WARREN BINFORD: Absolutely. And that's why, after the second day of interviewing these children, we called up -- we had a high-level, very urgent meeting in my hotel room and said, "What are we going to do about this? Because somebody is going to die." And so, we called up the attorneys who are in charge of this case, described what we were seeing, and then asked them what they wanted us to do about it. And for the first time in over 20 years of doing these visits, they told us to go ahead and go to the media, so that we could get these children out of this facility as quickly as possible.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the lice and the lice combs?
WARREN BINFORD: Yes. Yes, yes. So, let me tell you about this incident, because this was especially concerning. This visit was really originally scheduled for just three days. And what ended up happening was, when I was there on Wednesday, we started to hear from several children that there was an incident that had happened in one of the cells. And what the story was, was that there was a lice outbreak in one of the cells. Six of the children were found to have lice. Those six children were given lice shampoo, and then the other children were given two lice combs and told to pass those around and brush their hair with the lice combs in order to make sure that they, too, didn't have lice or, if they did, that the lice were being pulled out by the lice combs. Now, sharing lice combs, we all know, is something you never do with a lice infestation. But this is, in fact, what happened.
But then the story gets worse, because one of the little kids lost the comb, and the guards hit the roof. They yelled at the children and berated the children. They scared the children. They made the children cry. And then they took out all of the children's bedding. They took out the mats. They took out the blankets and told them that as punishment for losing that comb, that they were going to have to sleep on the concrete that night. We could not believe that the guards really were going to do what they had threatened to the children that they would do. And so, we arranged to come back the next day, specifically to interview those children and find out if they had been made to sleep on the floor last night or if it was just an empty threat meant to scare the children. And, in fact, we heard from multiple children that they in fact were forced to sleep on the floor that night in this cold cell, you know, on the cold concrete.
AMY GOODMAN: So, the AP is reporting 1-year-old, 2-year-olds, 3-year-old, dozens more under 12.
WARREN BINFORD: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: Fifteen have the flu. Nineteen more have been quarantined. And the reports of the 10-year-old taking care of the 2-year-old, handed the 2-year-old by a guard, along with two other kids under 15, that they're supposed to take care of a sick 2-year-old?
WARREN BINFORD: Yes. We saw multiple children, and not just the tweens and the teens, taking care of young children. We saw school-age children, 7 and 8 years old, who are trying to take care of the toddlers and the preschoolers -- you know, for the school-age children, the ones who are about 7 and 8.
There was one especially concerning little girl who had not showered or had her hair shampooed in so long that literally the hair on the back of her head was matted. And as a mom, I can assure you, they're going to have to cut off all of her hair. When I saw the matting on her hair, I was so deeply concerned that I immediately went to the guards and said, "You need to give this little girl a bath. You need to give her -- shampoo her hair. You need to put conditioner in there and detangler. You have to get this matting out of her hair; otherwise, her whole head will have to be shaven."
And so, I came back the next day and asked if she had been given a bath and her hair shampooed, and I was assured that she had been. So I then called her and asked to see her. And when she was brought to me, she looked just as dirty. Her hair was just as matted as it was the day before.
And so I called in one of the girls who had been helping to take care of her, and I said, "Tell me what's happening, because I'm being told by the guard that she had a shower yesterday, or a bath, and she obviously hasn't." And that little girl, who was about, oh, I'd say, probably 13, 14 years old, she told me that there was a 7- or 8-year-old girl who was taking care of this little 4-year-old girl the day before and was unable to persuade her to take a shower, and so they marked this dirty little 4-year-old girl off as having been given a shower, when in fact she had not been showered at all, because they had left it up to a 7- or 8-year-old to do this massive job of trying to detangle this little girl's matted hair. It was outrageous.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Binford, where are these children coming from? Why are they separated from their parents? Where are their parents?
WARREN BINFORD: So, about half the children have parents in the United States. So, as we started to interview the children, we asked them where their parents were. We asked them if they had their parents' telephone number. And most of the children have parents in the United States -- most of the children that I interviewed have children in the United States. And they had their parents' number either memorized or written on a bracelet around their arms or tucked into a piece of paper in their jacket. And so we asked them if they'd like to speak to their parents, if they had spoken to their parents. And many of these children had not spoken to their parents. And many of these children who had spoken to their parents had only spoken to them once.
So, what we did was we got the parents on the phone and started to find out what had happened. And many of these children are coming from Central America, particularly the Northern Triangle, which is El Salvador, Nicaragua and Honduras, and they came to the United States with relatives. This might be a parent, but it might be the entire family. We had one little girl who was separated from her mother, her father and her younger sibling. We had many children who had been separated from older siblings who are young adults. We had children who were separated from aunts and uncles and cousins. And then what's happening is they are being reclassified as unaccompanied children, even though they came across with relatives and have parents in the United States.
Over 50% of these children last year were placed with their parents in the United States. Another 20-something percent were placed with other family members in the United States. And an additional approximately 15% were placed with other adults who are authorized by the parents to take care of them. So, it's really a very small percentage, about 12% of the children that we meet with in these facilities, who actually need to be in government custody. Every other child can be put on an airplane to their parents, or their parents are willing to come and get them. We repeatedly talked to the parents who said, "Tell me where I need to send the money to bring my daughter to me, to bring my son to me." You know, they are able to take care of their children. They want to take care of their children. The only thing that's standing between these children and their parents is the U.S. government. And I've described for you the horrendous conditions in which the U.S. government is keeping these children. It's outrageous.
AMY GOODMAN: What is the Trump administration telling you?
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