By David Martinez

Reports revealed this week that US Customs and Border Protection is running a jail for migrant children at a border station in Clint, TX that doctors have described as similar to “torture facilities.” In a small farming town near El Paso, hundreds of migrant children are being held in crowded, unsanitary, and inhumane conditions as part of US imperialism’s genocidal campaign against immigrants from oppressed nations in Latin America.

Immigration attorneys led by lawyer and nonprofit director Peter Schey raised the alarm after visiting the station where they witnessed conditions that shocked and disgusted them. In a legal motion submitted against the border patrol, the group states that, “babies are being kept in these freezing cold conditions, and some of them have only a diaper and a T-shirt to wear.”

Nearly all the children are separated from their parents, some as young as three years old; a one-year-old baby is being held with its mother, who is also under eighteen. Older children take turns comforting the toddlers who are without their parents. One girl told an attorney, “A Border Patrol agent came in our room with a 2-year-old boy and asked us, ‘Who wants to take care of this little boy?’”

One fourteen-year-old girl from Guatemala, as she held two children on her lap who she had courageously taken up care of, told lawyers, “I need comfort, too. I am bigger than they are, but I am a child, too.”

The facility was originally built to hold one hundred people, but at times has held up to seven hundred children. Fifteen children were reported to have the flu, and another ten were under quarantine.

As of this Thursday, only thirty children remain after the Border Patrol scrambled in an attempt to downplay the bad public image created by media reports of the squalid conditions in the detention center. This media attention, of course, will not stop them from capturing more children.

Aaron Hull, the agent in charge of the El Paso sector, could only respond that the allegations of inhumane conditions were ‘hurtful’, centering the feelings of imperialist agents over the tortured children.

The US imperialist state has simply passed around blame for the conditions in Clint, and the only possible solution they have given is to grant more money to the Department of Homeland Security. President Donald Trump pointed fingers at the Democrats for not providing enough funding for border security.

Opportunist Democrat politicians like Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez have gained notoriety for comparing the detention centers to Nazi concentration camps, but as one of her first acts in congress, she joined the Democrats in voting to fund the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Like other Democratic Socialists and liberal charlatans, she has no interest in liberating the oppressed nations or in overthrowing the imperialist state.

In the migrants’ home countries, especially those in Latin America, US imperialism forces whole societies to deteriorate in order to maintain the interests of monopoly capital. The Democrats are unapologetic collaborators with the preservation of US imperialism, and the blood of oppressed nations is on their hands as much as it is on Trump’s.

The pain and suffering of these children should move all people to stand for the only true solution to this horror – the destruction of the US imperialist state through people’s war. Any other option is to condemn these children and their parents to endless persecution, no matter how much money and resources are given to the border patrol, detention centers, and nonprofit run facilities that contract with the government.

Without overthrowing this decaying imperialist state, migrants, children and adults alike, will continue to be hunted, thrown into cages, and tortured. The gut-wrenching reports of this child torture calls for the masses to organize for revolution.