Last week, we learned that the government is secretly holding unaccompanied migrant children, some as young as 1, in hotel rooms.

As the Associated Press reported, the children are held for days in hotels under the supervision of adults not trained in child care before they’re sent back to their home countries. Under the Flores settlement agreement, which has safeguarded the rights of migrant children in U.S. custody for two decades, children are supposed to be sent to government shelters run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement and eventually placed in the care of a family member or other suitable sponsor while their immigration case winds through court. But now, the Trump administration is completely circumventing this process. According to the AP, the government has used hotels in Arizona and Texas for this purpose nearly 200 times. Meanwhile, more than 10,000 beds within the government’s shelter network for migrant children remain empty.

“They’ve created a shadow system in which there’s no accountability for expelling very young children,” Leecia Welch, an attorney at the nonprofit National Center for Youth Law, told the AP.

This new practice comes in the wake of an order issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention early in the coronavirus pandemic that allows U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to rapidly “expel” people rather than keep them in U.S. custody where they may appear before an immigration judge.

MVM Inc. is the federal contractor holding the children in hotels. The name might sound familiar. That’s because our colleague Aura Bogado broke the story in 2018 about MVM’s practice of housing migrant children inside a Phoenix office without a child care license. After telling Reveal that the offices were a “temporary holding place” for children being flown out of Phoenix, MVM later admitted that the children actually were staying there overnight.

This week, legal advocacy groups filed a lawsuit against the government to end this practice. “The Trump administration is holding children in secret in hotels, refusing to give lawyers access to them so it can expel them back to danger without even a chance for the children to show they warrant asylum,” Lee Gelernt, an ACLU attorney, told the Arizona Republic.

Reveal’s Patrick Michels discussed this new system with Dr. Marsha Griffin, an executive committee member of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Council on Immigrant Child and Family Health and a professor of pediatrics at the University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley School of Medicine.

Here’s how their conversation, which we’ve edited for clarity, went:

Patrick Michels: What are your biggest concerns now about how the Trump administration is handling people who cross the border, between this practice of holding migrant families and children in hotels and this practice of “expulsion” after that?

Dr. Marsha Griffin: Well, I find it all concerning. Having to house children in hotels is something that is not brand new – it's just happened very rarely. Say they were going to transport a child to Cincinnati through Houston and the flight got delayed for some reason, they might have to lay over somewhere. But with the expulsions, I'm hearing from others on the ground that it's thousands of children being expelled. To me, it's extremely concerning that you have adults not trained in child care. And not always several people with the children at the same time. You have the potential for physical, emotional and sexual abuse. You just do. Having unmonitored adults with children puts them at risk, and (ICE’s) job is to protect children from neglect and abuse. That is my big concern. 

It's unconscionable that they would expel unaccompanied children, because (the Office of Refugee Resettlement) does have the capacity. We should be treating these children exactly how we always have. They should be transported to ORR within 72 hours. In ORR, when they first come in, they are given tests for tuberculosis, for any number of other diseases. And until they get those tests back, they're isolated. So there's no difference in this. We could do the same thing. And those children could be housed by people who are trained in child care, in shelters where we have a lot of beds.

The other thing that concerns me is that it's done in the shadows. There is no transparency. And I guess nowadays, they don't let people in. In the past, I've been able to go in and take the presidents of the American Academy of Pediatrics in, so that they could advocate that (Customs and Border Protection) is not the appropriate people to take care of kids.

Michels: So right now, like you said, there's so much about this system that we don't know. As a pediatrician who knows how this system used to work, what questions do you wish ICE would answer about their care for these kids?

Griffin: I think the first thing is, who is part of (MVM Inc.), the transport company, and what kind of training do they have? There's no way to really know what, if any, medical attention they're getting. My guess is the kids are well if they're preparing to send them back to Mexico or to their home country. So unless they're sick, they're probably not getting any medical attention. They're not being tested.

And you can imagine, these kids have been through hell already. They didn't come alone. They came with a big brother or grandmother, aunt, uncle. And now they don't know these people. And now they're in a hotel room. It's affecting children's lives and it's hurting them, and it's just not necessary. (The American Academy of Pediatrics) put out a press statement as soon as they heard about it. That we see you children, we will not quit fighting for you. They have been very vocal that this is wrong.

Michels: Are you concerned that children face greater risk of exposure to COVID-19 in these hotels than if they’d been placed in a shelter?

Griffin: In an ORR shelter, there are so few kids right now that they can separate them. Now, all ORR shelters are not equal. Some do a better job than others. But my big issue is not the hotels. My big issue is having adults with the children with no oversight. We don’t know what’s going on.

Michels: The legal authority that the administration is using to expel these kids and families is under the guise of protecting the country during a public health crisis. As a doctor, how do you feel about that?

