Leaked Video From Child Detainment Center Shows Little Girl Crying For Her Mom
Distraught little girl stuck in child-detainment center captured on video
We’re starting to see what it’s like for the babies and children who have been ripped from their families thanks to the Trump administration. A former employee at a New York child detainment center secretly recorded video of a distraught child and leaked it to the media.
Like many Americans, the childcare worker is fed up with the Trump administration’s heartless tactics and felt motivated to show the world what these kids are going through on a daily basis. In addition to quitting her because of her disagreements with the immigration policy, the work also leaked footage shot inside the facility for migrant children.
The Rachel Maddow Show showed the video on its Monday night show. The worker shot the video last week at the Cayuga Centers in East Harlem — and it’s beyond heartbreaking.
The girl featured in the video hasn’t spoken to her mom for at least a week and desperately wants to, but the worker can only call the child’s caseworker. Imagining the fear and the pain that little girl is going through is almost too much to bear.
“You want to speak to your mom?” the employee asks. All the little girl can do is cry and nod.
The workers at this facility did not separate these children from their mothers and fathers, but they care for migrant children during the day. The worker told Maddow that she noticed a “huge influx” of much younger children and at first didn’t know why that was happening. Typically, the center cares for older children and teens. But after seeing so many young kids, the worker researched what was happening at the border and realized Trump’s policy was ripping families apart. At least 2,000 children have been taken from their moms and dads, many of whom were sent across the country with no information about where their parents were being kept or how to get in contact with them.
The worker shared why she shot and released the video: “I am here today because I feel like it’s important to make a difference. I feel that it’s time for everybody to stand up and stop being afraid and actually help these children that are being separated from their parents.”
While it’s true that people standing up and protesting the cruel policy led to Trump ending it, his administration still hasn’t done anything to reunite the children with their parents. And hasn’t presented any plans to.
“It’s very heartbreaking to know that there’s children, even if it was just one,” the worker explained. “But there’s a lot of them in my program, and it’s sad to know that these children are crying for their parents. They don’t know where their parents are.”
