Credit: AP Photo/Gregory Bull, File
The federal government has quietly expanded its use of shelters to house babies, toddlers and young children, our reporter Aura Bogado has learned.
Bogado obtained records that show a dozen children, ages 5 and under, arrived at Child Crisis Arizona starting in mid-June and are living at the shelter without their parents. Some of the children are as young as 3 months old. It’s unclear where the parents are located. The Office of Refugee Resettlement told Reveal last week that it’s working on a response to our questions about their whereabouts.
Another facility, Bethany Children’s Home in Pennsylvania, is housing 11 children, including an unknown number of infants.
The shelter expansion comes in the wake of intense criticism by lawmakers and immigrant advocates over the government’s care of immigrant children in its custody. Last month, lawyers and pediatricians who visited several Border Patrol facilities observed sick children in dirty clothes with no regular access to showers or medical care.
The government awarded Child Crisis Arizona and Bethany Children’s Home $2.4 million and $3.5 million, respectively, to house unaccompanied children through early 2022.
Both facilities have previously come under scrutiny. At Child Crisis, state inspectors found 37 violations, including a lack of drinking water for children in classrooms and an incomplete first-aid kit. In January, a Bethany Children’s Home employee also pleaded guilty to charges related to setting up a teen to be beaten by two peers.
Meanwhile, children held at a new temporary shelter in Carrizo Springs, Texas, are not getting access to legal services required under federal law.
The shelter has been open for two weeks without a contract for legal services, said Jonathan Ryan, CEO of the legal nonprofit RAICES. His organization plans to go to the shelter soon, with or without a contract.
“These kids need lawyers,” he said.
Read our story here.
You can also listen to Bogado talk about her reporting on “The Takeaway” here.
AN UPDATE TO A FAMILY SEPARATION CASE
Earlier this year, I told you the story of a Salvadoran father who was separated from his two children after crossing the border into Texas last fall. U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers accused the father of being an MS-13 gang member.
Even though his lawyers compiled a stack of evidence refuting the accusations, including a document stating he does not have a criminal record in El Salvador, the U.S. government refused to believe him.
He was not the only asylum-seeker facing a gang allegation by the government. ProPublica reported last week that immigration officials are using a gang intelligence database containing information from foreign authorities to background check asylum-seekers. Lawyers and advocates say the database has been kept mostly secret, making it difficult to verify its reliability.
In court records, the government said that a search for the father’s name in a database revealed that Salvadoran officials had identified him as a gang member. His lawyers argued that the government failed to provide “documentation they allegedly relied on in determining he is a gang member.”
Without any mention of the gang allegation, the government released him in May and he was reunited with his children.
WHAT WE’RE READING
Some asylum-seeking parents are being forced to stay in Mexico while their children are placed in U.S. custody. (Reuters)
On June 12, Gerardo, a 41-year-old indigenous bricklayer from Guatemala, appeared before a U.S. immigration judge in El Paso, Texas. Since crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally two months earlier with his 14-year-old son, he had been separated from the boy and forced to wait in Mexico for his hearing.
Now, he had only one question for the judge: “Can you help me get my son back?”
After they crossed into the United States, a border patrol agent declared the boy’s photocopied birth certificate to be fake, casting doubt on their father-son relationship. Despite Gerardo’s protestations in broken Spanish, officers took the boy, Walter, away.
Gerardo was sent to Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, to wait out his immigration court proceedings, with no idea where Walter was taken and no instructions on how to find him, according to Gerardo and his attorneys, who recounted the court appearance and circumstances of his case to Reuters. They asked that his surname be withheld because Gerardo fears for his family’s safety in Guatemala.
In a phone call to a cousin in Arkansas, Gerardo said, he learned that Walter was at a large migrant children’s shelter near Miami. Separated from his dad, Walter later recalled, “I felt like the world was crashing down on me.”
A new Trump administration policy would strip unaccompanied children of their protected status, placing them at greater risk for deportation. (Los Angeles Times)
Judge Ashley Tabaddor, the president of the National Assn. of Immigration Judges, said that the new policy could potentially have “a profound effect on the children’s ability to seek asylum.”
“The asylum officer interview is a much less adversarial process that is thought to give the child a better and more comfortable setting,” she said.
Federal asylum officers have been rushing to process as many unaccompanied minor applications as possible before the change takes effect Sunday, USCIS personnel told The Times, speaking on condition of anonymity to protect against professional retaliation.
The change is the latest in the Trump administration’s efforts to make it more difficult for immigrants, including children, to seek asylum.
The government will not send additional children to the largest facility for unaccompanied children in U.S. custody. (Miami Herald)
The Homestead detention center is no longer taking in new children at its facility, government officials say.
The hold on the placement of unaccompanied minors began at least two weeks ago alongside the efforts of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to downsize its child population by more than half, to 1,300 from 2,700.
“There are no plans to close Homestead at the moment,” an HHS spokeswoman told the Miami Herald in a text Monday.
Since the suspension on new kids was launched, about 1,000 children have been either reunited with sponsors or transferred to other shelters — which the government didn’t name Monday.
Your tips have been vital to our immigration coverage. Keep them coming: [email protected].
– Laura C. Morel
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Fact-based journalism is worth fighting for.
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