60 Minutes - 03/11/2018: Human Cargo, Secretary of Education, Treating Trauma

Episode Date: March 12, 2018

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There's a lot of debate about immigration reform and border security right now. Tonight, we'll show you what human smuggling on an industrial scale looks like on the Mexican-American border. After Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos visited the Parkland High School on Wednesday, some of the students sent out angry tweets. You came to our school just for publicity and avoided our questions. Betsy DeVos came to my school, talked to three people, and pet a dog. I have asked to head up a task force that will really look at what states are doing. See, there are a lot of states that are addressing these issues in very cohesive and coherent ways.

Do you feel a sense of urgency? Yes. Because this sounds like talking instead of acting. There is a sense of urgency. Make sure you're playing nice with your friends. We first learned of the trauma-informed care happening in Milwaukee from a series in the local newspaper. It's one of the poorest cities in the nation. And something else drew us to Milwaukee.

It's the city where I grew up. Poor, a lot of negative experiences, sexual abuse and all of that. What's the difference between a really bad childhood and being able to overcome that? Poor, a lot of negative experiences, sexual abuse and all of that. What's the difference between a really bad childhood and being able to overcome that and a traumatic childhood and someone not being able to overcome that? Really, it boils down to something pretty simple in its relationships. I'm Steve Croft. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Scott Pelley. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Oprah Winfrey. I'm Bill Croft. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Scott Pelley.

I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Oprah Winfrey. I'm Bill Whitaker. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes. matter most? When your famous grainy mustard potato salad isn't so famous without the grainy mustard. When the barbecue's lit, but there's nothing to grill. When the in-laws decide that, actually, they will stay for dinner. Instacart has all your groceries covered this summer. So download the app and get delivery in as fast as 60 minutes. Plus, enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart,

groceries that over-deliver. Immediately after President Trump's inauguration in 2017, arrests of illegal immigrants on the southwest border plummeted to lows that hadn't been seen in years. But three months later, with immigration reform stalled in Congress, the numbers started climbing again and have now returned to average. That comes to about half a million immigrants arrested a year. A great deal has changed on the border because of increased enforcement and control of the drug cartels on the Mexican side. Human smuggling has developed to an industrial scale. Illegal immigrants in the hands of professional smugglers

find themselves trapped in a system of cruelty, neglect, and death. There was no reason to notice the trailer in Frio County, Texas, except for the voice of a woman crying, we don't want to die. But we don't want to die. In 2015, the sheriff freed 39 men, women and children overcome by heat. They were rushed to medical treatment and this time no one died. 18 wheelers packed with people are discovered at a rate of more than 100 a year just in Texas Last July, this one was found in San Antonio with well over 100 Mexican and Central and South American migrants inside. It was eerily quiet.

When the doors opened, I expected to see people standing. All we saw was people laying down. Paramedic Kale Chambers reached for unconscious victims. Extremely hot to the touch. Physically hot to the touch. People at the brink of death that were at the end of the rope and then people that were alive but declining as we were there. You were losing them. Sure, yeah. The trailer was designed to be refrigerated, so it was sealed tight. The cooling system was broken. Ten died, including two children.

Twenty-nine were critically ill. They're doing it out of a sense of desperation. People simply fear for their lives, and they have no other way of surviving. Jeremy Slack is a researcher who has spent years interviewing immigrants in Mexico. He's a professor at the University of Texas, El Paso. What is so terrible in Central America and in Mexico that it drives this migration? Well, we have intense levels of violence, both in Central America and parts of Mexico, where the population has been targeted in a way that we had never seen before. Issues such as extortion are one of the main drivers for immigration,

because gangs and drug cartels start extorting businesses, which eventually leads to the business being forced to close down. And now not only do people have no economic sustenance, but they also have people trying to kill them. And those two factors are incredible drivers of migration. and now not only do people have no economic sustenance, but they also have people trying to kill them. And those two factors are incredible drivers of migration. We met some of the immigrants when they surrendered to the Border Patrol. A 16-year-old girl told us that she was threatened with rape by a gang in El Salvador. This boy journeyed 1,000 miles from Guatemala alone, hoping to reach his parents in Florida.

