A former employee at a New York City facility for migrant children has leaked footage of the conditions inside for the first time.
The Rachel Maddow Show aired the tape during Monday night’s broadcast. It was shot late last week at the Cayuga Centers in East Harlem; the facility houses migrant children for day programs, while they stay with foster families at night. The employee said she started seeing a “huge influx” of much younger children coming in, which she eventually realized was due to the Trump administration’s family-separation policy.
While the policy has since ended, thousands of detained children are still being held separately from their parents. One particularly disturbing bit of footage shows a young migrant girl asking for her mother.
“I am here today because I feel like it’s important to make a difference. I feel that it’s time for everybody to stand up and stop being afraid and actually help these children that are being separated from their parents,” the former employee told Maddow. “It’s very heartbreaking to know that there’s children, even if it was just one. But there’s a lot of them in my program, and it’s sad to know that these children are crying for their parents. They don’t know where their parents are.”
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