This article has been published in conjunction with ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power.
A teenage woguy with her baby arrived on the U.S. border this summer and asked for help. She told federal agents that she was afraid to return to Guatemala. According to her, the guy who raped her had threatened to make her “disappear.”
Then, the lawyers say, the girl disappeared briefly, in the custody of the United States government, who kept her with her baby for days in a hotel with almost no outside contact before federal agents summarily evicted them from the country.
Similar movements have taken up position along the border for months as a component of an emergency fitness order issued through the Trump administration in March. Citing the risk of COVID-19, he gave federal agents broad powers to return almost without delay to the border, adding babies as young as 8 months old. Children are entitled to special protections under the law, in addition to the right for a judge to attempt to file their asylum applications.
Under the new policy, the administration does not send young people, a procedure on years of established law that requires a formal hearing before the immigration court.
Instead, he expels them, without a judge’s ruling and after a brief variation of the government and without access to social personnel or lawyers, infrequently or even their families, while they are detained in the United States. “Children don’t even get the primary registration number through which the Department of Homeland Security follows all immigrants in their custody, making it”virtually impossible to “locate them,” wrote Efrén C. Olivares, a Texas Civil Rights Project attorney, in a court that says the practice is illegal.
Little is known about how the procedure works, but government figures recommend that almost all young people arriving at the border be temporarily returned.
Between April and June, customs and border cover officials met with 3,379 unaccompanied minors at or between ports of entry. Of these, only 162 were sent to federal youth shelters of immigrants attended by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the firm of social and fitness facilities guilty of their care. CBP did not say whether the remaining minors had been deported or what had happened to them.
It is difficult to know the exact number of young people detained or under what conditions they are referred.
“We only succeed in a small fraction of these young people,” said Lisa Frydman, vice president of foreign systems at Kids in Need of Defense, a young migrant advocacy organization with partners in Central America. “The rest is just gone.”
Lawyers responded to frantic calls from a circle of relatives whose children suddenly disappeared after crossing the U.S. border. Of the thousands of unaccompanied minors deported under the physical fitness ordinance, defense organizations said they discovered only about 3 dozen after months of study in the United States, Mexico, and Central America.
The Guatemalan teenager is one of them. She told children in Guatemala that she had been sent to an American hotel with her baby for days and that she had only allowed a brief call with her father to the United States. She and her baby were then airlifted to Guatemala, where her case alarmed both the teams of foreign refugees that sent her back to another country, deeming her in danger. The defenders did not provide him with his age or other non-public main points.
The Associated Press first reported last month that management had arrested at least 169 young people at 3 Hampton Inn-Suites hotels in El Paso and McAllen, as well as in Phoenix, before deporting them. New government figures show that the practice has grown to more than 240 young people in the last 3 months. The children reported being held for weeks in hotel rooms through an unlicensed government contractor, with little means to do so outside.
Lawyers said the administration’s deportation policy was far more worrying than the undeniable practice of prolonged detention in a hotel, which they said violates a long-standing court rule that protects young migrants. Most young people who now succeed on American soil are temporarily transferred back to their countries of origin, at risk, forcing foreign child protection agencies to protect them from harm. Some young men told lawyers that they had been sent to Mexico, even though they were not there, in the middle of the night.
The U.S. government He has largely refused to comment or publish statistics, and has filed lawsuits filed through the American Civil Liberties Union and other advocacy organizations that oppose the deportation program.
In June, a desperate father in Houston discovered Linda Corchado, an immigration lawyer in El Paso. His 16-year-old son was detained somewhere in an American hotel, however, where and through whom he did not know. He said the government was about to send the boy back to Honduras, where he feared his son would be executed by gang members who threatened him after watching them kill another man.
Corchado alerted the ACLU, and the boy became the first plaintiff in what lawyers expected to be a case of checks because they argued that the government was illegally a difficult-to-understand provision of the Federal Code of Public Health and Welfare, drafted in 1893. , to justify the expulsion of all. migrants, including children, at the border.
The child’s case triggered an emergency hearing in June in Washington, D.C., before U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, who ruled that the ACLU “probably will succeed” in its arguments that the government did not have the authority to deport the child according to the aptitude statement. issued through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
A few days later, Justice Department lawyers suspended the deportation of the child and agreed to allow him to seek asylum in immigration courts, the legal procedure required for young migrants who come here alone.
