ICE’s Next Deportation Target Is Unaccompanied Migrant Children
The Trump administration is ordering immigration agents to find and deport thousands of undocumented immigrant children who came to the U.S. without their parents, Reuters reported, citing an internal government memo.
The memo, titled “Unaccompanied Alien Children Joint Initiative Field Implementation,” stated that children would be deported if they have existing deportation orders or served with a notice to appear in immigration court. Children labeled as “flight risks,” such as immigrants who failed to appear at a hearing, are to be prioritized. The remaining minors are prioritized as “public safety” or “border security.” This is a severe departure from ICE’s usual prioritization targeting adults with criminal records for deportation action.
Children who arrive in the U.S. without a parent or legal guardian are put in the care of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) until they can be placed in a home with a sponsor, usually a parent or other relative, to await legal proceedings. “These children may have histories of abuse or may be seeking safety from threats of violence. They may have been trafficked or smuggled,” ORR says on its website. According to ORR data, it has released 27,840 children to the care of a sponsor.
Some of these children have been exploited as child laborers in the U.S. after their release. According to the memo, the new initiative seeks to make sure children are not trafficked or exploited in other ways in addition to carrying out deportations and legal action.
During Donald Trump’s first term, he implemented a cruel policy of separating thousands of migrant children from their parents, which he halted in 2018 after significant public protest, legal action and criticism from immigration and child welfare experts.
Last week, the administration instructed groups who provide legal services to unaccompanied immigrant children to cease their work, suspending the program that gives children who cross the U.S.-Mexico border alone legal representation, before reversing its decision a few days later after public outcry. If the order had not been reversed, thousands of children would have had to face deportation without due process.
Shaina Aber, executive director of Acacia Center for Justice, which contracts with the federal government to provide representation to undocumented immigrant children told Reuters the organization will continue working with the government “to ensure that these critical services upholding the basic due process rights of vulnerable children are fully restored.”
President Donald Trump chose a longtime immigration enforcement official, Mellissa Harper, to lead ORR, prompting concerns that ORR data could be used to arrest and deport immigrants. Also last week, NPR reported that numerous ICE officers obtained access to an ORR database maintained by the Department of Health and Human Services that lists approximately 4,100 unaccompanied children who crossed into the U.S., which some fear the administration would use for immigration enforcement and deportations. Homan in late January did not rule out that possibility.
In March of 2018, a group of teens brought a class action suit against the Juvenile and Family Residential Management Unit within ICE, which Harper ran at the time. A judge later ruled that ICE broke the law when it transferred the teens from ORR custody to ICE detention centers without considering the possibility of putting them in a less restrictive setting.
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