They ended up in detention, where they can apply for asylum or eventually be deported. This traditional route, over the Rio Grande River and through the brush on foot, is the path smugglers often use to funnel immigrants to the 18-wheelers on the U.S. side. But many are lost here. My wife came home from the grocery store at five o'clock one afternoon. Our dogs were playing with something in the yard, and it was a human skull. Mike Vickers' South Texas ranch lies on the smugglers' roots. I've probably got 500 pictures of different bodies. We didn't find all of those.

Some of them were found by ranch hands, sheriff's department, different people. 500 over what period of time, roughly? Since about 2004. What's killing them? The heat and being unprepared. Eddie Canales works in the same county as Mike Vickers' ranch. He crossed in through Piedras Negras? Yes.

In 2013, Canales founded the South Texas Human Rights Center, which helps rescue endangered immigrants and helps identify the dead. We came across the bodies of two men who apparently froze to death during a cold snap the other day. They were young men. They're 18 and 19 year olds. One was from Mexico and one was from El Salvador. How often are bodies found around here? Last year, 61 bodies were recovered. That's the ones you know about? That's the ones we know about. The sheriff here will tell you that for every one recovered, there's five still out there.

Of these survivors, some are led by smugglers to safe houses like these on the U.S. side, which were filmed by the Border Patrol. In days or weeks, their numbers grow until there is a truckload. The migrants aren't told about the 18 wheelers until it's too late, and then they are forced to board. We wanted to understand their desperation, so we traced a survivor of the fatal San Antonio truck 650 miles to his home in Aguas Calientes, Mexico. 42-year-old Jorge De Santos Aguilar was pulled from the truck unconscious. He was in a coma nearly three weeks and in the hospital nearly two months. You have a new little boy to support.

Was he one of the reasons that you went to America? Yes, De Santos told us. I'd do it for him. Nearly half of Mexicans live in poverty. De Santos is married with three children in a small apartment. In Aguas Calientes, he can make up to $300 a month, which doesn't pay the bills. In America, it's $5,000 a month. He's made the trip four times, worked in a factory on a hog farm, and helped rebuild New Orleans after Katrina. For his last, nearly fatal trip, he sold his truck, saved money from his past trips, and paid smugglers $6,500.

It was completely dark, DeSantis told us about the trailer. There was no window, there was no light, there was nothing. It's estimated the 100 and more victims in the back of the San Antonio truck baking in their own heat pushed the temperature well over 120 degrees, which led to the 10 deaths and 29 critically ill. I heard a lot of people screaming, DeSantos said. They wanted water. There were some people saying that they wanted to die. I heard a mom scream for her children. The torment lasted three hours. The last thing I remember, he told us, was calling out to God. Is it more dangerous today than ever?

I would say so. There is so much enforcement in the areas that people were able to cross safely. It has pushed people more and more into places that are dangerous. How much of this illegal immigration is controlled and run by the drug cartels? They're kind of the regulatory mechanism. And they essentially set the rules, so to speak, for illegal activities in the region. It has led to this professionalization,

this need to collaborate and coordinate with the drug cartels because they are the ones that are able to control how officials work. They know more about sophisticated ways of avoiding apprehension, avoiding enforcement. The drug cartels own the border. Definitely. Once migrants are over the border, their next challenge is effectively a second border of federal checkpoints. On major routes far north of Mexico, the Border Patrol operates a second set of screening stations. We visited one of the busiest 29 miles north of the border on Interstate 35.

That truck that was found in San Antonio came through here. It did. Jason Owens is the deputy chief at the Laredo checkpoint. How did it manage to get through? It's unfortunate, but the possibility of us catching every single thing to come through this checkpoint is just not feasible. The driver had his commercial license revoked. He came through here without a license. How is that possible? So the agent on primary has just a couple seconds given the amount of

traffic that comes through. And so the agent, whenever they talked to the driver, didn't have that reasonable suspicion. The x-ray was broken down that day? Yes. The Border Patrol wanted to show us the x-ray machine, but it was broken when we were there, too. I'm going to go back and scan the other side. Yep. When the x-rays work, they illuminate the horror. There were 200 people in this trailer. When high-tech fails, dog tech is ever reliable. We watched two illegal immigrants sniffed out from behind the airfoil on the roof of a rig. Chief Owens told us that they would catch many more trucks, but there are just too many. 1.3 million of these vehicles comes through here, just cargo alone every year. Another 1.9 million passenger.

