by Lynn Mandaville

Like most mornings, I started out today with a quick scan through the various news postings that, through the magic of technology, appear in my inbox via subscriptions to such sources as NPR and The Hill.  I expect each day to see more of the same.  Chaos in Washington, the president lying out of both sides of his mouth, Democratic hopefuls beginning the devolvement into disparaging each other.  We all know the daily drill.

But this week has seen an increase in new reporting about the inhumane treatment of migrant children along our southern border.  Each day the claims are worse than the day before.  And I thought ICE and Homeland Security and the Trump administration couldn’t possibly become more inhumane than enforcing the zero-tolerance policy which separated children from their parents in ways that threatened their ever being reunited.

It was almost one year ago that the deputy director of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), Matthew Albence, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee.  On July 31, 2018, Albence was quoted as saying “With regard to [family residential centers], the best way to describe them is more like a summer camp.”

People everywhere were stunned by this depiction of detention centers.  And now that more than 13,000 children are being held in such centers, isolated from their parents in too large numbers, we are learning that their incarcerations are more and more inhumane than we were led to believe.

Let’s take a quick diversion for my recollections of summer camp.  You might be able to insert here your own memories from Boy Scout, Girl Scout, or church camps in your own youth.

When I was a pre-teen, I went to Camp Mohawk in White Plains, NY, for one week each of two summers.  It was in the lush, green hills of that region, with a lake, cabins, tents, a dining hall and a wide variety of recreational facilities that included swimming and canoeing in the lake, basketball and softball, and endless crafts and nature activities.  We had three square meals a day, access to daily showers and baths, clean clothes, on-site routine medical care, and adult supervision 24/7 for whatever our needs.  Often those needs included comfort for those experiencing homesickness.  (Mind you, this was no fancy-schmancy camp.  It was the late ’50s/early ’60s, and rustic was the order of the day, not to mention affordable for families of average means.)

Summer camp was idyllic.  It was an adventure, to be sure, because we were quite young (10 – 12 years old) and away from home, many of us for the first time.  We slept on cots, but still in clean sheets brought from home, with our own pillows.  We had to hike a short distance to the communal bath houses to take care of normal bodily evacuation, and for showering and brushing teeth twice a day.  It was a hike to the mess hall for meals.  But this was the intent of the experience: to spend a week out of our ideal, white, middle-class neighborhoods, experiencing nature, making new friends, learning new skills, just a tad outside the norms of living in our middle-class, ticky-tacky houses.

And for those who didn’t like the experience (remember Alan Sherman’s song from the 60s Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah about camp life?) there was a light at the end of the bucolic time-at-camp tunnel.  You would be going back home to the bosom of your middle-class family.

It is my complete and indisputable, spot on opinion that life in a border detention facility, even WITH parents, is a far, far cry from summer camp.

Immigrants are incarcerated in detention centers.  They cannot come and go of their own volition. They live and sleep in cages.  (I don’t care about semantics.  Chain link fences eight feet high with locks on the gates constitute cages.)  They sleep on hard floors or thin mats with foil tarps for blankets.  In photos or videos the government has allowed the public to see, I have never noticed pillows for the laying of heads, a clean, fresh sheet, or an adult supervisor nearby.

We know that children are now housed separately from adults, segregated by gender.  We have heard that agents who supervise these facilities are not allowed to touch or comfort children.  In some cases, we’ve heard, they are not allowed to change poopy diapers.  We know the kids are fed, but they are fed institutional food prepared to feed American appetites, not the cultural appetites of Central Americans.

Though we have been told that children have access to recreational activities, I have never seen video of any sort of recreation.  Supposedly, these children are educated at these facilities, but we don’t know in what subjects, what languages, by whom or for how long in a given week.

What I have seen are children languishing on the floors of their cages under foil sheets.  They are inert little beings, not being engaged but wallowing in their loneliness and grief at being separated from their families.

Summer camp, my wrinkly old white butt!

Now, back to the latest piece of reality for these kids. Now we are informed that they do not have soap or toothbrushes and toothpaste for their most basic personal hygiene.  What kind of camp would allow that?  Our camp counselors made sure we brushed out teeth morning and night, and that we showered daily.  Matt Albence proudly crowed that most of these kids had never seen a dentist until they were “camping” at the border “summer camps.”  Now does this make any sense at all to provide dental care but no routine dental hygiene afterward?  I guess that’s the government mind at its best.  (And what atrocity will we hear next, that young girls are not being provided sanitary products for their monthly periods?)

If you have not seen it yet, there is a new music video put out by rapper Vic Mensa.  I first saw it on The Daily Show.  It is the artist’s biting parody of Matt Albence’s summer camp remark, called Camp America : Best Summer Ever.  You can view it on YouTube by searching Vic Mensa Camp America or just Camp America.  And I would urge you to do so, even if only to know what’s going on in popular culture.

Mensa uses an interesting device that I first saw used in the film A Time To Kill, a movie based on a John Grisham novel about the trial of a black man accused of murdering the white men who raped and brutalized his 10-year-old daughter.  During the closing argument of the trial, the lawyer for the defense asks the jury to close their eyes and imagine the scene while he describes in great detail the horrors endured by the little girl as she is beaten and raped by slobbering, drunk men.  He describes the sounds, the smells, the pain of the act.  And in his last sentence he asks that the jury now imagine that the little girl is white.

It is a powerful and poignant moment in the film, because the all-white jury is confronted by the stark inhumanity of the crime only when they view it as happening to one of their own.

Mensa’s video uses the same device.  The children in the cages at Camp America are all blonde, blue-eyed, and white skinned, wearing orange jumpsuits and sleeping under foil sheets.

Mensa hits us in the face with this metaphorical two-by-four to bring home the inhumanity of real life in Camp America.

Remember how angry you were when we first heard about Trump’s ingenious deterrent policy of separating families?  It’s time to get angry again, and stay angry, and demand and end to these inhuman practices being visited upon desperate migrants at our border.

Post Script:  reports from the Associated Press late today have revealed deteriorating conditions at detention centers where children are caring for other, smaller, younger children, where food and water are in short supply, and where sanitation is becoming highly questionable.  Children with flu are quarantined, a few teen mothers are caring for newborns, and post-natal care for either mother or baby is non-existent.  I fear we have not yet heard the worst.