Children arriving on border await fate in immigration courts

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The little girl wearing pink party shoes topped with bows smiled from her seat in a Los Angeles immigration courtroom. The 7-year-old is happy now that she is worlds away from the violence in her native El Salvador.

Gang gunfire once forced her to hit the floor inside her home. She fled Central America last year with her great-grandmother to join her mother in the U.S. At the Mexico border, authorities separated the two, and she lived in a youth facility for about a month. She cried so much that staff members gave her extra phone time to talk to her mother, the mother said. She was eventually reunited with her mother and is now seeking asylum.

Her case, which was in court Tuesday, predates the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy calling for the criminal prosecution of all immigrants stopped on the southwest border. But it illustrates how children arriving from Central America have long faced the prospect of family separation and navigated a complex legal immigration system that can take months or years to render a decision due to a massive backlog of cases. The U.S. government separated more than 2,300 children from their parents in recent weeks in a policy that stoked widespread outrage among both Democrats and Republicans. On Wednesday, Trump bowed to pressure and signed an executive order ending the separations. It was a dramatic turnaround for the president, who had insisted, wrongly, that his administration had no choice because of federal law and a court decision.

Many of the affected children may soon find themselves in an immigration courtroom somewhere in the United States as they make a case to stay in the country legally and avoid deportation.

At immigration court in Los Angeles, Judge A. Ashley Tabaddor had more than 20 cases on her morning docket — all of them children’s cases, and many of them asylum seekers.

Some had arrived a year ago, or even two. All had lawyers and were seeking to stay by seeking asylum or through a government program that provides green cards to abused and abandoned children.

The girl and others applied for asylum at an office run by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and were waiting for an interview. The agency in March had more than 17,000 children’s cases pending review.

The judge told the lawyers, children and parents in the courtroom that recently it had been taking longer than the month or two that young applicants previously waited for an interview. Other cases were mired in confusion. A 16-year-old girl had been telling the court she lived in Los Angeles with her aunt when in reality she had moved to Texas to stay with her mother.