In just this station? This checkpoint alone. If this were a port of entry, this would be about the third busiest port of entry in the entire country. If you checked them all, commerce would stop. Right. So part of our job as CBP is to facilitate legitimate trade and travel, at the same time securing our borders. Smugglers recruit American drivers because they are less suspicious. We wondered how they find

willing Americans, so we called one. This call is from Troy Dock, an inmate at a federal prison. Former truck driver Troy Dock is in a prison we were not allowed to visit. He told us he crossed the border to see the sights. A man befriended him and asked Dock to smuggle an abused woman and child across the border. After dinner and drinks, the man confessed that what he really wanted was to pay Doc $5,000 to transport a dozen illegal immigrants waiting at this safe house in the United States. When Doc arrived there, the dozen turned out to be 50. Did you have any trouble at the federal checkpoint? No, they just waved us through. Hours later, Doc reached Dallas, but two of his captives

did not. They say two of them had passed away from a heat stroke, and the other one I think was in a coma or something like that. How long are you supposed to be there in the federal prison now? Till 2036. The driver in the San Antonio deaths, James Bradley, pleaded guilty to transporting immigrants resulting in death. He will be sentenced later this month. More Border Patrol agents. That's what we need here. We need at least another 150 agents here in Brooks County. South Texans, including Mike Vickers, are improvising. Vickers organized the Texas border volunteers, 300 armed civilians who patrol ranch lands and call in smuggling activity. The volunteers have no legal authority

and they were investigated by the sheriff in 2014 for detaining and tying up illegal immigrants while waiting for the border patrol, something that Vickers says they won't do again. Some people watching this interview are saying to themselves right now he's an armed vigilante taking the law in his own hands. We've heard that before. This was a massive invasion. We've been doing this for 11 years. There's been thousands of people that we've reported that otherwise would have came in here scot-free. Eddie Canales, the founder of the South Texas Human Rights Center, is focusing on rescue. He's set up more than 100 water stations. You know, there are people who say you're encouraging illegal immigration by

making it possible to get through here. Well, I don't think I'm the overriding factor of why people come here. You know, there's people that are leaving their countries by, you know, being pushed out, you know, and they have no choice. I'm providing humanitarian effort and, you know, so people don't die and then people don't suffer. Sometimes, historic events suck. But what shouldn't suck is learning about history. I do that through storytelling. History That Doesn't Suck is a chart-topping history-telling podcast chronicling the epic story of America, decade by decade.

Right now, I'm digging into the history of incredible infrastructure projects of the 1930s, including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more. The promise is in the title, History That Doesn't Suck, available on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos is a devout Christian grandmother from Michigan who has spent most of her life trying to improve the quality of education for poor kids. So how in the world did she become one of the most hated members of the Trump cabinet? She's dedicated to promoting school choice, but her critics say she really wants to privatize the public school system that she once called, quote, a dead end. Now, after the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, her portfolio is expanding. Tomorrow, President Trump is expected to appoint her as head of a new commission on school safety,

charged with developing policies to prevent school violence. Betsy DeVos visited the school in Florida on Wednesday, but like almost everywhere else she goes, she faced criticism. Some of the students sent out angry tweets. You came to our school just for publicity and avoided our questions. Betsy DeVos came to my school, talked to three people, and pet a dog. Many of the students are frustrated at the administration for talking about school

safety but not acting. I give a lot of credit to the students there for really raising their voices and I think that they are not going to let this moment go by. They want gun control. They want a variety of things. They want solutions. Do you think that teachers should have guns in the classroom? That should be an option for states and communities to consider. And I hesitate to think of, like, my first-grade teacher, Mrs. Zorhoff. I couldn't ever imagine her having a gun and being trained in that way. But for those who are capable, this is one solution that can and should be considered.

