. ICE has demonstrated itself incapable of ensuring the health and safety of people inside these facilities."
Responding to the CDC's report, ICE spokesman Bryan Cox said:
"In general, due to the short-term nature of CBP holding and the complexities of operating vaccination programs, neither CBP nor its medical contractors administer vaccinations to those in our custody."
Earlier this summer, ICE confirmed around 4,200 of 5,200 quarantined detainees were exposed to mumps. The CDC argues most of them contracted it while in ICE custody or in the custody of another U.S. agency.
As as we enter influenza season, we must also consider the administration, citing "the short-term nature of CBP holding," will not provide flu vaccines to detainees.
That "short-term nature" is not so short when the administration decides to terminate a decades-old legal settlement prohibiting indefinite detention.
In July, Dr. Colleen Kraft, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, described "government-sanctioned child abuse" after what she witnessed when touring one of the camps:
"I can't describe to you the room I was in with the toddlers. Normally toddlers are rambunctious and running around. We had one child just screaming and crying, and the others were really silent. And this is not normal activity or brain development with these children."
Dr. Kraft talked about the "toxic stress" responsible for the harm to these children's brains, adding:
"It disrupts their brain architecture and keeps them from developing language and social, emotional bonds, and gross motor skills, and the development that they could possibly have."
Kraft asserted what the Trump administration is perpetrating upon these children is tantamount to "government-sanctioned child abuse."
But Dr. Kraft wasn't the only pediatrician to speak out.
Dr. Dolly Lucio Sevier discovered similar examples of infection, malnutrition, and psychological trauma at a Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) facility in McAllen, Texas where over 1,000 children are being imprisoned.
Despite examining one child at a time, Dr. Sevier was not permitted to enter the area where the children were held, many in cages.
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