In 1985, a 15-year old girl named Jenny Lisette Flores tried to enter the United States in order to move in with her aunt. She was apprehended by immigration authorities. While in custody, she was subject to treatment that was clearly inhumane. From the Marquette Law Review:

Jenny fled the violence of El Salvador to be reunited with her aunt, who was living in the United States; however, she never made it to her aunt’s home. The INS apprehended and arrested Jenny at the border: She was “handcuffed, strip searched, and placed ... in a juvenile detention center where she spent the next two months waiting for her deportation hearing.” The INS placed Jenny in a facility that did not provide educational, nor many recreational opportunities. Furthermore, some of the minors in the facility had to share “bathrooms and sleeping quarters with unrelated adults of both sexes.”55 Although Jenny had no criminal history, was not a flight risk, and was not a threat to anyone, the INS would not release Jenny to her aunt because the INS did not allow unaccompanied minors to be released to “third-party adults.”

The ACLU launched a class-action lawsuit which charged, among other things, that the INS policy...

"...resulted in lengthy incarceration of juveniles in substandard conditions, without education, supervised recreation, or reasonable visitation opportunities, unreasonably subjected them to strip and body cavity searches, and served as a thinly-veiled device to apprehend the parents of the incarcerated juveniles and to punish the children."

Nearly a decade's worth of litigation ensued. Eventually, it reached the Supreme Court, which remanded the case to the district court. The two sides reached a settlement before the district court could rule again.

The resulting FSA established a “nationwide policy for the detention, release, and treatment of minors in the custody of the INS.” The FSA required that “immigration officials detaining minors provide (1) food and drinking water, (2) medical assistance in the event of emergencies, (3) toilets and sinks, (4) adequate temperature control and ventilation, (5) adequate supervision to protect minors from others, and(6) separation [of children] from unrelated adults whenever possible.” Additionally, the FSA required that the INS (1) ensure the prompt release of children from immigration detention; (2) place children for whom release is pending, or for whom no release option is available, in the “least restrictive” setting appropriate to the age and special needs of minors; and (3) implement standards relating to care and treatment of children in U.S. immigration detention.

There followed endless pulling and hauling trying to make what became known as The Flores Settlement work; in 2002, Amnesty International issued a report that was critical of the detention facilities in which children were being held. But, through the years, the Flores Settlement held. Until, of course, this Wednesday, when the folks at Camp Runamuck moved to blow it up because the cruelty is the point. From the Washington Post:

The Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services will issue a new rule Friday to withdraw from the Flores Settlement Agreement, the federal consent decree that has set basic standards for the detention of migrant children and teens since 1997. The new rule would eliminate a 20-day cap for detaining migrant children and create a new licensing regime that would make it easier for federal officials to expand family detention nationwide. Although the rule is set to take effect 60 days after it is published, officials expect the implementation to last longer. Advocates have vowed to challenge the rule in court, which will put the change in front of U.S. District Judge Dolly M. Gee, who denied the administration’s request last year to extend family detentions.

The cruelty is the point.

Migrant children are pictured at a detainment facility in Homestead, Florida. RHONA WISE Getty Images

But officials said they hoped the threat of longer detention would deter the crush of Central American migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border and complement existing enforcement measures. Border apprehensions have slumped more than 40 percent since May, a major drop officials have attributed to increased enforcement in Mexico, but officials worry about a resurgence in the fall.

This carefully crafted agreement, battered by politics since 1997, is dismissed by the current administration* as a "loophole." This is the language of pure vandalism, which, outside of cruelty, is about the only thing at which this administration* excels.

“Today, the government has issued a critical rule that will permit the Department of Homeland Security to appropriately hold families together and improve the integrity of the immigration system,” acting DHS secretary Kevin McAleenan said in a statement, before traveling to Panama on Wednesday. “This rule allows the federal government to enforce immigration laws as passed by Congress and ensures that all children in U.S. government custody are treated with dignity, respect, and special concern for their particular vulnerability.”

Oops, I forgot one. The administration*, as should be obvious from the above, also excels at cheap and obvious bullshit.

This is about smashing things for the entertainment of the rubes and yahoos who find smashing things entertaining, as long as the things being smashed are the lives of people whom the rubes and yahoos find essentially worthless. Oh, there's an ugly philosophical underpinning to actions like this. But there also is an unmistakable element of simply breaking things to watch them fall apart. During the 2016 campaign, there was a lot of fatheaded speculation about how electing this guy would provide beneficial "disruption," although what the hell that was supposed to entail did not become clear until the country actually elected this guy and we saw that it pretty much involved the equivalent of unleashing a herd of ill-tempered wildebeests in the Vatican Museum.

Worst of all, of course, is the fact that children are going to get ground up in this system, which is what the system is being designed to do. These are crimes against humanity. And the system designed to commit them is getting better at it by the day.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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