But no one size fits all. Every state and every community is going to address this issue in a different way. Do you see yourself as a leader in this subject? And what kind of ideas will you be promoting? I have actually asked to head up a task force that will really look at what states are doing. See, there are a lot of states that are addressing these issues

in very cohesive and coherent ways. Do you feel a sense of urgency? Yes. Because this sounds like talking. No, there feel a sense of urgency? Yes. Because this sounds like talking. No, there is a sense of urgency, indeed. The reason Betsy DeVos wanted to be Secretary of Education was so she could promote school choice. What a great-looking class.

Offering parents options other than traditional public schools where 90% of kids go. Good to meet you. What are you working on? She has proposed massive cuts in public education funding and wants to shift billions to alternative players like private, parochial, and charter schools. We have invested billions and billions and billions of dollars from the federal level, and we have seen zero results.

But that really isn't true. Test scores have gone up over the last 25 years. So why do you keep saying nothing's been accomplished? Well, actually, test scores vis-a-vis the rest of the world have not gone up, and we have continued to be middle of the pack at best. That's just not acceptable. No, it's not acceptable, but it's better than it was. That's the point. And so you don't acknowledge that things have gotten better. You won't acknowledge that over the... But I don't think they have for too many kids.

We've stagnated. Okay, so there's the big argument. So what can be done about that? What can be done about that is empowering parents to make the choices for their kids. Any family that has the economic means and the power to make the choices for their kids. Any family that has the economic means and the power to make choices is doing so for their children. Families that don't have the power,

that can't decide, I'm going to move from this apartment in downtown whatever to the suburb where I think the school is going to be better for my child. If they don't have that choice and they are assigned to that school, they are stuck there. I am fighting for the parents who don't have those choices. We need all parents to have those choices. Are you sure about your answers on those?

Which one's bigger than the other? Oh! Question is, does her solution work? Good job. Do choice schools perform better than public schools? Naturally, there are conflicting studies. It's complicated. Does that represent three-ninths? I think so.

I think you're right. But DeVos spends a lot of time showcasing choice schools like Cold Spring Elementary, a public school in Indianapolis that was allowed to get rid of the local teachers union and create an innovative curriculum. But when parents choose these options, taxpayer funds follow the child. Here, can I help you? And that means that the public school left behind can end up with less money. Why take money away from that school that's not working

to bring them up to a level where that school is working? Well, we should be funding and investing in students, not in school buildings, not in institutions, not in systems. Okay, but what about the kids who are back at the school that's not working? What about those kids? Well, in places where there has been a lot of choice that's been introduced, Florida, for example, the studies show that when there's a large number of students that opt to go to a different school or different schools, the traditional public schools, actually, the results get better as well. Now, has that happened to Michigan? We're in Michigan, this is your home state. Yes. Well, there's lots of great options and

choices for students here. Have the public schools in Michigan gotten better? I don't know. Overall, I can't say overall that they have all gotten better. The whole state is not doing well. Well, there are certainly lots of pockets where the students are doing well. But your argument that if you take funds away that the schools will get better is not working in Michigan, where you had a huge impact and influence over the direction of the school system here. I hesitate to talk about all schools in general because schools are made up of individual students attending them.

The public schools here are doing worse than they did. Michigan schools need to do better. There is no doubt about it. Have you seen the really bad schools? Maybe try to figure out what they're doing. I have not intentionally visited schools that are underperforming. Maybe you should. Maybe I should, yes. DeVos is the only cabinet secretary protected by a squad of U.S. marshals because she's gotten death threats.

She's frequently met by protesters who accuse her of pushing an elitist agenda. Save! Save! Save! Save! Save! She often manages to offend, as when she called historically black colleges and universities pioneers of school choice, as though they had a choice. Great honor and privilege. At this commencement speech at Bethune-Cookman University, students booed and turned their backs to her. Why have you become, people say, the most hated cabinet secretary? I'm not so sure how exactly that happened, but I think there are a lot of really powerful forces allied against change. Does it hurt? Sometimes it does. Sometimes it does. Again, I think I'm more misunderstood than anything.

