COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW – 26/06/2019
Jon Allsop
Last week, the Associated Press detailed the inhumane conditions imposed on hundreds of migrant children at a US border facility in Clint, Texas, near El Paso. Other stories followed the AP’s coverage; the children, we were told, had gone weeks without a bath or clean clothes, slept on the floor, and taken care of each other after the Trump administration separated them from their parents. These details were shocking. But they were secondhand. As The Washington Post’s Paul Farhi noted yesterday, the government, as is common, blocked reporters from the facility; instead, lawyers who visited in order to monitor conditions fed their observations back to the press, which they don’t normally do. “We received reports from children of a lice outbreak in one of the cells where there were about twenty-five children,” Warren Binford, one of the attorneys, told The New Yorker. When a comb got lost, “Border Patrol agents got so mad that they took away the children’s blankets and mats.”