Being forcefully separated from your family is something that nobody ever wants to happen to them. The way immigrants are being sent away from their families is unfair to them, and it needs to be fixed for the safety of the people.

The way that the deportations are being held needs to change so that the people are less scared and kids aren’t separated from their families. The process is violating and terrifying for these people. There is no real justification for treating detainees like they don’t matter, and that action needs to be taken to correct and reform the way they people are treated.

The new immigrant detention center is located at Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport. The center has gained the nickname “Alligator Alcatraz” because of the large alligator population in the surrounding area. According to NBC News, detainees describe the detention center as having “torturous conditions”. They are in cells with small beds, and detainees sometimes go days without eating. It is full of mosquitoes and has very unreliable medical treatments for people who are hurt. As of June 20th, there are over 56,000 detainees in the detention center, which makes the center extremely overcrowded.

According to the New York Times, in Lower Manhattan, around four weeks ago, a woman entered a building with her 19-year old son and six-year old daughter for an appointment with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. ICE detained the woman and sent her son to a detention center in New Jersey, and flew the woman with her daughter to a detention center in Texas. One week later, the woman and her daughter were sent to Ecuador, leaving behind two more children who weren’t detained in New York.

This is just one of the many instances where families are torn apart when relatives are sent to different detention centers around the country. The fear of separation comes from situations exactly like this one, not from a place of unfounded paranoia. Some people may argue that the reason these people are treated so poorly is because of how resistant they are and because of how they hide from immigration officers. This could be a valid argument if it wasn’t for the fact that these people are hiding because they don’t want to be separated from their families when they are deported. When people go to report themselves willingly or are forced there, they all seem to be separated from their family, proving that their fear wasn’t from a place of paranoia but from real things that have happened to others around them.

The process for deportation needs to change so that it is safer and more comfortable for detainees. If they guarantee that families aren’t broken and separated from each other, more people might be comfortable with registering for deportation. There also needs to be a guarantee of the right to return to their communities they were living before being deported, so they don’t have to live in detention centers that are overcrowded and filled with people. The centers need to be better and provide more for the detainees.

Basic human respect is nonnegotiable when it comes to how people are treated by the government.