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babylonsister

(171,092 posts) Sat Jun 23, 2018, 05:26 PM Jun 2018

Charles P. Pierce: None of This Damage Is Collateral

Last edited Sat Jun 23, 2018, 06:06 PM - Edit history (1)

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a21787598/migrant-children-disease-donald-trump/

None of This Damage Is Collateral
This president*'s performative cruelty comes in many flavors. All are intentional.
By Charles P. Pierce
Jun 22, 2018

One of the more undercovered aspects of the mess the administration* has created on the border is the danger of epidemic disease among the detained. My educated guess is that the administration* is not remotely prepared for any kind of serious outbreak. The problem has been building for a while. (The Obama administration has a serious reckoning ahead of it, too.) From the L.A. Times, in 2014:

Many of the children and families who crossed the border illegally need treatment for communicable diseases, including tuberculosis, chicken pox and scabies, according to the inspector general's report, released Thursday. Homeland Security workers said they had been exposed to such diseases while on duty and, in two cases, transmitted chicken pox to their children. Another issue is sanitation. Some immigrants didn't know how to use the bathrooms, the report said, resulting "in unsanitary conditions and exposure to human waste." Inspectors made 87 unannounced visits to 63 sites from July 1 to 15, in part because of an American Civil Liberties Union complaint that the Homeland Security Department was violating the civil rights and liberties of 116 unaccompanied children.

Contrary to allegations, the report said, "We did not observe misconduct or inappropriate conduct by DHS employees during our unannounced site visits." Some violations were found, however, including children held more than the 72-hour legal maximum because no permanent shelters were available. After 72 hours, children are supposed to be transferred to the Health and Human Services Department, which tries to place them with sponsors while they await an immigration hearing on whether they qualify to stay in the U.S. Under a 2008 law, children from all countries but Canada and Mexico are entitled to a hearing.

So, for an already overstressed system, the current “zero-tolerance” fiasco must have come as a particular joy. And history tells us that one of the traditional American slanders against all immigrant populations is that they will unleash unknown plagues on us all. This had its roots in the fact that immigrant populations were crammed into unsanitary neighborhoods in the large cities. From U.S. History Scene:

Fear spread that while disease was rooted in the polluted living conditions of New York’s poorer communities, disease could easily spread to the more well off citizens too. Public health officials realized that the city’s soiled streets and polluted sewers were a health risk to all New Yorkers. 19 In the mid-nineteenth century, New York possessed a primitive sewage system. Poorly planned sewers spanned the city, but most citizens’ homes did not connect to these pipes. Instead, most New Yorkers relied on outdoor outhouses and privies. These outhouses were usually poorly maintained and covered in filth. Poorer families did not even have the luxury of an outhouse. They simply dug a small trench into the ground outside of their homes. Trenches and outhouses were both unsavory solutions as waste was rarely removed from them and frequently flowed into the streets of the city.

snip//

The early indication is that, to the surprise of absolutely nobody, the administration* is at best fobbing off a lot of the healthcare to the localities to which it is fobbing off the children. From Crain’s:

Eight of the children were treated at North Central Bronx Hospital and four received care at Bellevue in Manhattan, Katz said. Dr. Daran Kaufman, director of pediatric emergency services at North Central Bronx, said the doctors treated the patients for conditions including asthma, constipation and depression. "Although we've been able to treat their medical diagnoses, they are sad and despondent and we are unable to treat the emotional scars they're presenting with," she said. Katz said those were only the children that the health system has identified to date as being separated from their parents. "There are undoubtedly more because our commitment is to serving them, not interrogating the circumstances that brings them to our facilities," Katz said

.

Depression is contagious, too. Sick, scared kids, fresh off a thousand-mile hellscape of a trip, separated from their parents, shipped off to the other end of the continent, and so understandably shell-shocked that they’re unable at this point even to tell the doctors what’s wrong with them. None of this damage is collateral.