Children claim they were beaten and kept naked in concrete cells at Virginia immigration detention centre

Teenage immigrants detained in a Virginia juvenile detention centre allege that they were beaten and subjected to long periods of confinement, including some instances where teens were left nude in a cold concrete cell.

The claims come from a lawsuit filed against Shenandoah Valley Juvenile Centre (SVJC), which includes a half-dozen sworn statements from Latino teens who were jailed there from anywhere between a few months to years.

The youngest of the teens at the facility was 14-years-old. The centre has 58 secure beds for 12- to 17-year-olds and is regularly used to detain Latino immigrants suspected of being a part of gangs like MS-13.

“Whenever they used to restrain me and put me in the chair, they would handcuff me,” a Honduran immigrant who was put into the facility at the age of 15, alleged to the Associated Press.

He continued: “Strapped me down all the way, from your feet all the way to your chest, you couldn’t really move. … They have total control over you. They also put a bag over your head. It has little holes; you can see through it. But you feel suffocated with the bag on”.

In court filings, lawyers for the detention facility have denied all the allegations of physical abuse detailed in the lawsuit, which span from 2015 to 2018. The filings deny any wrongdoing on the part of SVJC.

Court filings allege that staff at SVJC regularly taunted children, calling them “gay” and “f*****” in a manner that would stimulate past traumatic memories, and that the teens would continue to be taunted until reaching their breaking point, and act out physically.

In instances where the teens act out physically — as well as in other instances where the infractions were much less severe — the lawsuit alleges that guards at SVJC would frequently react with excessive force.

In one instance, the guards allegedly hit a teen in the back repeatedly with their elbows, while the teen was on the ground. In another, a teen was beaten after he complained about a headache and asked to be allowed inside from recreation time — guards would later say they thought the teen had found a piece of glass, though no contraband was found. Another team was abused after failing to comply with an order to leave a book in his cell after class.

The lawsuit claims that, in addition to physical violence against the teens from staff, the teens were often then either isolated in their cells, or strapped to chairs with handcuffs and cloth restraints.

In addition to these allegations, the complaint against the facility alleges that the teens are not provided adequate mental health care. That claim appears to be backed up by public statements by a top manager at the center at a recent Senate subcommittee hearing, where the official said the facility was ill-equipped to help the children with the mental trauma they had endured.

“The youth were being screened as gang-involved individuals. And then when they came into our care, and they were assessed by our clinical and case management staff … they weren’t necessarily identified as gang-involved individuals,” Kelsey Wong, a program director at SVJC, said in her April testimony.

Lawyers for SVJC responded with court filings denying all wrongdoing

Requests for comment made to SVJC, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Office of Refugee Resettlement, were not returned.

It is not clear when federal authorities first learned about the abuse, or whether any action was taken to safeguard the children. The complaint says that efforts by one of the teens to notify a federal representative stationed at the facility were ignored.

The SVJC facility is one of just three juvenile detention facilities in the US that has federal contracts to provide “secure placement” for kids who have problems in other, less-restrictive, environments.