In early March, our immigration team made plans for a retreat to strategize on the stories we wanted to tackle in 2020. We were going to meet at Reveal’s headquarters in the Bay Area, where our colleague Aura Bogado and editor Andy Donohue worked. Patrick Michels was flying in from Texas, and I was flying in from Florida.

And then the pandemic hit. Traveling stopped and our retreat was canceled. Instead, over Zoom meetings and phone calls, we shifted quickly to covering the ways that the Trump administration failed to protect immigrants’ lives during the pandemic, from migrant children held in government shelters to asylum seekers languishing in immigration detention.

We’re proud of the work we did this year. But most of all, we’re grateful that you’ve taken the time to read and listen to our stories. Before 2020 comes to an end, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on this year’s reporting.

HOW THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION PUT IMMIGRANTS AT RISK OF COVID-19

‘Business as usual’ when the pandemic hit: In March, as many corners of America grinded to a halt to promote the social distancing essential for curbing the spread of the new coronavirus, the U.S. immigration system continued operating under business as usual, placing immigrants, attorneys and government employees at risk, our investigation found. We learned that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement was slow to release detainees vulnerable to the virus from its detention facilities, where medical care has been criticized for years. Meanwhile, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services kept its offices open, where immigrants and their attorneys crowded in lobbies despite warnings from public health experts that people should practice social distancing. And in Manhattan, two federally funded learning center locations that serve unaccompanied minors remained open even as New York City schools closed.

The problem with denying so many detainees parole: We also took you inside the Pine Prairie ICE Processing Center in Louisiana, where asylum seekers felt helpless as they awaited the inevitable arrival of COVID-19 inside their dorms. Many of them qualified for parole, which allows ICE to release asylum seekers while they await their court hearings. But ICE began denying parole requests at a high rate after Donald Trump took office. You can hear the voices of detained immigrants I spoke to in our Reveal episode, “Detained and Exposed.” 

Kids were stuck in high-risk environments, too: And in May, Aura broke the story about the government’s refusal to release detained migrant children who have families willing to give them homes. Her story followed the case of a 17-year-old from Guatemala, who was being held at a California shelter. The teen had a family in Minnesota eager to sponsor him, but the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which oversees the care of migrant children, wouldn’t consider the application. (He was released after Aura’s story was published.)

ICE’s transfers and refusal to test angered public health officials: This fall, Patrick and I brought you inside the COVID-19 testing disaster at the Otero County Processing Center in New Mexico. We obtained emails that showed New Mexico’s top health officials clearly were frustrated with the pandemic response from ICE and its contractors. The federal agency wasn’t testing detainees exposed to the virus, failed to secure its own test kits and continued transferring detainees despite warnings from New Mexico health staff that such movement could spread the virus. Patrick also partnered with data reporter Mohamed Al Elew to analyze snapshots of ICE’s data, illustrating how COVID-19 reports within ICE detention have changed over time.

Fact-based journalism is worth fighting for.

THE MIGRANT CHILDREN THAT DISAPPEARED

Aura also spent much of this year exposing how the U.S. government has kept many unaccompanied migrant children for years within its shelter network. One of her stories, published in February, followed the case of a girl who had spent the last six years in U.S. custody. In her more than 10 years of experience covering immigration, Aura had never heard of a child being detained for so long.

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 without explanation. The girl thought her family had abandoned her. In January, she asked an immigration judge to deport her to Honduras.

Then in October, Aura was back with new reporting on the story. The girl is now in Honduras with a mother who didn’t raise her, and Aura has learned that she’s not safe. She spoke to the girl herself, and you can hear the interview in our episode, “An Adolescence, Seized.”

Aura wanted to know how many other children had been held for years in government shelters. So we sued the government to find out. She partnered with data reporter Melissa Lewis, and together they learned that the U.S. government has detained more than 25,000 migrant children for longer than 100 days over the past six years, and nearly 1,000 children have spent more than a year in refugee shelters in that time. "Your findings point to a systemic failure," one source told Aura.

The shelters, Aura writes, are “ill-equipped to handle the long-term educational, emotional and social needs of children. Aside from the occasional field trip, every part of a child’s day – from breakfast to school, to counseling, to recreational activities – takes place within the shelter.”

PIVOTING TO THE 2020 ELECTION

And finally, last month, Patrick and I brought you the story of Hector and his family as part of our Reveal episode, “United, we’re not.” For the last 11 months, the father of five from Guatemala has been separated from half of his family. Hector and two sons remain in Tijuana under the Trump administration’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, which forces asylum seekers to wait for their court dates in Mexico, while his wife and their three other children are in the U.S.

Hector knew the results of the presidential election would shape his family’s future. While Joe Biden has pledged to end the “Remain in Mexico” policy, it remains to be seen exactly how that plays out for people like Hector. 

Revisit all our immigration reporting here. And by the way: Kids on the Line now has a newsletter archive. Check it out here.
 

SENATE REPORT: GOVERNMENT FAILED TO PROPERLY VET SHELTER PROVIDERS

You might remember the names of these two residential child care providers: VisionQuest and the New Horizon Group Home. Last year, we reported the U.S. government had awarded them multi-million dollar grants so they could open shelters for unaccompanied children, even though the companies had previously been investigated for child abuse.

There was one big question we were trying to answer in the wake of those stories: Did the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the care of migrant children, vet these operations before giving them $32 million to care for children. 

Now, a Senate subcommittee has the answer: the HHS did not properly vet their disciplinary histories. 

