Detained migrant kids sitting ducks for virus
Migrant children and their families held in federal detention facilities are sitting ducks for the pestilence now spreading through communities nationwide. Already, four detained children have tested positive for the novel coronavirus; so have staff members at shelters for unaccompanied minors.
Two federal judges, alarmed at what appears to be a disaster in the making, have ordered immigration authorities to accelerate releases of detained migrants who have no criminal records and pose no danger to society. The longer the delay, the greater the risk to both the migrants and others.
The judges set Monday as the date by which two federal agencies — U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which operates three migrant family detention facilities, and the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which oversees shelters for unaccompanied minors — must report on their progress.
Jails, prisons and other detention facilities, often lacking any realistic means of achieving physical distance among inmates and detainees, are tinderboxes for disease of all sorts. Soap supplies are often inadequate.
That’s unnerving enough, given that populations in detention are never static, and that the constant transfers of people in and out are a recipe for rapid transmission of pathogens.
It’s more frightening still when the potential victims are children — and generally blameless children at that.
Blameless: That’s an accurate way of describing most of the minors in immigration detention. Some were apprehended with their parents, who were often seeking asylum for the family. Many others entered the country on their own, sent or smuggled with help from their families in hopes of joining relatives living in the United States. Nearly 7,000 children are being held in immigration detention, nearly half of them with one or both parents.
A federal lawsuit settled in 1997 set limits on the time migrant minors can be held in detention, in recognition of damage it can do to their emotional and mental health. The Trump administration, seeking ways to deter further illegal immigration, has been bending those rules, even seeking to hold migrant children with their families indefinitely. That was dangerous enough. Subjecting children to a heightened risk of being exposed to a widening pandemic is beyond irresponsible.
U.S. District Judge Dolly M. Gee of Los Angeles, in an order last weekend, found that family detention facilities run by ICE — two in Texas and one in Pennsylvania — appear “deficient” in terms of adopting standards and protocols, set by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that would protect children from disease. Gee ordered federal agencies to make “continuous efforts” to release migrant minors from custody.
Ruling separately Monday in the same lawsuit, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg of the District of Columbia expanded the order to apply to the minors’ parents detained with them.
The urgency is real. When and if the coronavirus begins spreading inside the facilities, the danger of releasing migrant children may become equal to or greater than the risks posed by continuing to detain them. That’s not a choice the courts should be forced to make.