I have flown here in a small plane to be in a small and strange place be present at a strangely large moment. I am in Karnes City, a city of about 3,500 Texans and an unknown number of imprisoned refugee fathers and their boys. At this eery instant in our world's history, 7000 more refugees are walking one thousand miles from Honduras to seek asylum in the United States. As if in resonating and obedient response to the vitriolic nationalism of our president Trump, today an assassin has sent pipe bombs to many of the opposition party leaders and two former presidents, all of whom are on his most hated enemies list, a list which includes a major news outlet and a former C.I.A. director. Here in the small Texas town of Karnes, named after the murdered son of a vengeful Texas general, I am a one person outpost in a tragic battle which can be understood only in terms of organizational and field psychology. Dyadic psychology will not suffice. Large group psychology is at work. I seem to be in a war sparked by a President, who vitriolically led a vigorous verbal attack on a favorite target of his hatred - immigrant parents. The President and his attorney general have been insisting with what seems animus that asylum seekers be separated from their children. Thus, mine is not a casual outpost, but a serious effort perhaps on behalf of and certainly using the tools of my beleaguered and socially far from powerful profession of child and adult psychoanalysis. Here I am trying to see what is needed to rehabilitate, make sense of and give voices to victims of what seems to be a deliberately traumatic inhumanity. The love of parents for their children has been used as what appears to be a political weapon.
I seem to be living in the novel, Erewhon, (Nowhere, spelled backward) written by Samuel Butler. In that novel, criminals were put in hospitals and persons with emotional stress were put in jails. Here in Karnes, parents are put in jail for doing what parents are supposed to do in the United States.
It is a surprising statement, local people tell me, to make in Karnes: "United States' parents are required by law to protect their children from all forms of violence, from recruitment into criminal activities, from belonging to narcotics-fueled gangs, and most of all to protect their children from being murdered." In fact here in Karnes, Texas, physicians and thus child protective services are mandated to remove a child from the care of the parent who fails in the duty to protect a child from such perils. But I am evaluating five refugee fathers and their sons who are in a San Quentin type of facility, jailed for months and repeatedly tormented by separations from each other. They are here because their fathers sought to keep their sons and themselves from being murdered. That intention has not been honored, appreciated, listened to, or officially believed. They report having been literally refrigerated, at times dehydrated,handcuffed, threatened with rifles, and buffeted by announcements of real and threatened separations from each other, terrorized and left helpless as fathers and sons deprived of control over their lives. Today I spoke with a 14 year old nightmare ridden and depressed boy who loved the sport of competitive running in his own country. He reported to me he does not know why he is in jail and why he is no longer able to run freely here. He showed me his skinny arms and legs, shrunken by his sadness and loss of appetite. He wants to talk to our President and ask why the President would do this jailing to children who are not criminals.
I do not have a good answer. I ask for his medical records. A self-proclaimed "lieutenant major" of the private company caring for the locked up boy says she is in charge of the boy. But she does not have access his medical records. I tell her she is in the position I believe of a foster parent and thus needs to know and be responsible for the child's medical condition. What if he had diabetes and she was neglecting him? The Immigration authority has his medical records, she tells me, not her. Another and much younger boy alarmingly tells me of many injections he received, which made him very tired. I must learn what those injections were.
I am accused by this same Lieutenant person of a committing a crime, which I have not done. I have supposedly brought a cell phone into the facility, which is a prohibited act. This is clearly an effort to cast me in a bad light, lest I unearth mistreatment of the child who is in her charge. Alas, Texas' protective services has no role in this child's federally purchased care. If they did, they would have to fine or require the replacement of a caregiver who had no knowledge of the medical needs of a child in their care, such as in a state licensed residential center.
Attorneys here are glad to have the help and input of a clinical mind. My news about failures of service providers to mitigate traumas, my findings about aggravations of prior traumas and adversities are heard as psychoanalytic orchestrations, music to those who seek to hear me and ask help in providing social justice. They find it hard to believe that a psychoanalyst is here to volunteer among their own volunteer efforts.
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