Shelter: Notes from a Detained Migrant Children's Facility (2020) is set in America at a border detention shelter after children are arrested for entering the United States without papers.
The author is a high-trauma therapist, documenting the daily lives of 14 unaccompanied children, from the time the U.S. Border Patrol arrests them to the time they are released from a detention facility. ‘We had twenty-four hours to vaccinate, provide clothing, get full background, call home … and four hours to report and address trauma.’
They are all minors, aged from pre-school to teenagers. They each have a case worker. One is a deaf, mute Mayan girl; one is a teenager from India who walked thousands of miles to reach America; and another is a 16-year-old Guatemalan boy.
Shelter is not prison, but for the unaccompanied minors, it is not home. It is a place to get a medical assessment and assistance.
Their situational tales are brief, and so is this book. If they were characters in a novel, there would be no depth to them, but this is reality, and readers don’t follow their lives. But readers do get a glimpse of where the detained migrant children came from and why they are on their way to the promised land of America. This is a rare description of an immigration shelter and the people who work there, complete with the necessary processes that enable each child to move forward with their lives.
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MARTINA NICOLLS
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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).
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