I expected to see kids in cages at a shelter for immigrant children. What I saw was worse We used to call them internment camps. Now, they are dystopian hotels for children who have been forcibly separated from their parents.

Juan Mendez | opinion contributor

Show Caption Hide Caption Teen describes smelly, crowded conditions for detained immigrant children Edmilson Aguilar Punay, a 15-year-old from Guatemala, says the detention center where he was held was so crowded, some people had to sleep standing.

There is an open-air prison operating not far from the middle of Tucson. The facility can house just under 300. It is close to capacity and the folks who operate it are too willing and able to expand.

You’ve likely heard in the news we have multiple facilities housing migrant children who have been forcibly separated from their families at the border. As a civil servant, I felt obligated to investigate these reports, and chose to accompany a "tour" of the Southwest Key facility in Tucson.

Many of the children in the facility were picked up by law enforcement upon crossing the border into the U.S. Some crossed into Arizona, but not all. Just under a third of the children housed in this facility are separated from their families, while the rest are unaccompanied minors.

Some can languish here for more than 250 days, according to staff reports.

They're profiting off kids' trauma

I did my best to prepare myself for images of cages with children wrapped in foil blankets, but I was taken aback by what I actually saw: a dystopian "remodeling" of a long ago abandoned hotel, with brightly colored murals in a cruel attempt to make a juvenile detention center look like a poor summer camp in the desert.

As I observed children as young as 5 to age 17 in the same four-colored outfits, there were not enough brightly colored murals to distract me from the reality that each child was there against their will as private companies profited from their detention.

I passed a classroom during the tour, the instructor was leading a group of children through an English writing and reading exercise, the phrase “I want to go to California” was scrawled across the whiteboard.

For years, politicians in Congress have allowed companies to profit off children’s misery and trauma. These children escaped death, some being physically or sexually assaulted along the way, crossing a desert in unimaginable heat, only to endure mental health damage and sexual assault at our hands so that a president can force an immoral border policy on a supposedly moral country.

What America is, not what it should be

In America, everyone regardless of whether they are a citizen or an asylum seeker is entitled to equal protection under the law.

In America, no one should find that they are being denied their freedom to maintain a violent system that profits from the detention of mostly black and brown communities.

In America, we welcome "your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free."

And yet what I saw at Southwest Key is that children who fled from violence and extreme poverty do not have the legal representation to seek a better life in America. Southwest Key, and many operators like it, rely on pro-bono lawyers from non-profits that don’t have the capacity to fight for all these kids.

We used to call these internment camps, but we have since deluded ourselves into thinking otherwise by privatizing them.

The U.S. exists because of the conquest and seizure of land. We have been tearing apart black and brown families and communities long before Trump. The ripple effects can be observed today and likely throughout our lifetimes as many more families and children come here to reunite with loved ones due to our past and current actions.

Juan Mendez is a Democratic state senator from Tempe, Arizona. You can follow him on Twitter: @mendezforaz.