June 26, 2018

Rachel Maddow Shares Leaked Footage From Inside a Migrant Children Detention Center

A facility employee warned children not to talk to the media.

On Monday, Rachel Maddow shared footage surreptitiously recorded inside a detention center in New York City, which is currently holding migrant children recently separated from their parents at the border. The exclusive footage was recorded by a former employee who worked at the East Harlem facility until last week. She told MSNBC that she left her job in protest of the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance immigration policy.

The footage included several images of children eating and playing in what appears to be a classroom-like setting. It also included one heartbreaking video clip of the employee struggling to get information from a distressed young girl crying for her mother.

Later in the segment, Maddow shared audio that captured a facility employee warning children against speaking to the media because it could potentially hurt their chances of reuniting with their families. 

“If for whatever reason you talk to a reporter, you know what’s going to happen to your case?” the woman is heard saying in Spanish. “It is going to be on the news, and then one doesn’t know what is going to happen. If you are going to last here for a long time, I am not trying to scare you. I am just telling you it’s the truth.”

We've never been very good at being conservative.

And usually, that serves us well in doing the ambitious, hard-hitting journalism that you turn to Mother Jones for. But it also means we can't afford to come up short when it comes to scratching together the funds it takes to keep our team firing on all cylinders, and the truth is, we finished our budgeting cycle on June 30 about $100,000 short of our online goal.

This is no time to come up short. It's time to fight like hell, as our namesake would tell us to do, for a democracy where minority rule cannot impose an extreme agenda, where facts matter, and where accountability has a chance at the polls and in the press. If you value our reporting and you can right now, please help us dig out of the $100,000 hole we're starting our new budgeting cycle in with an always-needed and always-appreciated donation today.

payment methods

We've never been very good at being conservative.

And usually, that serves us well in doing the ambitious, hard-hitting journalism that you turn to Mother Jones for. But it also means we can't afford to come up short when it comes to scratching together the funds it takes to keep our team firing on all cylinders, and the truth is, we finished our budgeting cycle on June 30 about $100,000 short of our online goal.

This is no time to come up short. It's time to fight like hell, as our namesake would tell us to do, for a democracy where minority rule cannot impose an extreme agenda, where facts matter, and where accountability has a chance at the polls and in the press. If you value our reporting and you can right now, please help us dig out of the $100,000 hole we're starting our new budgeting cycle in with an always-needed and always-appreciated donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate