But before they could file petitions for asylum in the US, previous xenophobic administration in power stopped them at the border and decided to punish the families. Thus their small children were separated forcibly, placing them in clandestine detention centers, spread all over the country. Fortunately, a few brave journalists and photographers from country’s leading newspapers, receiving anonymous tips, followed the events. They then broke the story accompanied with secretly-taken photographs. A countrywide uproar ensued. A court order was issued forcing the government to begin the process of reuniting the children to their parents. And that’s when many parents, themselves detained, started to complain that many of their children could not be traced for the reunion. The news also broke that everyday hundreds of new homeless children (appearing to be lost) were seen to be roaming on the streets of many Central American countries.
Now, in front of Judge Smith, Mr. Henry shamelessly argued that instead of labeling those holding centers as “detention centers”, they should be described more like the “summer camps,” similar to entertainment venues. Judge Smith, himself a Holocaust survivor from the World War II, suddenly visualized the moment of his arrival at the death camps in Auschwitz. Coming out of the box-car, down the ramp of the platform, he was greeted by two viciously barking chained German shepherds.
Before this trial began, Judge Smith met some of the detained children inside his chamber. He had no doubt they were treated with some kind of psychotropic medicines, thus altering their moods and mental acuity before dispatching them to neighboring countries in the dark of the night. As Mr. Henry finished his presentation, Judge Smith allowed Mr. James Harris, the plaintiff lawyer to take the stand. He produced a well-taped and reconstructed shredded document, recovered by one of the investigative journalists from the garbage-bin located near a detention facility. He handed over the document to the judge who then read it loudly for the court. It was a list of medicines dispensed from the center’s pharmacy over past few months, without any patient’s name. All of them were well-known adult psychotropic drugs. Now Judge Smith went back to his own memory, remembering his own emancipated body when liberated from the camp by the US soldiers.
He silently uttered “The world now generated new barbarians.”