This article was first published in ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning research writing hall. Subscribe to The Big Story newsletter for stories like this in your inbox.
Since March, the Trump administration has returned thousands of young migrants to their home countries without legal review or protection, posing the threat of them simply sending COVID-19 to the United States.
But during the time the young people boarded the planes to get home, they were already tested for the virus, and they were shown to have it.
Court documents and data provided through immigration and customs officials to Congressional staff last week reveal that the Trump administration agreed to verify each and every child in their custody before sending them back to their home countries as a component of the deportation policy.
ICE’s extensive testing seems to undermine the foundation of the mass deportation policy: which is to “prevent the introduction” of COVID-19 into the United States.
The Trump administration has argued that because of the pandemic, it will have to circumvent the protections built into the Immigration Act for young migrants, which dictates that they must move to the Department of Health and Human Services (and ultimately to sponsors in the United States) and given the opportunity to apply for asylum. Administration officials said they may not threaten inflamed youth who transmit COVID-19 through the system. However, even after young people have negative control of the virus, they are not allowed access to the same protections above.
Trump’s management cited Sections 265 and 268 of Title 42 of the U.S. Code, which allow the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to order exclusion or anything that may introduce a disease into the United States. Citing the law, in March, the CDC began banning access to the United States without papers.
“The Trump administration’s claim that they need to summarily expel children because of COVID was always a pretext,” Lee Gelernt of the ACLU, who has represented children in lawsuits challenging the expulsion policy, told ProPublica. “If they are now actually testing and know the children do not have COVID, then the policy is that much more unjustified.”
A minutes filed in July noted that “virtually all” young people in ICE custody were examined by COVID-19 prior to expulsion, as a condition of the “testing requirements” imposed through their country of origin. At last week’s Congress briefings, narrated in ProPublica through several present members, ICE clarified what those “test requirements” were.
The United States has agreements with 10 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean to return unaccompanied youth to law enforcement. All those agreements, ICE told Congress, require young people to have a negative result on the COVID-19 test before they are fired.
“All U.S. unmarried minors deported under Title 42 are deported under casual agreements that remain fluid between U.S. governments and abroad,” an ICE spokeswoman told ProPublica. “There are casual agreements in place with some countries that require COVID-19 testing prior to deportation.” When asked in particular about his statement in Congress that all countries that agree to settle with young people should be examined and whether this contradicted the basis of the deportation policy, ICE refused to clarify, raising “an ongoing dispute.”
Under the new policy, the maximum number of adult migrants is returned to Mexico in hours. However, to apply the deportation order to young people, management has developed an ad hoc formula in which young people are held for days in hotels, with little contact with the global outside, which makes it the maximum for lawyers or lawyers to locate them earlier. are returned to the countries from which they fled.
Thousands of children have been expelled since the policy was enacted in March. Some are sent to overcrowded government shelters in Central American countries like Guatemala; others are totally out of reach of legal service providers, who have not been able to find them.
Under the U.S. Immigration Act, unaccompanied young migrants arriving undocumented must be in HHS custody, which may place them with a sponsor (usually a parent) awaiting a court hearing to determine whether they are eligible for immigration. State. Trump’s management has said it’s too damaging to keep sending these young people to HHS for a pandemic.
The Acting Commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, Mark Morgan argued at a press conference on August 6 that “if we introduce these other people to the ORR,” the refugee resettlement workplace, which is the guilty HHS workplace for young migrants, “will triumph over the total goal of Title 42, we continue to introduce those other people into our formula and create a greater threat of exposure to other Americans.
But on July 22, an independent court report filed in the Flores case, which governs the care of young people in immigration custody, stated that “virtually all people in hotels expecting EYE deportation flights will be examined by COVID-19 prior to deportation to meet the testing of the needs imposed through the countries of origin for the returnees.” (Trump’s management says that “deportation” is a term of immigration law and that because migrants who are subject to the CDC ordinance are processed under the Immigration Act, they can think of deportation. However, the Court’s report used the term “deportation” to also refer to evictions for reasons of public fitness).
In peak cases, ICE meets this requirement through immediate COVID-19 tests produced through Abbott Laboratories that can produce effects in as little as 15 minutes. While Abbott’s immediate evidence has been subject to scrutiny for a maximum rate of false negative effects, they continue to be used through the Trump administration. However, at least one country, Guatemala, asks the United States government to discharge the effects of the COVID-19 test from a laboratory, a procedure that can take 4 to five days.
It is not transparent when verification needs came into effect. The court’s report describes them as “taxes recently.” A Guatemalan official recently told Reuters that only a few of the young people who were returned to Guatemala under politics have documents proving they tested negative for COVID-19. It is not known whether this means that Ice violated the terms of his agreement with Guatemala to control the youth, or if those young people were not the subject of the agreement. Anaeli Torres, of Guatemala’s social welfare firm, told ProPublica that the firm did not know if a child had been deported under immigration law or deported under a public order of fitness upon arrival in Guatemala from the United States.
Since the spring, ICE has been accused of contributing to the spread of COVID-19 in Central America and the Caribbean by deporting others who had been trapped by coronavirus in migrant detention centres. ICE denied this, saying that all detainees are examined by COVID-19 before being deported.
But people expelled under the public health law are not being put in ICE detention. Further, unlike deportees who are removed from the U.S. because they are found to have violated immigration law, migrants expelled under the public health policy have had no legal due process. They are being barred from the U.S. purely because they might have the coronavirus and might spread it to others.
The CDC’s original order banning the “introduction” of migrants, from March, assumed that it would be impossible to test migrants for COVID-19. That was key to its rationale for barring their entry. “In theory, to mitigate public health risks, CBP would have to transport aliens in their custody suspected of COVID-19 infection to a nearby medical site for sample collection and testing, and then implement containment protocols (i.e. quarantine or isolation) in their facilities while awaiting test results,” the order said. “CDC would not have the resources or personnel required to house in quarantine or isolation or monitor dozens, much less hundreds or thousands of aliens.”
In the following months, however, ICE created an ad hoc quarantine and isolation system. Migrants detained in hotels, for several days or even weeks, are prevented from leaving their rooms and have limited external contact.
Ironically, coVID-19 positive migrants must remain in the United States, while those with negative controls are deported. It is unclear whether unaccompanied youth tested positive for coronavirus in their detention through ICE. At least one migrant circle of relatives staying at a San Antonio hotel has tested positive for deportation. The circle of relatives was sent to an ICE detention center to recover.
While referrals to HHS are expected to take place within 72 hours, the administration has detained youth in hotels longer as it prepares to evict them. The court’s report noted that the necessary evidence occasionally prolonged its stay in the United States, as the effects may take several days to process.
Rapid testing eliminates that concern, but ICE did not explain in its congressional briefing, or at any other time, why it cannot send children to HHS once they have tested negative.
Archived in: