The girls are missing

It took the publicity brought by Sen. Jeff Merkley, among others, to finally make Americans aware of the horrendous policy of housing children ripped away from their parents who have come through border points to seek asylum.

ICE made detention centers available for the media to tour to show that the children are not being housed in cages, have beds to sleep on and activities to do. They did show that. They also showed that the kids must look at a mural of Donald Trump among other horrifying images. They showed that traumatized children can not get comforted by anyone, including their own siblings. MSNBC's Jacob Soboroff described it as de facto incarceration for minors who did nothing but come with their parents to escape violence and persecution in their home country.

But here's the thing: I've poured over these reports. I've scoured the photos. I've looked at every publication and every news outlets reporting. Not. One. Covers. Girls. Being. Detained.

Where are the girls?

No tours have been given of a facility housing girls. Are their facilities safe? Have they been sexually assaulted or exploited? What precautions are being taken to keep them protected? Why are we not hearing about them?

Immigration and Customs Enforcement recently asked the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), which instructs federal agencies on how to maintain records, to approve its timetable for retaining or destroying records related to its detention operations. This may seem like a run-of-the-mill government request for record-keeping efficiency. It isn’t. An entire paper trail for a system rife with human rights and constitutional abuses is at stake.

ICE has asked for permission to begin routinely destroying 11 kinds of records, including those related to sexual assaults, solitary confinement and even deaths of people in its custody. Other records subject to destruction include alternatives to detention programs, regular detention monitoring reports, logs about the people detained in ICE facilities, and communications from the public reporting detention abuses. ICE proposed various timelines for the destruction of these records ranging from 20 years for sexual assault and death records to three years for reports about solitary confinement.