Children 'beaten, handcuffed, stripped and kept in solitary confinement' in US detention centre

Children separated from their parents under US immigration rules have told how they were beaten, handcuffed, stripped naked and locked up alone in concrete cells in a detention centre.

Several detainees as young as 14 said guards stripped them of their clothes and strapped them to chairs with bags over their heads, the Associated Press news agency reported.

The alleged abuse at the Shenandoah Valley Juvenile Centre in Virginia was detailed in court documents which include testaments from Latino teens held there for months or even years.

A Honduran immigrant who was 15 when he was sent to the facility said: “Whenever they used to restrain me and put me in the chair, they would handcuff me.

“Strapped me down all the way, from your feet all the way to your chest, you couldn't really move ... They have total control over you. They also put a bag over your head. It has little holes; you can see through it. But you feel suffocated with the bag on.”

The testament comes amid an international backlash over a US policy which has led to children and even babies being separated from their parents and even kept in cages at immigration centres.

President Donald Trump yesterday signed an executive order ending the process of separating children from families after they are detained crossing the US border illegally.

As well as first-hand, translated accounts from children in court documents, a former child-development specialist who worked inside the facility in Virginia said she saw children there with bruises and broken bones that they blamed on guards.

Many of the children were sent there after US immigration authorities accused them of belonging to violent gangs, including MS-13. President Donald Trump has repeatedly cited gang activity as justification for his crackdown on illegal immigration.

Mr Trump said yesterday that "our Border Patrol agents and our ICE agents have done one great job" cracking down on MS-13 gang members. "We're throwing them out by the thousands," he said.

But a top manager at the Shenandoah centre said during a recent congressional hearing that the children did not appear to be gang members and were suffering from mental health issues resulting from trauma that happened in their home countries - problems the detention facility is ill-equipped to treat.

The lawsuit in which the allegations are contained was filed against Shenandoah and alleges that young Latino immigrants held there "are subjected to unconstitutional conditions that shock the conscience, including violence by staff, abusive and excessive use of seclusion and restraints, and the denial of necessary mental health care."

A 15-year-old from Mexico held at Shenandoah for nine months also recounted in legal documents being restrained with a bag over his head.

"They handcuffed me and put a white bag of some kind over my head," he said, according to his sworn statement.

"They took off all of my clothes and put me into a restraint chair, where they attached my hands and feet to the chair. They also put a strap across my chest. They left me naked and attached to that chair for two and a half days, including at night."

After being subjected to such treatment, the teenager, now 17, said he tried to kill himself in August, only to be punished with further isolation.

He added: “One time I cut myself after I had gotten into a fight with staff," the teen recounted. "I filled the room with blood. This happened on a Friday, but it wasn't until Monday that they gave me a bandage or medicine for the pain.”

The child development specialist who previously worked with teens at Shenandoah said that many there developed severe psychological problems after experiencing abuse from guards.

"The majority of the kids we worked with when we went to visit them were emotionally and verbally abused. I had a kid whose foot was broken by a guard," she said. "They would get put in isolation for months for things like picking up a pencil when a guard had said not to move. Some of them started hearing voices that were telling them to hurt people or hurt themselves, and I knew when they had gotten to Shenandoah they were not having any violent thoughts."

She said she never witnessed staff abuse teens first-hand, but that teens would complain to her of injuries from being tackled by guards and reveal bruises. The specialist encouraged them to file a formal complaint.

Though lawyers for Shenandoah responded with court filings denying all wrongdoing, information contained in a separate 2016 lawsuit appears to support some of the information contained in the recent abuse complaints.

A hearing in the case is set for July 3 before a federal judge in the Western District of Virginia.

Lawyers on both sides in the lawsuit either did not respond to messages from the Associated Press, or declined to comment, citing strict confidentiality requirements in the case involving children.