Griffin: Asylum seekers continue to flee their home countries because of violence. That's not going to stop. Global warming is causing people to leave their land, and that will continue. We can only shut down our borders for so long, because migration is not going to stop. So it bottlenecks people who had to leave. It's not coming up with a good plan, it’s just diverting them from here to there, most of the time to countries that have very low resources to help.
 

3 THINGS WE’RE READING

1. Immigrant laborers from Guatemala have worked through the pandemic. Now they are among the hardest-hit communities in Florida. (The Washington Post)

They work for landscaping companies and construction projects across Florida. And when the pandemic began, they were deemed essential workers. Now, Guatemalans are among the communities most affected by COVID-19. “It’s a crisis within a crisis,” said Samuel Matos-Bastidas, a contact tracer assigned to the indigenous Guatemalan population.

The kicker: More than 30% of those tested in Palm Beach County’s Guatemalan-Mayan community – a population of around 80,000 – have been diagnosed with the novel coronavirus, three times the state average. Many believe the infection rate to be far higher. Of 130 families enrolled in an early-childhood education program through Lake Worth’s Guatemalan-Maya Center, for example, 80 have been infected. Alfredo saw how the virus made its way into the community. When he started feeling sick, the owner of his landscaping company sent him and eight close co-workers to be tested. Alfredo and five others tested positive. Within days, his 6-week-old daughter became sick, too, her temperature reaching 106 degrees, he said. She tested positive and was sent to intensive care.

2. By 2050, millions of people fleeing food scarcity caused by climate change will seek refuge across borders, new projections show. (ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine)

Rural communities in Central America are facing an environmental crisis. As the planet warms and rainfall declines, experts predict that many crops will decline in the coming decades. The result will be a mass migration from farm communities to urban centers that will struggle with overpopulation and food scarcity. Inevitably, millions of people will migrate north to the U.S. unless government officials address the looming climate crisis, new models show. “The political responses to both climate change and migration can lead to drastically different futures.”

The kicker: Our modeling and the consensus of academics point to the same bottom line: If societies respond aggressively to climate change and migration and increase their resilience to it, food production will be shored up, poverty reduced and international migration slowed – factors that could help the world remain more stable and more peaceful. If leaders take fewer actions against climate change, or more punitive ones against migrants, food insecurity will deepen, as will poverty. Populations will surge, and cross-border movement will be restricted, leading to greater suffering. Whatever actions governments take next – and when they do it – makes a difference.

3. Undocumented immigrants are choosing to “self-evict” from their homes, even though they have the same rights as other tenants facing eviction. (The Texas Tribune)

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, more Texans are finding themselves without work and facing eviction. Among them are undocumented immigrants, who are fearful of seeking remedies through the legal system given their status. They’re opting to prematurely leave their homes instead.

The kicker: But tenants who decide to leave a home on their own, or self-evict, many times don’t even get to the point at which an eviction is filed, so there’s no record of how many people, like María, pursue this route. “When it comes to eviction, a verbal threat of eviction or lock-out may result in an undocumented person packing up and leaving immediately,” said Sandy Rollins, executive director of the Texas Tenants’ Union, a housing advocacy group. “This could be due to the lack of understanding of their rights, but it could also be from fear of engaging with courts in order to stand up for their rights.”
 

NEWS BREAK: WHEN YOUR DAD IS A TIKTOK STAR

Latino dads are having a breakout moment on the popular video app TikTok. Los Angeles Times reporter Tomás Mier spoke to fathers about this new trend. For many, it’s a way to connect with their children while breaking stereotypes about fatherhood in Latino communities.

From the story:

Wearing a sultry look on his face and a long, curly gray wig, Genaro Rangel pulled his fake hair out of a ponytail and whipped it dramatically over his shoulders.

"¡Qué pasó!” exclaimed Rangel, a burly, mustachioed handyman, as he yanked off the wig in his Santa Ana dining room. “It’s me!”

His daughter, Wendy, burst into giggles as she recorded a shaky cellphone video for TikTok while her dad did an off-tune impersonation of Mexican legend Marco Antonio Solis, aka “El Buki.” She would post it with the words, “I’m dead,” and the hashtag #mexicandadsbelike.

Wendy Rangel, 22, often films her father, a natural jokester originally from the Mexican state of Baja California, because he does not mind making himself the butt of a joke on a social media app that he barely understands. If it makes his daughter happy? He’ll do it. Enthusiastically.

Rangel is one of a growing number of middle-aged Latino dads making appearances on TikTok, the app best known for its goofy teen videos. From papis strutting in heels and a crop top to apás joining in on skits to papás jokingly swearing in their accented English, Latino dads are racking up the likes and views from users who see their own families reflected in the short, often candid clips. 

“People don’t really see this side of their dads,” Wendy Rangel said. “Most dads don’t like being recorded and they’re more protective about what people think about them. My dad doesn’t have a filter. He doesn’t care about being tough. He just likes being himself.”

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– Laura C. Morel

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