A Physician in South Texas on an Unnerving Encounter with an Eight-Year-Old Boy in Immigration Detention

..."The guardians didn’t step more than two feet away from the kid. One of the four was an armed police officer. I thought, Does it take an army of adult men to take care of one elementary schooler? I walked over to the boy, crouched down, and asked him, in Spanish, ‘How do you feel?’ ‘Sad,’ he said.

“The boy had been in custody for over a month. One of his guardians told me that he had been ‘acting out’ and threatening to harm himself, by jumping from his bed. This man told me, ‘I’m his clinician,’ but he was definitely not a doctor. I don’t know if he’s a social worker, a medical assistant, a housekeeper. I have no clue. But he obviously had been granted some sort of authority in regard to assessing children and determining what their needs are. He wouldn’t provide basic background. I couldn’t find out any information because he would say, ‘I’m not at liberty to tell you that’ and ‘You don’t need to know that,’ even though a lot of my questions were relevant to taking care of the child. I was asking things like ‘Where are his parents?’

“One of the men told me that the boy had crossed the border alone, but I didn’t know if I was getting the true story—if he had been separated from his mother and father before or after he entered the country. The man who called himself a clinician also told me that they knew where his parents were, and one of them was in the United States. I didn’t know if that meant in custody or not.

“What bothers me is, if you know where this parent is, why can we not contact them for consent? They aren’t even made aware if their child has an injury, if their child is having a breakdown. These are people who were desperate for a better life and crossed the border. Why are their parental rights being taken away?

“I asked the clinician, ‘When is this child going to be reunited with his parents?’ He was evasive. First it was ‘Oh, well, we don’t know.’ And then it was ‘Well, he won’t be reunited with his parents unless he behaves.’