Some of the criticism she feels is unfair, especially when it involves her wealth. She faced a hostile question about it during a speech at Harvard last year. So you're a billionaire with lots and lots of investments, and the so-called school choice movement is a way to open the floodgates for corporate interests to make money off the backs of students. How much do you expect your net worth to increase as a result of your policy choices? You can choose not to answer that, Secretary. Among President Trump's cabinet of moguls and titans, DeVos is the richest. She grew up wealthy and married even wealthier. In their hometown of Grand Rapids, the DeVoses have been exceedingly charitable.

Their name decorates buildings like the Civic Center and Children's Hospital. At her bruising confirmation hearing, she was grilled about her wealth and lack of experience. She's been an advocate, not an educator. Do you not want to answer my question? What happened there? I've not had a root canal, but I can imagine that a root canal might be more pleasant than that was. So you've been on the job now over a year. What have you done that you're most proud of?

Yeah. What have you done that you're most proud of? Yeah, we've begun looking at and rolling back a lot of the overreach of the federal government in education. By overreach, she means regulations. And like most of President Trump's cabinet, DeVos is a devoted deregulator. Part of her job as Secretary of Education is overseeing guidelines that protect the civil rights of students. Just days after being confirmed, she rescinded a guideline

implemented under President Obama that allowed transgender students to use the bathrooms of their choice, sparking even more protests. Trans rights are human rights! She's now considering scrapping the Obama-era guidance on how to identify, avoid, and remedy discriminatory discipline, which aims to prevent schools from punishing students of color

more harshly than their white classmates. We are studying that rule. We need to ensure that all students have an opportunity to learn in a safe and nurturing environment. And all students means all students. Yeah, but let's say there's a disruption in the classroom and a bunch of white kids are disruptive and they get punished, you know, go see the principal. But the black kids are, you know, they call in the cops. I mean, that's the issue. Who and how the kids who disrupt are being punished. Arguably, all of these issues or all of this issue comes down to individual kids.

And it does come down to individual kids, and it often comes down to I am committed to making sure that students have the opportunity to learn in an environment that is conducive to their learning. Do you see this disproportion in discipline for the same infraction as institutional racism. We're studying it carefully and are committed to making sure students have opportunity to learn in safe and nurturing environments. While this regulation is under review, she's already drawn fire for changing Title IX guidelines on handling sexual assault on college campuses. She's allowing colleges to require stronger evidence from accusers and give the accused a greater benefit of the doubt. Are you in any way, do you think, suggesting that the number of false accusations are as high as the number of actual rapes or assaults?

Well, one sexual assault is one too many and one falsely accused individual is one too many. Yeah, but are they the same? I don't know. I don't know, but I'm committed to a process that's fair for everyone involved. The Me Too movement has come along at the same time. This is all feeding into it. We're not talking about colleges anymore. We're talking about men in positions of power in industry and government. Have you ever had an issue? I can recall a number of moments in the past, several decades ago, that I think today would just be viewed as unacceptable.

Yeah. Okay. It's been an unlikely journey and balancing act for grandmother Betsy DeVos. Yeah, you're really good. From her sheltered life in Michigan to her life now as a lightning rod in Washington. In 1850, a Catholic orphanage called St. Emilion was founded in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to take in children whose parents had died in a cholera epidemic. 168 years later, that same organization now known as St. A is still finding shelter for thousands of children who need it, often kids who have deep trauma in their young lives,

and helps those kids with a revolutionary approach that's spreading across the country. No longer a residential orphanage, St. A primarily places orphaned, abandoned, neglected, and abused children in foster homes and then coordinates their care. On any given day, it's looking after some 2,000 children, almost all of whom are part of a 21st century epidemic of childhood trauma. I got diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder when I was 15. Milwaukee resident Alicia Fox was given that PTSD diagnosis seven years ago. Things got pretty scary. Months after she somehow found the courage to tell her grandmother and then the police of the terrible trauma she had been enduring. For 10 years when when I was 4 to 14, I've been sexually abused and raped by my father. Alicia's father and mother split up even before she was born.

