VERONA, Va. -- Guards at a juvenile detention center for troubled migrant teenagers had many ways of handling serious problems. At times, they resorted to the chair. Other times, the mask.
According to the teenagers and a former worker, the high, hard-backed metal chair had wheels so it could be tilted and moved like a dolly through the halls of the Shenandoah Valley Juvenile Center, a northwest Virginia facility that houses American and teens in the country illegally who have emotional, behavioral and psychological problems.
Children as young as 14 were strapped to the chair -- some stripped down to their underwear -- with their feet, arms and waist restrained by cushioned leather straps and loops, they said.
Those who guards feared might spit, said one former worker, got the mask -- a mesh hood that covered their entire faces and heads. Sometimes, the detainees said, they were forced to wear it while in the chair.
Uses of the chair and mask are among the more extreme examples of complaints that have emerged from inside a handful of detention centers that house teenage migrants with a history of violence, mental-health problems or, in some cases, gang affiliation. A few hundred a year are held in the network of jail-like facilities that also hold American children who have been sent there for a range of behavioral problems and crimes, including assault and murder.
The centers have tougher security measures than the migrant-only shelters where a vast majority of the teenagers are sent after entering the country illegally, either on their own or with their families.
[U.S. immigration: Data visualization of selected immigration statistics, U.S. border map]
For years, the government has sent the most troubled migrant youths to these more restrictive facilities, and many complaints about these sites came well before the White House's crackdown on illegal immigration. Others, though, have been lodged in the wake of the recent surge of detained migrant children and teenagers, accusations that include use of the restraint devices, injections of psychotropic drugs and long periods in solitary confinement.
In sworn statements at the center of a class-action lawsuit against the Shenandoah Valley facility and the government commission that receives millions of federal dollars to run it, six former detainees paint a hellish portrait of daily life inside.
"They locked me in a room that was 8x10, or maybe 8x16, for 23 hours a day, all by myself," said one detainee identified only as R.B. in the suit. Originally from Guatemala and now 18 and living with his mother in Texas, he had a pre-existing mental illness and was transferred to the Shenandoah Valley facility because of "behavioral problems," according to the lawsuit. He said he often got into fights with other detainees and guards because he felt so isolated and angry over his fate. Punishment was the chair and mask, he said.
Far north of the border where they were first apprehended, in the verdant Shenandoah Valley west of Charlottesville, detainees at the center of the lawsuit described being beaten while handcuffed, slammed against walls, stabbed with pens, subjected to anti-Hispanic and other racial remarks, and forced to spend hours strapped to the restraint chair.
In interviews, two former employees of the Shenandoah Valley facility, which has received $31.4 million in federal contracts since 2009, said the use of the chair and the mask was carefully monitored, and they were used only as a last resort. They disputed any suggestion that their treatment of the children was abusive, cruel or unlawful.
But detainees in the lawsuit said that the chair was used often on them and other children, and that they were tied to it for varying lengths of time, from 30 minutes to -- in at least one case -- 2½ days.
The class-action lawsuit was filed late last year by the Washington Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs on behalf of three plaintiffs who were asking for quality treatment and mental-health care for all detainees. Since then, two plaintiffs were returned to their home countries and a third decided not to proceed. A fourth migrant teenager who has been detained at the center since December -- a 17-year-old boy who said he left Honduras after a gang threatened to kill him if he didn't join it -- was recently added to continue the suit. Three former detainees gave sworn statements about their treatment at the Shenandoah Valley center but are not plaintiffs.
A Section on 08/05/2018