Families face jail for trying to sneak kids into US

The Trump administration says it will begin arresting parents and other relatives who hire smugglers to bring their children into the US, a move that has sent a shudder through immigrant communities nationwide.

The new ‘‘surge initiative’’ by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, announced yesterday, marks the latest get-tough approach to immigration by the federal government since President Donald Trump took office.

The government says the effort aims to break up human smuggling operations, including arresting people who pay so-called ‘‘coyotes’’ to get children across the US border with Mexico.

That marks a sharp departure from policies in place under President Barack Obama’s administration, during which time tens of thousands of young people fleeing spiralling gang and drug violence in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador crossed the border.

The children are placed with ‘‘sponsors’’ – typically parents, close relatives or family friends – who care for the minors while they attend school and their cases go through the immigration court system.

The government now says plans to arrest the sponsors.

Immigrant advocacy groups said they were investigating a dozen arrests or ongoing investigations in Texas, Pennsylvania, New York and Virginia.

Elsy Segovia, an immigration lawyer in Newark, New Jersey, said armed agents visited her client this week under the guise of checking something to do with his Social Security number, then announced it he was being investigated for smuggling his 16-year-old nephew from El Salvador. The teenager crossed the border in Arizona last week.

Wendy Young, president of Kids In Need Of Defence, a non-profit organisation that has matched thousands of unaccompanied minors with lawyers, said: ‘‘Without caregivers to come forward, many of these children will languish in costly detention centres or be placed in foster care, at great expense to states.’’

Since October 2013, nearly 170,000 unaccompanied minors have been placed with sponsors in all 50 states and the US Virgin Islands, and many are still awaiting their day in court, according to federal data.

Last year, an Associated Press investigation and a bipartisan congressional probe found that the agency’s own inadequate screening had endangered more than two dozen migrant youths in the government’s care, including six Guatemalan minors who were placed with traffickers and forced to work on egg farms.