Thank you for reporting on this important story! You know, these so-called reunification camps are a subset of the "troubled youth" industry in general.

I've written several stories about how queer youth are abused routinely in the same system. The same "transport specialists" show up in the middle of the night, often waking children up from their own beds, putting them in handcuffs or zip ties, and forcing them into disciplinary wilderness camps in places like Utah, Washington State, or the Caribbean.

The camps are brutal. Children are often physically punished, with many documented cases of beatings, exercising to the point of serious physical injury, and of withholding food to the point of malnutrition.

Here in Michigan, we've just been coping with a story about a teenager who was sent to such a camp in Jamaica. After several concerned people reported abuse at that camp, local law enforcement investigated and substantiated cases of beatings and starvation.

They shut the camp down, and most of the residents made their way back to the United States and Canada.

But not the kid in Michigan. His parents refused to go pick him up, leaving him stranded in the Jamaica foster care system. His parents are facing potential criminal charges in family court in Michigan.

Fortunately for the kid, a family has stepped forward and offered to permanently foster him. He finally gets to come home to Michigan.

I don't know why his parents sent him to such a harsh disciplinary camp. But I know that a very significant percentage of kids like him are sent there because they're gay or transgender. That's it, that's all. The parents complain that their children are "rebellious," despite the fact that nobody can choose to become straight or cisgender.

I wrote a story last year about a teenage boy sent to a camp like that on a Caribbean island. What they did to him there was unspeakable. What they did to other teenagers there was unspeakable.

It took several of his high school teachers, neighbors, and young friends to apply pressure to get him home safe. The camp denied that he was even there, even when a member of the US Consulate came looking for him. It took an order from a federal magistrate judge in the United States to get him home, even after his 18th birthday! He was literally being held prisoner.

He had been a straight A student, with many friends and bright university prospects. His parents sent him to be tortured because he was gay and would not try to stop being gay.

When he returned, he was so traumatized that he couldn't even socialize with his friends anymore. He was terrified. It took him a long time to get back to even a semblance of the happy kid he had been before. He did not go to university.

When he started to recover, he shared stories about other kids like him who had been tortured, kids from the US and Canada whose parents were trying to force them to take on values they disagreed with. One Canadian girl was sent to the camp because she refused to participate actively in her church's youth group, because she disagreed with it on moral grounds.

She was also a straight A student before she was sent to be tortured.

The details are horrifying. She was forced to run on stony ground for hours without shoes, even after her feet became cut up and began to swell. She suffered permanent injury to her feet, and that was besides the fact that she and other inmates there were routinely beaten with leather straps until they bled.

Then they had to thank their abusers by telling them they loved them for their care and discipline.

I'm not making any of this up, and it's not unusual, and it's used to go after queer kids every day.

The same "transport specialists" who snatched the kids in your story snatch queer teenagers to be taken away to be tortured. And it's (mostly) legal.

None of the parents in the incidents I'm telling you about faced the slightest legal repercussions for what they did to their children.

I'm glad these reunification-camp stories are coming out now, adding to the pressure to shut down the "troubled youth" industry, which for the most part is not about youth who are actually troubled, just about youth who are not willing to accept their parents' values, meaning mostly their conservative religious values.

And queer kids are at particularly high risk of being tortured.