Lawyers found more young people in danger of deportation.
The 16-year-old Honduran boy’s relative told a lawyer at the U.S. access port in El Paso that the teenager had disappeared in the United States after crossing the border together. Corchado called CBP and requested the child’s legal protection evaluation as part of the deportation process, but federal agents said they were moving him to a hotel to bring him back.
Once migrants are transferred to a hotel under the care of a government contractor, it is as if they disappear into a “legal abyss” where it is not known which federal company helps maintain custody, Corchado said.
“You can’t protect yourself, ” he said.
He claimed that an immigration and customs manager had told him that after the migrants moved there, “it’s off our radar.”
At risk of legal action through the ACLU, management agreed to end the child’s deportation and transfer him to a federal shelter while fighting for asylum, his lawyers said.
In coordination with lawyers across the country, ACLU lawyers located at least 18 young people last July who were being deported, according to court documents. Just in case, the government agreed to suspend the proceedings that opposed them, a victory for the child, but a concession that prevented lawyers from obtaining a ruling from a judge on the policy as a whole.
“We assume that the government would like to have a court-based verification case of the legality of this unprecedented and highly debatable practice of using public fitness legislation to bring out the ghost expulsions of children,” said Lee Gelernt, an ACLU lawyer fighting the program in court. Array “The government gets away with it and ends all the child protections that Congress has thoroughly enacted.
Justice Department spokeswoman Alexa Vance declined to comment. The same goes for Ice spokesperson April Grant, who files ongoing lawsuits.
Grant also refused to publish statistics on young deportees through the agency, adding hotel detainees, or to providing repatriation agreements that the United States has signed with at least 8 countries – adding Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras – that would perceive how those countries agreed to settle with deported youth under what circumstances.
Matthew Dyman, a CBP spokesman, also said that the ongoing litigation meant he could only answer as many questions about the policy. Alexei Woltornist, a DHS spokesman, responded to the emails.
Lawyers said secrecy reminded them of their quest two years ago from thousands of young immigrants that the Trump administration separated from their parents at the border.
Government officials then sent youth to federal shelters under the ORR, with no follow-up number linking them to their parents in ICE detention centers. It took a federal court order and months of taxpayer-funded efforts before many of them could be reunited with their parents. Some were never deported because their parents had been deported and were therefore handed over to acquaintances or other relatives in the United States.
The other thing now is that young people do enter the American formula for young migrants.
Most were temporarily transferred back to Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, the top 3 origins of unaccompanied youth in the United States.
Once in Central America, they don’t need pre-pandemic protections. Strict closures have made it difficult for guard dogs, such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, to track unaccompanied youth after they are returned to government repatriation centres.
Government officials from those 3 Central American countries stated that they may not know the difference between young people who had been returned under the physical fitness order and those who had been deported in accordance with the same usual procedures. But what they bring back has alarmed the defenders.
From the beginning of the pandemic until early July, at least 476 unaccompanied youths have been returned to Honduras, partly by air from the United States and the rest largely brought from Mexico, the Honduran federal watchdog reported.
According to a government spokesman, Guatemala reported that about 380 of these young people returned from the United States in the same period. El Salvador said more than 70 unaccompanied minors had been returned, and the Mexican government reported that 1,050 of its own youth had been returned between April and June, the most recent knowledge available.
The total number of unaccompanied youth that governments have reported to have been returned to those 4 countries, around 1,700, is well below the most recent official figure published by the U.S. government. In early June, he said he had deported at least 2,175 “single minors” according to the aptitude statement. Then, raising the litigation, management stopped providing the data.
“The number of young people who have won corresponds to the number of young people who have been deported,” Frydman said of KIND.
She and other lawyers suspect that young people from other countries have been informally deported to Mexico. In recent months, many have reported that the U.S. government has reported that the U.S. government has He sent them back, alone in the middle of the night and untreated through Mexican immigration officials.
TYPE at least 3 unaccompanied minors from Central America in Mexico.
