Migrant kids from other nations sent to Mexico

U. S. border authorities have been expelling migrant children from other countries into Mexico, violating a diplomatic agreement with Mexico and testing the limits of immigration and child welfare laws.

The expulsions, laid out in a sharply critical internal email from a senior Border Patrol official, have taken place under an aggressive border closure policy the Trump administration has said is necessary to prevent the coronavirus from spreading into the United States. But they conflict with the terms upon which the Mexican government agreed to help implement the order, which were that only Mexican children and others who had adult supervision could be pushed back into Mexico after attempting to cross the border.

The expulsions put children from countries such as Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador at risk by sending them with no accompanying adult into a country where they have no family connections. Most appear to have been put, at least at first, into the care of Mexican child welfare authorities, who oversee shelters operated by religious organizations and other private groups.

The expulsions, which appear to number more than 200 over the past eight months, reflect the haphazard nature with which many of the administration’s most aggressive immigration policies have been introduced.

In many cases, they have led to the shuffling of young children among U. S. government agencies and now among the governments of countries that are not their own. For years now, the Trump administration’s handling of migrant children has left members of families separated for months on end.

A report to the courts this month revealed that the parents of 545 such children in the United States, some of them separated from their families as long ago as 2017, still have not been located.

Under existing diplomatic agreements and U. S. policies, children from countries other than Mexico are supposed to be put on flights operated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement to their home

countries to be reunited with their families.

Brian Hastings, chief of the Border Patrol’s Rio Grande Valley sector, acknowledged in an interview that non- Mexican children had been sent back into Mexico.

Hastings said that without rapidly returning migrants under the pandemic rule, “we would have massive amounts of infections, massive amounts of commingling, and again we would fill a hospital.” He said border agents are directed to contact the Mexican consular office each time an unaccompanied child is expelled.

But border agents have now been directed to exempt most children under age 10 from the expulsion policy and transfer them to shelters in the United States, Hastings said.