Letters to the Editor 06/26/2019

To the Editor:

(A letter to Oregon’s congressional delegation):

I listened this morning to a report on NPR’s Weekend Edition to an interview with a law professor from Willamette University where she shared the atrocious conditions she and a team of investigators found when inspecting facilities housing migrant children. Her name is Warren Binford. She has been doing this type of inspecting for over 20 years and described what she found as the worst conditions seen over all of those years. They visited facilities in Santa Teresa, New Mexico and Clint, Texas.

She spoke of the dangerous, unsanitary, worse-than-prison-like conditions where the children had little chance to shower, were provided no soap and allowed to brush their teeth only every 10 days! In addition they were housed in a metal warehouse that had no windows, slept on concrete floors, lacked nutritious food, slept, ate and toileted in the same area with other children who were sick and/or had lice, and were granted little time out-of-doors. At the time of the interview there were 350 children, with 100 of them young.

How horribly inhumane! And this is happening in the United States! As a parent, grandparent, early childhood professional, parent education professional, and U.S. citizen I could not believe what I was

hearing!

In this day and age we all know the destruction of young lives who live with trauma. No matter the race or ethnicity of any child, we need to value them as our future. Who does our government think will be raising these children? Who will pick up the pieces when they are older and hell-bent on retaliating for how they had been treated? Is our purpose to create enemies, because that is exactly what we are doing! Every day this continues creates memories, memories not in the children’s or our country’s, let alone their families, best interest!

Please, do something! Find a way to reunite them with their families or at least help them get to their sponsors. This cannot continue!

Edith Ann Jones