DR. IRWIN REDLENER: I think we’re seeing a certain number of people that are literally seeking safety asylum from environments in their home countries that have been profoundly dangerous by any measure. These are families that are escaping death, torture, coercion, all sorts of issues that I think any normal parent would want to – if they could possibly do it – bring their child to some safer place, in this case, the United States. And there’s actually several versions of the things that are happening to children as a result of immigration policies. So one of them, the one that I wrote about in the Washington Post was about the fact that for families seeking asylum with children on the very same day that Melania Trump announced her own personal agenda now to deal with, in a more appropriate and kindly way with children, the Attorney General Jeff Sessions – representative of the Trump administration – announced that they were going to be very, very hard line hardcore about arresting parents seeking asylum and separating their children into basically detention centers.
And I was just really very distressed to see that the administration was pulling no punches. They called the parents smugglers of their own children, as if these kids were just ivory tusks or God knows what. But, this was very a degrading way to hear about children being described. But what I was really concerned about was now deliberately voluntarily putting children into situations that we know are going to be highly traumatizing. Maybe the worst aspect of it was the fact that of the 700 children so far put in detention, 100 of them were under the age of four, which is almost unimaginable that somebody would make what would impose that kind of trauma on a child and the parent for that matter.
BETWEEN THE LINES: Dr. Redlener as many of our listeners are aware, quite recently, President Trump denounced immigrants in general as animals and then he backtracked and made it specific to members of a particular gang, but more recently, Trump made a statement and I’ll read it verbatim here. It says “They exploited the loopholes in our laws to enter the country as unaccompanied alien minors. He said and then went on to say they look so innocent. They’re not innocent.” What do you make of Trump’s declaration here that the children who may enter the border, cross the U.S. border, seeking asylum or protection aren’t innocent?
DR. IRWIN REDLENER: You know, I, there’ve been so many offensive words tweeted, spoken, alluded to by not just President Trump, but many, many people in as an administrator in his administration. That is, it’s almost like, and where I think many of us are sort of stunned that one more statement that affects children could be made, but on the other hand, are we surprised? I don’t know that I’d say that I was surprised. I was just sort of, I just felt myself being amped up and ramped up in terms of my just disbelief about these positions that they’re taking and I don’t really want our country to be looked at as if all of us are of that in that frame of mind. I think it’s destructive to our reputation. It’s destructive to our future and it’s just generally repulsive. It’s very uncomfortable to be associated with that kind of language and those kinds of references to human beings trying to make a goal of in a great country.
BETWEEN THE LINES: Dr. Redlener, I wanted to ask you about the, uh, the short and long range effects of tearing away young children away from their parents in a very traumatic situation at a border crossing. Like we’re having the many examples brought to us now. There’s increased levels of stress on children in this situation, as you describe it, toxic levels of stress. What’s the effects of this stress?
DR. IRWIN REDLENER: There’s been some research now for the past 10 to 15 years. Then it’s pretty much conclusively established and children who are exposed to very intense levels of persistent stress like this being this acute separation from your parents at a young age, that there are immediate consequences of kids getting depressed. They’re upset, they’re anxious, but there’s also because of this stress, a release of the stress hormones in the body, adrenaline and cortisol and so on. And it turns out that when these hormones are released over a long period of time, they can actually affect the brain architecture of the brain functioning. And that can have very long-term consequences, not just as it turns out in the mental health of children, but also in their propensity to get chronic illnesses of adulthood. In other words, that there’s certain damage that happens to organs and organ systems in the body when they’re exposed to these stress hormones that make them more susceptible when they’re adults, more susceptible to high blood pressure and heart disease and maybe cancer. We don’t know the entire picture yet, but the fact is that we know this can cause lifelong very negative consequences in people who have been exposed to long-term toxic stress in childhood.
