The government’s practice of keeping migrant children in hotel rooms is far more widespread than we originally thought.

A father, right, and his son, who was detained in an American hotel and faced expulsion to Honduras.
Credit: Carolina Guerrero for the Texas Tribune/ProPublica

The government’s practice of keeping migrant children in hotel rooms is far more widespread than we originally thought. Last month, the Associated Press found that children as young as 1 ([link removed]) were being held in hotels in Arizona and Texas under the supervision of adults not trained in child care before they’re returned to their home countries.

Now, The New York Times ([link removed]) is reporting this week that about 900 migrants, most of them children, were detained in hotels in San Diego; Phoenix; McAllen, Texas; El Paso, Texas; Miami; Los Angeles; and Seattle. They’re checked in at major hotel chains, including Hampton Inn & Suites, Best Western and Econo Lodge.

The Times story is the latest reporting that shines a light on this practice. Besides the AP story, The Texas Tribune and ProPublica ([link removed]) found that children aren’t even given an identification number, which the Department of Homeland Security uses to track immigrants in its custody. This makes it “virtually impossible” to find them, Efrén C. Olivares, a lawyer with the Texas Civil Rights Project, wrote in a court declaration mentioned in the Tribune/ProPublica story.

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 federal 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, even though more than 10,000 beds within the government’s shelter network for migrant children remain empty.

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 Times story links to my colleague Aura Bogado’s reporting from 2018, when she broke the story ([link removed]) 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 ([link removed]) that the children actually were staying there overnight.

As part of her extensive reporting, Aura spoke to a 7-year-old boy, Wilson, who was held in an office building by MVM for days without his mother. Wilson’s story was featured on our radio show ([link removed]) as well as in an animated video ([link removed]) , “The Office of Missing Children.”

“A transportation vendor should not be in charge of changing the diaper of a 1-year old, giving bottles to babies or dealing with the traumatic effects they might be dealing with,” Andrew Lorenzen-Strait, a former deputy assistant director for custody management at ICE, told The Times. “I’m worried kids may be exposed to abuse, neglect, including sexual abuse, and we will have no idea.”

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The Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Ga. Credit: Jonathan Wiggs/The Boston Globe via Getty Images


** THE LATEST INSIDE ICE DETENTION DURING COVID-19
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Another detained immigrant has died after testing positive for COVID-19. According to BuzzFeed News ([link removed]) , the 70-year-old from Costa Rica, whose name was not released, was being held at the Stewart Detention Center in Georgia and died at a local hospital. Another detainee held at Stewart, 34-year-old Santiago Baten-Oxlaj, died in May. In total, five detainees have died after contracting the virus, according to ICE figures ([link removed]) posted on the agency’s website. Meanwhile, more than 1,000 detainees with COVID-19 are currently under isolation or monitoring.
Some detention centers are still grappling with large COVID-19 outbreaks. At the Mesa Verde ICE Processing Center in Bakersfield, California, more than half of detainees ([link removed]) have tested positive for the virus. The tests were conducted after a federal judge ordered ICE to test every detainee at the facility who had not yet been tested. The judge’s ruling was prompted by a lawsuit filed in April ([link removed]) by a group of immigration lawyers who raised concerns about conditions inside Mesa Verde during the pandemic. Emails obtained by the lawyers indicate that ICE officials refused recommendations
([link removed]) that they test all detainees at the detention center, in part because they wouldn’t have enough space to isolate those who tested positive. Meanwhile, at the Farmville ICE detention center in Virginia, nearly 250 detainees are being treated for the virus in what is the largest outbreak inside ICE detention in the country. Last week, a group of CDC scientists arrived to “assess and manage the crisis,” The Washington Post ([link removed]) reported.
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**
3 THINGS WE’RE READING
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1. How county sheriffs have become “enthusiastic foot soldiers” for ICE during the Trump administration. (Type Investigations ([link removed]) )

In more than 140 counties across the U.S, sheriff's deputies are authorized by ICE to place immigration holds on immigrants booked into their jails. Among these agencies is the Gwinnett County Sheriff’s Office in Georgia, where nearly half of immigrants placed under an ICE hold ended up in jail over a traffic-related offense. “I would deport citizens if I could,” said Gwinnett County Sheriff Butch Conway. “A lot of the illegal aliens that we identify and hold for ICE, they’re preying on their community.”