Her dad eventually got custody because her mom had a drug problem, and he then hid his crimes from everyone for a decade. So during that whole time, I wasn't a person, you know. I wasn't anything. I wasn't even my own property. I didn't own myself. Somebody else did. I can tell by the way you can speak about it, when you can say, this thing happened to me from 4 to 14, that now there's been a clearing for you. Right. Most people think that, you know, oh, she's damaged or like,

oh, she's not going to be okay. But at the end of the day, I think that I'm a survivor. And every time you tell it, it makes you a little stronger. Absolutely. Alicia's survival was not a sheer thing. Her father went to prison for his crimes against his daughter. She went to live with her maternal grandmother and aunt, Bonnie and Michelle Hahn. What did you think the first time you heard her described as suffering from PTSD? I didn't understand it because PTSD was for the veterans coming home from the war. That was what I thought it was. I had no idea. At the time, she was acutely suicidal. Tim Grove is clinical director at St. A., and he took responsibility for Alicia's care.

We might not be able to ever prevent the stuff that happens to kids, but we're fully in charge of how we respond when we see it. So this is how we're trying to come up with... For Alicia, like every child who comes to St. A now, they responded with an approach called trauma-informed care, which focuses on a person's experiences before trying to correct their behavior, whether it be juvenile delinquency, poor performance in school, or out-of-control anger. It comes down to the question of not what's wrong with you, what's wrong with that kid,

why is he behaving like that, to what happened to you, which is a very different question. It's so subtle and yet so profound in terms of how kids experience an adult that approaches them from that angle. They feel safe. I felt that somebody understood,

that they knew where I was coming from, that it wasn't just another person just trying to talk to me to calm me down for that moment, that they had done their homework and that they really wanted to help. You felt seen. I felt seen. I felt heard. A crucial element of trauma-informed care is something called the ACE test. She's like, it seems like your ACE score is really high. ACE stands for Adverse Childhood Experiences. Ten questions, primarily taking a lens and looking at sort of the family home and saying to adults looking back at their childhood,

were you physically abused? Were you neglected? Did someone go to prison? Ten questions categorizing adversity that kids face. I did an ACE test for them, and I scored a 9 out of 10. For anyone, a high score on the ACE test is a powerful predictor of physical and mental problems down the road. According to the Centers for Disease Control, it makes you five times as likely to be depressed and can cut your overall life expectancy by as much as 20 years.

The CDC says this isn't theory, it's scientific fact, backed up by hundreds of published studies. And the CDC says one out of every eight children suffers enough trauma to cause lasting damage. If you have developmental trauma, the truth is you're going to be at risk for almost any kind of physical health, mental health, social health problem that you can think of. Dr. Bruce Perry may be the world's leading expert on childhood trauma. Well, thanks for coming. He has treated thousands of children, and been called on for decades to treat kids traumatized in high-profile events, including the Columbine and Sandy Hook school shootings.

He's a psychiatrist and also has a Ph.D. in neuroscience. That very same sensitivity that makes you able to learn language just like that as a little infant makes you highly vulnerable to chaos, threat, inconsistency, unpredictability, violence. And so children are much more sensitive to developmental trauma than adults. So if you're a child who's raised in a nurturing and well-cared for environment, you're more likely to have a well-wired brain. Correct. And if you're a child who's raised in an environment of chaos, of uncertainty, of violence, of neglect, you are being wired differently. And typically in a way that makes you more vulnerable. Kids that grow up like that have much higher rates of risk for mental health

problems, much higher rates of risk for doing poorly in school. For just functioning in the world. Exactly. Your brain is kind of always trying to make sense out of the world. Bruce Perry travels the world teaching the techniques of trauma-informed care to therapists, educators, social workers, and foster care agencies. It's crucial, he tells them, to understand what has happened to traumatized children before trying to fix their behavior. You need other tools in your toolkit. Tim Grove heard Perry speak at a conference 10 years ago and almost immediately began incorporating the Perry approach at St. A. We started to train our staff. And what our staff came back to us and said was they said, we're starting to get this and we're seeing some remarkable things happen.

