Detention center violence hits home in Connecticut

NORWALK — For many of the few hundred immigrant students who have enrolled in the city’s public schools in recent months, the journey here has been difficult and even dangerous.

According to school and city officials, four female students — each of whom spent time in Texas detention facilities — were raped before recently arriving in Norwalk. Citing HIPAA laws and to protect the identities of the girls, local officials declined to discuss any information they have gathered from the teens about the incidents.

It’s unclear whether the sexual assaults occurred in federal facilities or after the girls were released. It’s also unknown if the teens reported the incidents to anyone in Texas.

Their stories are indicative of a larger trend of violence against women and girls in detention centers, along the way to America and in countries like El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, the former homes of many of the Spanishspeaking students now enrolled in Norwalk schools.

“It is horrifyingly prevalent,” said Alicia Kinsman, director of immigration legal services at the Bridgeportbased nonprofit Connecticut Institute for Refugees and Immigrants (CIRI). “What we’re seeing is a large number of vulnerable populations, including women and children, having been sexually assaulted.”

More than 72,000 migrant children traveling alone and almost 458,000 families crossed the border illegally in the fiscal year ending in September — at times, overwhelming Border Patrol agents and the agency’s processing centers that are meant to only hold immigrants temporarily before they are moved elsewhere.

And, despite the reported surge in Norwalk, nationally those numbers have dropped significantly since President Donald Trump’s administration announced a new policy forcing most immigrants to wait in Mexican border towns for the duration of their U.S. asylum cases.

Children deemed unaccompanied, meaning they are not with a parent or guardian, are usually quickly transferred from Border Patrol custody to federal shelters overseen by the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), which hold the children until they can be released to relatives who have undergone a screening process.

The ORR could not immediately confirm the alleged assaults reported by the four minors in Norwalk.