Better than this
U.S. border policy inhumane
By Eduardo Ochoa, Special to the Democrat-Gazette
About four years ago my friend Allen, an internal medicine doctor in New York who runs the Bellevue/NYU Program for Survivors of Torture, called me because he needed a pediatrician to go with him and a small group of advocates to visit Artesia, N.M.
I asked, "Why Artesia?"
He told me there was a military training center that had hurriedly been converted into a holding area for family units fleeing Central America who had been apprehended at the border and were being transported to facilities like these for processing. A small group of us was allowed to tour the facility, talk to staff and interview mothers who were there with their young children.
It was the middle of the desert in the summer. They referred to the way stations where they were processed after detention as las hieleras (the iceboxes). As terrible as I thought the situation was then--holding women and children, spotty legal representation, the randomness of deportation--what has been happening right now--U.S. government officials separating young children from their parents--is unimaginable brutality. Torture, when it comes right down to it.
Eduardo Ochoa, MD, FAAP, is an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences and practices pediatrics at Arkansas Children's Hospital, and is a past president of the Arkansas Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
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