But you got to work on that teacher. You got to work on that cop who just came and screwed everything up. And we said, okay. And 10 years later, 50,000 people have gone through our curriculum and been trained by us. Make sure you're playing nice with your friends. Among those trainees, all the teachers at a trauma-sensitive charter school operated by St. A. Thank you for the hug. St. A now works with the Milwaukee Police Department's Trauma Response Unit and with judges in the city's Children's Court.

Over the course of my career, there have been so many cases where I wish I would have known a lot of this at that time. What the judge now knows is to ask a child, what happened to you, before asking what's wrong with you. St. A repeats that mantra to any Milwaukee organization that will listen. I got involved with St. A's and the director over there, Tim Grove, and he says, Belinda, you've been doing this all along. There just never was a name attached to it.

For the last 23 years, Belinda Pittman-McGee has been running the Nia Imani Family Center. I noticed the chores board. So there's order and responsibility. Providing transitional housing for homeless women and their children. The chaos of homelessness is itself a traumatic experience. I couldn't help anyone if I didn't go back and learn about what happened to them, what they didn't know was to understand why am I the way that I am. Yeah. Why can't I control my impulses? Why am I so aggressive?

Why does the first thing that happens, somebody irritates me and I blow up? That's right. Yeah. I blow up and I want to fight and I want to run off. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So you help them put the pieces together for their stories. That's right. To understand why I am this way. Belinda understands trauma because she's lived through trauma. More than 30 years ago, she fled an abusive marriage with her three children. I got the children and we left. She and her children walked to a shelter for abused women.

The first week I was there, we were all outside, kind of going to go about our day, and I heard a mother say, okay, I'll see you back at home tonight. I thought, home? She calling the shelter home. That blew me away. I used to sit around a table just like this. Just like this. So I know life can be better

if that's what we truly want. Niamani's residents gather in the building's basement almost every evening for group learning and discussion, facilitated by staff members who've been through training with St. A. When you persevere, when you press through it, you're going to come out victorious. Their children are looked after in an adjacent room, and Belinda shuttles between nurturing the children and nurturing their moms. And this is our baby in the family, right?

This is our baby in the family, right? This is our baby in the family. And we're going to help her. She's going to learn from all of our experiences. There is a lot of pain in this room. Most of the women are on public assistance. And Belinda says that 90% of the men who fathered their children are incarcerated. How long you been incarcerated? Well, he get out next year, and he like, y'all there, come back.

Like, I don't want to go back. Like, this is the first time in my life, like, I feel like I'm doing something, and I'm doing it because I want to do it. And I'm happy with that. You are. You are. And you know what? You're going to work that out too. You're going to work it out. They'll work it out, she says, by first understanding their own trauma and then, in her words, rescripting their lives and the lives of their children.

You know, people talk about this cycle of poverty, the cycle of joblessness, homelessness, incarceration. Can those problems be solved without addressing trauma? No. We first learned of the trauma-informed care happening in Milwaukee from a series in the local newspaper, the journal Sentinel. It was titled, A Time to Heal, and there's a lot that needs to be healed in Milwaukee. It's one of the poorest cities in the nation, and something else drew us to Milwaukee. It's the city where I grew up.

It's not lost on me, the irony of being back in the same city, Milwaukee, where I grew up on welfare, poor, a lot of negative experiences, sexual abuse, and all of that. What's the difference between a really bad childhood and being able to overcome that, and a traumatic childhood and someone not being able to overcome that? Really, it boils down to something pretty simple in its relationships. And a lot of people can say, oh, I went through that. I went through that. I was physically abused, sexually abused, and I made it. I pulled myself up by the bootstraps.

What you're saying is at some point in your life, there was a relationship or a helping hand or some kind of healing process that helped you to get where you are. Absolutely. Somebody helped you pull up those boots. For the women at Nia Imani, that somebody is Belinda Pittman-McGee. For Alicia Fox, who's now in college, it's Saint A, her aunt, and her grandmother. I think the way that I got through it is knowing that my family, my grandma's side of the family, was always going to be there for me, no matter what. Through my darkest times, they were there. So I thought, if they could be there through my darkest times, then they're definitely going to be there for the great times.

I'm Scott Pelley. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.