The kicker: About 267,000 noncitizens were deported by ICE last year. That number was driven in large part by local sheriffs like Conway; 70 percent of ICE arrests originate in the criminal justice system, mostly in jails. And as President (Donald) Trump’s war on immigrants has expanded, sheriffs have become some of its most enthusiastic foot soldiers. In Gwinnett and more than 140 other counties, ICE has authorized and trained sheriff’s deputies to assist it. In most of these counties, local officers use federal databases to check the immigration status of people booked into local jails and then place warrantless immigration holds on noncitizens who may be deportable. Since 2017, the number of sheriffs who have agreed to participate in this program, known as 287(g) for the section of the federal code that created it in 1996, has spiked. Most are in rural counties across the South and Southwest. In addition, hundreds of other sheriffs comply voluntarily with ICE’s requests to keep
immigrants in custody for up to 48 hours until agents pick them up. Texas now requires its jails to do so, and lawmakers in several states, including Georgia, have barred counties from imposing “sanctuary” policies that curtail ICE’s access to local detainees.

2. Health departments’ contact tracing teams are facing language barriers and trust issues with immigrant communities. (Los Angeles Times ([link removed]) )

Health departments across the country are bolstering their contact-tracer staff levels. But many are facing a void in bilingual contact tracers who can speak Spanish and other languages in order to reach those particular communities.

The kicker: And the language barriers go beyond Spanish: Minneapolis needs tracers who also speak Somali, Oromo and Hmong; Chicago needs Polish speakers; and Houston’s tracing effort is grappling with a population that includes Vietnamese, Chinese and Hindi speakers. But even when health officials overcome language barriers, they still must dispel the deep suspicions raised among immigrants when someone with the government calls to ask about their movements in an era of hard-line immigration enforcement under Trump.

3. Guards at an El Paso detention center “systematically” sexually assault detainees, according to a new complaint. (ProPublica and The Texas Tribune ([link removed]) )

According to a complaint filed by a Texas advocacy group urging federal and local prosecutors to investigate, guards have assaulted at least three detainees, typically in areas of the facility that aren’t under video surveillance. “Most women who are still there are scared of saying anything,” one woman said. “You don’t know what they can do.”

The kicker: Since the complaint was filed (last week), two more women, including one who is currently detained in the El Paso facility and one who was previously held there, have come forward with abuse allegations. At least one other woman was deported after a guard assaulted her, detainees told lawyers. An El Paso County District Attorney’s Office spokesperson said that the agency had forwarded “potentially criminal allegations” to the DHS’ Office of Inspector General, which did not respond to emails seeking comment. A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Texas said that it had received the complaint and takes allegations of “misconduct by public officials extremely seriously.”
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** NEWS BREAK: OVERLOOKED NO MORE
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At the start of 2018, The New York Times began publishing Overlooked, an occasional series that features notable people who lived remarkable lives but whose deaths never graced the newspaper’s obituaries section. One of the recent stories, by reporter Jennifer Medina, chronicles the life of Jovita Idár. Born in 1885 in Laredo, Texas, she was an editor and activist who advocated for the rights of Mexican Americans as well as women’s education.

From the story ([link removed]) :

Frequently taking on pen names – among them Astraea, the name of the Greek goddess of justice, and Ave Negra, Spanish for black bird – Idár also wrote about equal rights for women and regularly urged women to educate themselves and seek independence from men.
She defined the modern woman as someone with “broad horizons.”

“Science, industry, the workshop and even the home demand her best aptitudes, her perseverance and consistency in work, and her influence and assistance for all that is progress and advancement for humanity,” she wrote, according to “Texas Women: Their Histories, Their Lives” (2015).

And she made the argument that educating women would improve society as a whole: “Educate a woman, and you educate a family,” she would often exhort.

In 1911, she joined the First Mexican Congress in Laredo to organize Mexican-American activists. She then started Liga Femenil Mexicanista, or the League of Mexican Women.

That same year California granted women the right to vote, and Idár urged women in Texas to “proudly raise your chins and face the fight.”
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