Issue link: https://nnumagazine.uberflip.com/i/1011065
A recent investigation by Reveal and the Texas Tribune also found that "taxpayers have paid more than $1.5 billion in the past four years to private companies operating immigrant youth shelters accused of serious lapses in care," including drugging children, neg- lect, and sexual and physical abuse. In Texas, "state inspectors have cited homes with more than 400 deficiencies, about one-third of them serious," including staff members' failure to seek medical attention for children. According to the Reveal/Texas Tribune investigation, the govern- ment continued to place immigrant children in these facilities even after serious allegations were raised and state inspectors had issued citations. And these facilities are now among those holding children separated from their parents. "We can't stay silent at all during this crisis," says NNU Vice Pres- ident Katy Roemer, RN. "Families are coming to this country for asylum; they are fleeing violence in their home countries. They don't deserve barbaric treatment." N urses are duty bound to help and heal all people. So with little to no plan for reuniting all families, and with the poten- tial for entire families to continue to be detained for indefinite lengths of time, RNs are continuing the kind of advocacy that hap- pens best and most loudly with a collective voice. Speaking up is espe- cially dire, nurses say, given that children have been handed over to government contractors profiting from their mass incarceration, and there seems to a ramping upward, not downward, of detentions. The Pentagon in late June formally requested beds to accommodate 20,000 undocumented children, according to news reports. So RNs have taken up a unified message: So-called "zero-toler- ance" immigration policies violate family values, nurses' values, and very basic human rights. Nurses are deeply aware of the policy's negative impact on public health, because they make an oath to care for all patients, regardless of background. Nurses coming from families who immigrated more recently and who live closest to our border communities also feel these families' pains personally. "Both of my parents are from Mexico, and the only reason I ended up being a U.S. citizen is because my mom got a job here in Texas," said Cooper, who sympathized strongly with the child detainees and believes she escaped a similar fate just by virtue of having been born in a different decade. "This could have been any one of us. It could have been any one of us." 14 N A T I O N A L N U R S E W W W . N A T I O N A L N U R S E S U N I T E D . O R G M AY | J U N E 2 0 1 8 "I [have worked in] mental hospitals, and I see how our soldiers are suffering with PTSD. These kids can suffer from the same ailment, PTSD, from what they are encountering—not only what they went through in their home country, but also on their voyage here to us, and then the situations they are confronted with here."