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In June 2019, a variety of news outlets published reports detailing the horrid conditions at immigrant detention centers along the United States' southern border. The Associated Press, for instance, quoted a lawyer named Warren Binford, who visited a facility in Texas and spoke to some of the immigrant children detained within, saying that the kids were living in inhumane conditions. ABC News obtained a medical declaration that likened these detention centers to torture facilities. As outrage from these reports grew online, actress Nancy Lee Grahn posted a set of photographs that supposedly documented these conditions and accused the Trump administration of forcing children to sleep on cement floor with an aluminum blanket & lights on all night: While the text of Grahn's tweet accurately reflects recent news reports, the photographs she used to illustrate her point were not taken during U.S. President Donald Trump's administration. These photographs are actually still images from a surveillance camera at a Border Patrol holding facility in Tucson, Ariz., in August 2015. The images were released as part of a lawsuit brought by the American Immigration Council and the American Civil Liberties Union against U.S. Customs and Border Protection concerning the conditions at the agency's temporary holding facilities. Here's an excerpt from an NPR report: While these photographs were taken during the Obama administration, the conditions described in Grahn's tweet still apply to the detention facilities operating under Trump. Physician Dolly Lucio Sevier was granted access to a detention center after a flu outbreak sent five infants to the neonatal intensive care unit. In a medical declaration obtained by ABC News, Sevier compared the conditions to a torture facility and wrote that minors were dealing with extreme cold temperatures, lights on 24 hours a day, no adequate access to medical care, basic sanitation, water, or adequate food. Binford, a law professor, told NPR: They are worse than actual prison conditions. It is inhumane. It's nothing that I ever imagined seeing in the United States of America. The second part of Grahn's tweet mentions Sarah Fabian and claims that companies are making $750 day to detain immigrant children. Fabian is a Department of Justice lawyer who attempted to defend the conditions at detention centers during a June 2019 Court of Appeals hearing. According to the Washington Post: Grahn's claim that companies make $750 a kid a day to torture them relates to the fact that some immigration detention centers are owned and operated by private for-profit companies. Reuters reported in February 2019 that while it costs about $250 per day to hold a child at a permanent detention center, the cost can triple at temporary, privately owned, for-profit facilities such as the Homestead Temporary Shelter for Unaccompanied Children: To sum up: Viral photographs supposedly documenting the conditions at immigration detention facilities under the Trump administration were actually taken in 2015 during Obama's tenure. The poor conditions at these Obama-era centers have continued or worsened under Trump.
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