Last year, my colleague Aura Bogado heard about a girl who had spent the last six years detained in the U.S. government’s network of shelters for unaccompanied migrant children. In her more than 10 years of experience covering immigration, Aura had never heard of a child being detained for so long.

That tip unraveled into a shocking story, first published in February, that shows how, in the immigration system, the government basically can do whatever it wants, including keeping a family separated for a major period of a child’s life.

The girl had been separated at the border by the government from family members when she was 10. Now 17, she was shuffled from shelter to shelter in Massachusetts, Florida, Oregon and Texas, even though she had family members ready to take her in. Her family took the steps to sponsor her, but as the process was about to be complete, they say the government cut off communication with them. They didn’t know why, and didn’t know what had happened to her for years. She thought they’d abandoned her. So in January, she asked an immigration judge to deport her to Honduras, back to a birth mother who didn’t raise her.

Now, Aura is back with new reporting on the story. The girl is in Honduras, and Aura has learned that she’s not safe. One of her family members sent Aura a grainy cell phone video of the girl. “She doesn't have any shoes on,” Aura tells Reveal host Al Letson. “She's spitting something out. Her face, if you can tell, her face is bloody. She might be spitting out blood.”

After calling another neighbor, Aura eventually connects with the girl, who tells her what life has been like since returning to Honduras.

You can hear the full story in the Reveal episode, An Adolescence, Seized.  And stay tuned for more next week.

Fact-based journalism is worth fighting for.

ADVOCATES CAN’T FIND THE PARENTS OF MORE THAN 500 SEPARATED CHILDREN 

More than two years after the Trump administration separated hundreds of migrant families at the U.S. border under its “zero tolerance” policy, 545 children remain separated from their parents.

In the 15-page status report filed this week in the landmark Ms. L case that forced the government to reunify the families, lawyers representing the families say that they’ve been unable to track down the parents of these children. About two-third of those parents were deported.

As KQED reported recently, advocates and lawyers have been searching in Central America for the parents, but with new travel restrictions in place due to COVID-19, the search has become more difficult. "When the administration started separating families at the southern U.S. border ... there was no plan to track the families or even reunite them, even though their own experts warned these separations were causing harm," Nan Schivone, the legal director for Justice in Motion, told KQED. "And here we are three years later, still dealing with the fallout."

In the summer of 2018, the government began prosecuting every migrant who crossed the border without authorization, resulting in a wave of family separations. The Trump administration hoped the policy would discourage other migrants from seeking asylum.

On June 20, 2018, after enormous backlash from immigrant advocates and politicians, Trump ended the practice. A few days later, U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw ordered the government to reunite the nearly 3,000 children who were torn apart from parents that summer. The Department of Health and Human Services’ inspector general’s office later identified family separations happening as early as 2017. 

Read the new court filing here.
 

3 THINGS WE’RE READING

1. Hundreds of police calls to private ICE detention centers rarely resulted in prosecutions. (Los Angeles Times)

Since 2017, law enforcement has received at least 265 calls reporting violence and abuse inside California’s privately run immigrant detention facilities. Many of the calls alleged cases of rape, assault, and abuse against detainees. But records show that only three cases in which detainees were victimized ever resulted in charges. “It seems like ICE, prison officials and local law enforcement agencies are each trying to pass the buck, and the victims of crimes are in the middle,” said Grace Meng, a lawyer with Human Rights Watch. 

The kicker: What emerged is a picture of a system in which violence can be perpetuated against detainees with impunity, both by other detainees and facility staff. Detainees were banned from calling 911, according to ICE, and forced to rely on others to report allegations on their behalf. Some private detention centers brokered agreements with law enforcement agencies that dictated which crimes officers would respond to. When police did intervene, some were discouraged from investigating, prevented by staff from speaking to detainees who had alleged abuse and instructed not to pursue cases they said had merit, according to police reports.

2. Despite new shelter openings, the government is still expelling migrant children to their home countries during the pandemic. (El Paso Times)

Before the pandemic, the government undertook a massive expansion of its shelter network for unaccompanied migrant children. And this expansion continues today, even though the facilities remain nearly empty.  Arriving migrants -- including children -- are now being returned to their home countries after the Trump administration invoked Title 42 of the U.S. Code, which bans immigration if there is a "serious danger of the introduction of … disease into the United States." Many children have also been held in hotels, even though thousands of beds are available within the shelter network (a judge recently ordered the government to end that practice). The Office of Refugee Resettlement, which oversees the care of migrant children, didn’t respond to the El Paso Times’ requests for comment on the government’s decision to continue this expansion.

The kicker: The coronavirus "poses serious challenges" for the care of unaccompanied children, said Mark Greenberg, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute and former head of HHS' Administration for Children and Families, which oversees the shelter system. "But the federal government has now had since February or March to figure out how to best address those challenges within a shelter system that has 13,000 available beds," he said. Nationwide, ORR reported having approximately 1,820 children in care on Oct. 7 and roughly 12,000 unoccupied beds as of Sept. 30, while Border Patrol reported apprehending or encountering 3,756 unaccompanied children in September, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

3. Many migrant workers are living on lockdown, limited to just the farms they work on and carefully controlled trips to the grocery store. (The New York Times)

Lipman Family Farms in Virginia is keeping Mexican tomato pickers toiling on its fields during the COVID-19 pandemic under lockdown to prevent the spread of the virus among its workers. If workers don’t comply with the restrictions, their contracts could be cancelled. “If employers in any industry were to tell their American workers, ‘You cannot leave your worksite,’ there would be a societal outcry,” said Jason Yarashes, lead attorney for the Legal Aid Justice Center. “But, for farmworkers, this level of control is deemed acceptable.” 

The kicker: “You’re practically a slave,” said another worker, Jesus, who like others interviewed for this article asked to use only a first or last name for fear of losing his job and, with it, his permission to work in the United States. Lipman’s battle with its workers underscores one of the signature conundrums of the coronavirus pandemic. Locking down its employees — a drastic measure that would be intolerable to most American workers — appears to have kept both the employees and the community safe. But at what cost?
 

Your tips have been vital to our immigration coverage. Keep them coming: [email protected]. 

– Laura C. Morel