One of the drawings.
Dr. Collen Kraft, a former president of the AAP, said the drawings were incredibly heartbreaking, in part due to these children feeling like they were behind bars.
“The fact that the drawings are so realistic and horrific gives us a view into what these children have experienced,” Kraft told the outlet. “When a child draws this, it’s telling us that [the] child felt like he or she was in jail.”
AAP says it was not immediately clear which CBP facilities housed these children. They also mentioned to CNN that they are working with CBP officers to advise on properly screening and caring for children in their custody, but have made little progress after multiple meetings.
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Though the children appear to feel like prisoners, the CBP claims in a statement to PEOPLE that they have been providing “the best care possible” to people in their custody.
“U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) leverages our limited resources to provide the best care possible to those in our custody, especially children,” the group says. “As DHS and CBP leadership have noted numerous times in testimony to Congress and in numerous media engagements that our short-term holding facilities were not designed to hold vulnerable populations.”
“CBP works closely with our partners at the Department of Health and Human Services to transfer unaccompanied children to their custody as soon as placement is identified, and as quickly and expeditiously as possible to ensure proper care,” they add.
Amid the controversy, PresidentDonald Trumphas seemingly weighed in on the issue.
In a thread on Twitter on Wednesday, Trump, 73, claimed that the facilities are nicer than many of the migrants’ homelands and said if they were unhappy with the conditions, that they should return to their native countries.
“If Illegal Immigrants are unhappy with the conditions in the quickly built or refitted detentions centers, just tell them not to come. All problems solved!”addedTrump.
The alarming drawings come one week after aheartwrenching photograph surfaced of a father and daughter’s dead bodieswashed up on a riverbank after they attempted to cross the border from Mexico to the United States together.
Like the children’s illustrations from this week, the graphic photo has been used to highlight the cruel realities that many families are currently facing as they put their lives on the line to seek asylum from the violence and poverty in their home nations.
Trump’s administration has been focused on cracking down on immigration since taking office in 2017. The president has argued — sometimes in hyperbolic terms — that America’s current immigration system poses safety risks and the flow of migrants must be restricted.
However, there has been significant criticism that Trump’s harsh policies are also putting migrants at risk.
source: people.com