Both providers ultimately failed to open shelters after facing opposition from local officials who were familiar with their troubling track records. “Taxpayers have paid for facilities that will never open,” according to the Senate report, which cites our New Horizon reporting.  

During the subcommittee’s investigation, the government stopped distributing funds to these outfits until they could secure the necessary licensing to open a shelter, and began requiring that shelter providers disclose past violations in their grant applications.

Last summer, we partnered with WRAL News, the NBC affiliate in Raleigh, North Carolina, on an investigation into the government’s plan to send migrant children to shelter providers with little experience and documented pasts of abuse. Among those facilities was New Horizon Group Home in North Carolina, which was shut down in 2018 after inspectors found conditions inside that presented “an imminent danger” to the children. 

A few months after our New Horizon reporting, my colleagues Aura Bogado and Patrick Michels broke the story about VisionQuest’s proposal to open a shelter in Los Angeles. Throughout the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, scandals plagued the company, which was repeatedly investigated for violent handling of children. After their story, Los Angeles became one of at least six cities or states that blocked VisionQuest’s efforts to open shelters.

Read the Senate report here.
 

3 THINGS WE’RE READING

1. Three years after the U.S. government separated them, a Guatemalan mother and her teenage son reunite and work toward rebuilding their life together. (The New York Times)

Leticia Peren and her son, Yovany, were among the hundreds of migrant families separated under Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy at the border. They were reunited this year and are currently living with an affluent family in New York, where Peren is trying to find a stable job in the middle of a pandemic while rebuilding the bond she once had with her son.

The kicker: At the time of their reunification, Yovany was the last remaining child in custody who the federal government considered eligible to be released. The bonds broken during their 26 months apart — when Ms. Peren was a voice on the phone more than 1,500 miles away, as Yovany made new friends, went to a new school, learned to live without her — have been slow to regrow. By the time they were reunited, her son had matured into a young man, taller than her and with a deepening voice, one he could use to hold a conversation in English. Ms. Peren, frantic during the time it took to get him back, had lost some of her hair and developed a condition that, when triggered by stress, caused her face to sag on one side. Years after the mass separations of migrant families spurred a national outcry because of the trauma they caused, much of the public outrage over the policy eased as thousands of parents and children were eventually reunited.

2. Biden’s pick for Department of Homeland Security secretary calls for an end to the “inhumane and unjust treatment of immigrants.” (Miami Herald)

In his first public remarks since President-elect Joe Biden nominated him to lead DHS, Alejandro Mayorkas said during a virtual bipartisan immigration summit last week that immigrants, documented or undocumented, were essential to the U.S., and called for Republicans and Democrats to find common ground to fix what he called a “broken” immigration system. 

The kicker: Mayorkas described documented and undocumented immigrants as “essential” during the COVID-19 pandemic and “key drivers of economic growth.” He noted that solutions to the “vilifying” immigration system cultivated under the Trump administration “must reflect the broad sweep and impact of immigration across issues and constituencies, because key sectors of our economy, from agriculture to technology, rely on immigration…  We must bring to an immediate end the inhumane and unjust treatment of immigrants. There is no more powerful and heartbreaking example of that inhumanity than the separation of children from their parents,” he said.

3. Under a Biden administration, the agency that enforced much of Trump’s anti-immigrant policies faces a crossroads. (BuzzFeed News)

From large-scale worksite raids to the prolonged detention of asylum seekers, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has executed Trump policies that aimed to deport and detain as many immigrants as possible. A Biden administration is expected to rein in ICE’s discretionary power, though current and former officials say rebuilding the public’s trust in the agency will be difficult.

The kicker: BuzzFeed News spoke with 12 current and former ICE officials who served during the Trump administration about their experiences and their thoughts about the future. Many, like Schwab, said the new president must find a way to correct the excesses of the past four years and restore public trust in the agency by revamping policies and tactics. But many also cautioned that it won’t be easy. “It has been branded as a partisan agency. Law enforcement should be neutral, should be driven by policy and through fair and humane implementation of the law,” said one former ICE official, who served under both Obama and Trump. “Unfortunately, ICE put their MAGA hat on. They’re gonna try to take it off come January, but I don’t know how successful that will be.”
 

NEWS BREAK: A LONG-AWAITED THANK YOU

When she was 5, Ana Reyes and her family immigrated from Spain to the U.S. She couldn’t speak a word of English. And when her grades started to slip, her first-grade teacher spent the mornings before class teaching Ana how to read and write in English. Nearly 40 years later, Ana, who went on to graduate from Harvard Law School, was determined to find her former teacher to thank her. 

From The Washington Post story:

Reyes became fixated on finding her teacher. She started by posting on Facebook, asking for advice about where to begin her search. Coincidentally, a friend from college knew Jason Glass, the commissioner of the Kentucky Department of Education.

Reyes immediately wrote him an email, explaining that she was looking for her first-grade teacher from the 1980-81 school year at Wilder Elementary in Louisville.

She outlined her backstory: “When I started elementary school, I couldn’t speak a word of English. I recall that my first-grade teacher came to school early regularly, on her own time, to help me get caught up on learning to speak, read and write English,” she wrote on Oct. 24.

Then she detailed her educational and professional pursuits, including her substantial pro bono work to help refugees gain asylum in the United States, which, she said, underscores the effect her teacher had on her.

“I often wonder whether this career would have been possible if I had not had someone spend her extra time to help me learn English and not fall behind or through the cracks,” Reyes wrote. “I would very much love to say thank you, and my life very likely wouldn’t have been possible, without you.”
 

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

– Laura C. Morel