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.”

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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