The Trump administration is consistent in its cruelty


They have announced that they will not be providing the migrant families held in their detention camps with the flu vaccine despite the fact that there children recently died of such infections.

At least three children who were held in detention centers after crossing into the U.S. from Mexico have died in recent months, in part, from the flu, according to a letter to Reps. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., and Lucille Roybal-Allard, D-Calif., from several doctors urging Congress to investigate health conditions at the centers.

The United States had previously gone almost a decade without any children dying while under U.S. immigration custody.

“I can tell you from personal experience that child deaths are rare events,” Harvard pediatrics professor Dr. Jonathan Winickoff said in an email. Winickoff signed on to the Aug. 1 letter with forensic pathologist Judy Melinek and Johns Hopkins public health professors Dr. Joshua Sharfstein and Dr. Paul Spiegel.


“When I learned that multiple children had died in detention from potentially preventable causes, it truly disturbed me,” Winickoff said. “The country needs urgent answers to that question so that children stop dying in detention.”

Winickoff said that current holding conditions, like being placed in close proximity to other immigrants, make it easy to spread infectious diseases from person to person. He added that contracting the flu weakens a child’s immune system, making it harder to fight off other illnesses.

Of course this is consistent with an administration that feels it does not have to provide soap, bedding, toothpaste, showers, or other basic necessities to the children whom they keep in cold cages with the lights permanently on. It is all part of the plan to make the world aware that the US is such a hellhole for migrants that no one will want to come here. They probably think that having children die in the cages is a good thing, the more the better.

Comments

  1. Matt G says

    Funny that I haven’t heard the phrase “Family Values” coming from the mouths of Republicans in the past few years. Even then it was always in the context of same-sex marriage and the harm it is supposed to cause children.

  2. johnson catman says

    It is sickening that this administration is responsible for literally cruel and unusual punishment to people who have not even committed a crime. Are we the baddies? Absolutely.

  3. Steve Morrison says

    “We will meet in the place where there is no darkness.”
    —George Orwell, 1984

  4. Callinectes says

    That’s the tar-pit trap of the concentration camp. Keep them in poor enough conditions and you don’t even have to go to the trouble of exterminating them.

  5. says

    From concentration camps to death camps. They’re creating a leper colony -- one way in, and death is the only way out.

    I fear that if children die in those cages, the war criminals in charge will leave the bodies for days or weeks, and force the victims to remove any bodies themselves. As we’ve seen already, they’re capable of it.

  6. quotetheunquote says

    @Lassi #6.

    Ah, yes. Seem to recall that the Nazis had similar plans for Madagascar, in their time.

  7. jrkrideau says

    Tabernac.

    “They have announced that they will not be providing the migrant families held in their detention camps with the flu vaccine” .

    I feel very difficult in seeing them any different from the Nazi.

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