Two were brothers who said they had arrived at the port of El Paso. CBP officials told them that “the border is closed,” the youth told the lawyers, who refused to reveal the age of the siblings or other important points for their safety.
Federal officials sent the brothers to Ciudad Juarez, where they were left homeless until they went to a shelter, which contacted Mexico’s child welfare agency.
Dyman, a CBP spokesman, answered questions about the brothers. But he said non-Mexican youth can only be deported there if they are with adult parents. They’re meant to be sent there alone.
“When minors are without an adult circle of family members, CBP works intensively with their home countries to transfer them to the custody of government officials and reunite them with their families,” Dyman wrote in an email.
He said officials may exempt migrants from deportation in certain circumstances, for example, when they cannot be returned to their country or if officials suspect they have been victims of human trafficking. But he refused to specify how CBP officials make those exceptions and take checks, saying the data is “sensitive to law enforcement.”
Statistics from Mexico’s National Migration Institute show that more than 200 young people from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras were deported to Mexico under the declaration of physical fitness in June. This number includes unaccompanied youth and adults. An official at the Mexican house secretary wrote that he did not have a formal agreement with the United States on how to return unaccompanied youth from other countries, so he did not keep the cumulative statistics.
Young people who arrive alone in the United States from countries other than Mexico will usually have to be repatriated by air, a backward operation through logistics, and a global pandemic. Under the law, they cannot be held for more than 72 hours in transitional CBP processing services before being sent to shelters controlled through the ORR.
Lately the firm has about 850 children, has 14,000 taxpayer-funded beds. Prior to the administration’s aptitude order, in late March, the ORR withned approximately 3,600 unaccompanied minors.
Instead of beating young people in those state-approved, federally regulated shelters, where they would have to go to a lawyer and social workers, the United States transferred many minors to a clandestine network of hotels, under the care of an unauthorized contractor to care for young people. . Training
Management provided this knowledge to lawyers advocating for a court-ordered agreement that establishes express regulations on how the government can stop young migrants. The 1997 consent decree, known as Colonia Flores, requires that young detained migrants have safe rights, adding that they will be temporarily released and detained in authorised day care centres.
In April, May and June, the government confined at least 240 young people awaiting deportation, adding more than a dozen children under the age of six, to hotel rooms, according to legal documents filed with the court responsible for ensuring compliance with Flores regulations.
In April, ICE, through its contractor MVM Inc., detained at least 29 uncovered young migrants for 10 days at the 3 Hampton Inn-Suites hotels in Texas and Arizona before deporting them.
In May, the contractor arrested 80 youths for days at those 3 hotels. In June, 120 were arrested there before being deported, according to government reports.
A 5-year-old woman kept in a hotel room for 19 days in June before being deported.
As of June 30, according to recent maximum reports submitted through the Flores Administration, a 2-month-old boy had been detained at a Hampton hotel for 4 days while awaiting deportation along with 19 other children.
Neha Desai, a lawyer at the National Youth Law Center, an organization that advocates the government’s compliance with the consent order, called the prolonged detention of young migrants in hotels a “flagrant violation” of the regulations.
“It’s a phantom operation, ” he said.
The United States has still briefly detained a small number of young people in hotel rooms after an immigration sentence ordered them to deport them if there is a delay in their deportation flights.
But such a widespread detention of up to 3 weeks involving young people whose coverage claims have never been considered “goes against the law,” said Andrew Lorenzen-Strait, a former senior ICE official who left the firm last year. He said Congress and the courts have continually stated that young people should not stay in hotel rooms for more than one night, and even then, only in limited circumstances.
“The government is cowboy when it comes to protecting children,” he said.
Bob Carey, who led the ORR under Barack Obama, called the practice “horrible … you have vulnerable youth in the custody of a personal contractor with little transparency or adherence to state law, federal guidelines, the law, and a court settlement.”
Little is known about MVM, Virginia’s personal security contractor who retains young people in hotel rooms. A spokesperson wrote in an email that his multibillion-dollar agreement with ICE to send unaccompanied minors prevents him from disclosing information. He referred the questions to ICE, which refused to comment and refused the contract.
