By John Kiriakou
 

December 28, 2018 "Information Clearing House" -     An eight-year-old Guatemalan boy died in the custody of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) late Christmas Eve. His death came only two weeks after the death from dehydration of a seven-year-old Guatemalan girl also in the custody of CBP. The Congressional Hispanic Caucus is demanding an investigation into what it calls CBP’s “systemic failure” to protect the health and welfare of children in CBP facilities. Apologies and promises of reforms aren’t going to cut it. Things have to change. But the problem is actually worse than what the major news outlets are telling us.

Since the surge of unaccompanied minors arriving in the United States began in 2014, according to ProPublica, migrant children have filed hundreds of police reports documenting sexual assaults inside children’s shelters, which have received $4.5 billion in funding for housing and security services. Most of those sexual assaults have been at the hands of guards and other CBP employees. Federal investigators warn further that the Trump administration has quietly waived fingerprint background checks of staff members and had allowed “dangerously few” mental health counselors at a notorious tent camp housing 2,800 children in Texas.

ProPublica wrote recently, “Just five days after he reached the United States, a 15-year-old Honduran boy awoke in his Tucson, Arizona, immigrant shelter … to find a youth care worker in his room, tickling his chest and stomach. When he asked the man, who was 46, what he was doing, the man left. But he returned two more times, rubbing the teen’s penis through his clothing and then trying to reach under his boxers. ‘I know what you want. I can give you anything you need,’ said the worker, who was later convicted of molestation.”