Feds won’t release migrant kids to sponsors, then deports them
WASHINGTON — The 17-year-old Guatemalan boy has been in a California detention center for migrant children for more than 400 days.
He’s one of the longest-held of the roughly 1,800 minors in the U.S. immigration detention system — the largest in the world, and one now riddled with the novel coronavirus.
Federal detention of immigrants is civil, not criminal, and migrant children have special protections under a decades-old legal settlement known as the Flores agreement, which requires the government to hold them in “safe and sanitary” conditions and make “prompt and continuous” efforts to release them and reunify families. Two federal judges in recent weeks have ruled that the administration has violated the terms of that agreement in its handling of migrant children.
The Guatemalan teen — detained at the center in Fairfield, in Solano County — has been held by the Trump administration for 20 times the 20-day maximum allowed under Flores.
It’s not for lack of someone wanting to take him. When Bryce Tache and James Donaldson read on social media about the teenager, whom they call Mariano to protect his identity, the Minneapolis couple quickly applied to sponsor him, which would allow him to be released.
That was six months ago.
Now they fear the administration is using the pandemic to try to keep the boy until he turns 18, when officials can more easily deport him.
Officials at the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the detention of unaccompanied minors, denied making any policy changes amid the pandemic to prioritize enforcement actions against migrant children and parents.
“HHS is a child welfare agency, not a law enforcement agency,” spokesman Mark Weber said Friday. “If there is a delay in unification, it is for public health reasons.”
Across the country, however, lawyers who represent migrant kids say the administration is refusing to release children to ready sponsors. Court documents and lawmakers back them up.
Trump administration attorneys have argued in court that children are safer from COVID-19 in custody — even as the government quietly ramps up efforts to deport them. In recent weeks, officials have pulled scores of children and parents from detention in secretive operations to remove them from the U.S., according to lawyers, migrants’ affidavits and the receiving countries. Some were sick. A number were challenging administration policies in court.
Since March, when President Donald Trump declared a national emergency over the coronavirus, the administration has cut the population of detained kids and families by about 2,400, according to data from the Office of Refugee Resettlement, or ORR, the agency in the HHS department that Congress charged with the care and placement of unaccompanied migrant minors, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which detains migrant kids with their parents.