In 2018, Reveal of the Center for Investigative Reporting revealed that MVM had detained young people for more than a day in empty buildings in Phoenix. An ICE spokesman said the company had not allowed the company to detain young people for more than 24 hours at the s, which he said was intended to serve as “waiting areas” for same-day transportation between CBP and ORR shelters. An MVM spokesman called it an “unfortunate exception” to the company’s policy of locating a hotel in the event of a delay in the transport of young people.
Details of the company’s existing contract were revealed in a July court case of Andrea Sheridan Ordin, a former U.S. attorney appointed to oversee the Flores agreement in 2018. The federal ruling on the supervision of this consent order decided it was mandatory because the government was not complying with it.
Ordin advised THAT ICE avoid detaining unaccompanied minors in hotels, raising a “lack of formal control.” She wrote that MVM ‘transportation specialists’ will only have to have an associate’s degree or a top school degree and one year of experience in applicable paintings. They have separated young migrants into hotel rooms by age and gender and have “little or no access to leisure”. Children should be “in sight” of marketing specialists at all times.
Ordin said that maintaining hotel rooms for weeks can have a “negative” effect on children, adding that MVM did not seem to have consistent needs “with respect to the special wishes of young children, which adds hygiene, nutrition or emotional well-being. .
Ordin wrote that what was originally a “temporary measure” for the government to repatriate young people outdoors has become, as a component of its deportation policies, a “full component of the migrant detention system” for young people.
Management argued that he had exceeded his authority. Children deported under the physical fitness ordinance, he argued, are subject to the protections provided through Flores’ regulations because they are never officially placed in the custody of “immigration.”
Lawyers representing children under that settlement requested a judge’s ruling, writing that the government has a “penchant for unilaterally disregarding” the consent decree.
Thirty-five years ago, a 15-year-old Salvadoran woman fleeing the civil war in her home country was also imprisoned in an American hotel under the care of unlicensed personal security agents. Jenny Flores’ case has forced the maximum significant review to date of how the U.S. government can stop migrant children. In fact, the 1997 federal regulations are named after him.
Carlos Holguon, who began defending this case in 1985, said that there is now a sense of “Agreement already seen … however, the degree of anarchy is even beyond what happened then.
Since taking office, the Trump administration has attempted to end the Flower Deal, arguing that the flower colony and a 2008 traffic law serve as “escapes” to encourage families to wipe out young people here alone. The government has tried to repeal the agreement by regulation and has called on Congress to rein to the law on reauthorizing trafficking coverage, which demands safe promises for young people who arrive alone at the border.
So far, efforts have failed.
The administration has tried to separate parents and children at the border, but a federal ruling has largely rejected the practice in 2018, allowing it only in limited circumstances, as if the adult were a danger.
U.S. district judge Dolly Gee, who is in the Flores colony, has decided that the administration will have to temporarily release young people locked up with their parents in immigrant detention centers, most recently raising the threat of coronavirus spread.
“Family residential centers are on fire and there is no time for partial measures,” he wrote in an order on June 26.
The government now claims it can force detained parents to release their children or remain incarcerated indefinitely with them.
But none of the administration’s attempts to repeal regulation or law was as effective as the deportation decision, which “destroys every one of the hedging mechanisms described in Congress and the courts with a single movement,” KIND Podkul said.
Late last month, the ACLU filed a lawsuit for its lawyers to allow young detainees at the McAllen Hampton Inn after a video went viral featuring a Texas Civil Rights Project attorney who forcibly rejected.
“Children are imminent of illegal displacement,” the lawyers wrote.
In the face of a public scandal, Hilton temporarily announced that all three hotels had cancelled MVM bookings.
“We expect all Hilton homes to reject the companies that would use a hotel this way,” said a Hilton spokesman.
Government lawyers agreed to suspend the deportation of migrants who, they said, had stayed at the McAllen Hotel on the trial date; again, ACLU lawyers said, sparking a broader political dispute. A separate lawsuit involving a 13-year-old Salvadoran woman who was deported this summer is still hanging out at a federal court in Washington, D.C.
By the time management stopped returning the detained migrants to the Hampton Inn, most of the detainees there had already been deported or moved elsewhere; some, the lawyers said, just before the ACLU took legal action. Only 17 members of the family circle, adding an unaccompanied child, remained at the hotel.
What about the rest? No one would say.