Tariffs could add $5K to price of new cars Toddlers face judges alone
Automakers, analysts say Trump’s trade threats would harm economy Immigrant children as young as 3 don’t have parents to defend them
As the White House faces court orders to reunite families separated at the border, immigrant children as young as 3 are being ordered into court for their own deportation proceedings, according to attorneys in Texas, California and Washington, D.C.
Requiring unaccompanied minors to go through deportation alone is not a new practice. But in the wake of the Trump administration’s controversial family separation policy, more children – including toddlers – are being affected than in the past.
The 2,000-plus children probably will need to deal with court proceedings even as they grapple with the trauma of being taken from their parents.
“We were representing a 3-year-old in court recently who had been separated from the parents. And the child – in the middle of the hearing – started climbing up on the table,” said Lindsay Toczylowski, executive director of the Immigrant Defenders Law Center in Los Angeles. “It really highlighted the absurdity of what we’re doing with these kids.”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which oversees the deportations of unauthorized immigrants, did not respond to a request for comment.
Toczylowski said parents typically have been tried along with children and have explained the often violent circumstances that led them to seek asylum in the U.S.
The children being detained under the “zero tolerance” policy, though, are facing immigration proceedings without their mother or father by their sides.
“The parent might be the only one
“We were representing a 3-year-old in court recently who had been separated from the parents. And the child – in the middle of the hearing – started climbing up on the table. It really highlighted the absurdity of what we’re doing with these kids.” Lindsay Toczylowski Executive director, Immigrant Defenders Law Center
Moriah White of Braxton County, West Virginia, calls herself an “opioid war casualty” and said she welcomes any help the government will offer. She had to leave a job teaching special education because of the condition fibromyalgia, which makes her skin feel like “a sunburn scrubbed with a wire brush.”
Danny Elliott’s doctor was charged last week in a “takedown” in Florida and Georgia of 600 doctors accused of health care fraud and illegal opioid prescribing by Justice Department and Drug Enforcement Administration officials.
Elliott, a former pharmaceutical industry salesmen, was electrocuted in 1997, which left him with a brain injury so painful he contemplated suicide. He is trying to find a new doctor. His previous doctor was the first “who actually gave me some relief from my pain.”
DEA Miami Field Division Deputy Special Agent in Charge Jaime Camacho said last week that the agency is “committed to ending the opioid crisis that continues to plague Florida and endanger the welfare of our communities.”
Clinical psychologist Michael Schatman, editor in chief of the Journal of Pain Research, who describes himself as an “opioid moderatist,” said about 90 percent of people are better off without opioids. It’s the 10 percent who need them that are harmed by policy and enforcement actions pushed by groups he said are “radically anti-opioids.”
“For years, federal and state legislators did nothing, leaving it up to state medical boards and the regulatory agencies, which was the problem,” said Schatman, research director at Boston Pain Care, which has treated hundreds of patients without an overdose or suicide. “Now all of a sudden, state legislators are passing incredibly draconian laws that are and have the future potential to literally kill people.”
He cited laws, such as one that took effect July 1 in states including Florida, that tighten regulation of doctors who prescribe opioids and other controlled substances. End-stage cancer patients and the elderly don’t have long enough to live to become addicted and suffer needlessly because of the law, Schatman said.
Florida House Speaker Richard Corcoran, who attended the bill signing, defended the approach, according to the Orlando Sentinel. “Is that an inconvenience? Yes,” Corcoran said. “Is an inconvenience worth saving 50,000 lives nationwide? Absolutely.”
That attitude has led some doctors whose patients have had no problems with opioid prescriptions to back away from prescribing them. Schatman said there’s a big difference between depending on opioids to survive and becoming addicted to them.
Cathy Mitchell, a disabled registered nurse, suffers from a long list of injuries and diseases, including osteoarthritis, post-major lumbar surgery for ruptured discs, cervical scoliosis and bilateral carpal tunnel syndrome.
Disabled since 2013, she said only opioids provide the pain relief that allows her to “function daily.”
She has to go to a pain clinic every 28 days and her primary care doctor every three months. After 10 years of being treated for pain and anxiety “without causing any problems,” Mitchell can no longer be treated for both.
“The reality is that the opioid drugs work for certain patients, and there are certain situations where the opioids are the only drugs that work for those patients,” FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said.
Physicians are largely policed by states, and even as opioid prescriptions go down, overdose deaths increase as many suffering from addiction have moved on to heroin, often in combination with other drugs. The FDA recommended that doctors reduce opioid prescriptions, but doctors and their medical societies remain opposed.
State medical boards in some states have been especially aggressive in going after the licenses of doctors for overprescribing opiate painkillers.
Chronic pain patients across the country said that when physicians lose their license or stop treating pain patients, it can be difficult, if not impossible, to find a new doctor willing to take them on as a patient.
In Virginia, then-Governor Terry McAuliffe boasted on a panel in October that the state led the nation in reductions in opioid prescribing, including a drop of a third in the prior six months. Doctors aren’t allowed to prescribe or refill a prescription for opioids for longer than 10 days without a written explanation.
Two years ago, the state medical board suspended the license of Jenny Austin’s primary care doctor.
Austin, a former investment banker, had to take so much time off from work for crippling pain from migraines and a neurological disorder that she sought a higher dose of painkillers. She continued to see her Virginia doctor even after she moved to Louisiana, because she was “desperate to find a solution that would reduce my hospitalizations.”
Instead, she’s out of work and bedridden much of the time.
The FDA is considering encouraging medical professional societies to develop evidence-based guidelines on prescribing and the possibility of incorporating new prescribing information on opioid painkiller labels.
Schatman is skeptical the efforts will make much difference.
“The opioid pendulum has swung awry,” Schatman said. “This current climate of opiophobia is ... leaving patients more dysfunctional, with diminished quality of lives, severe hopelessness and increasing suicidality in the chronic pain patient population.”
“The reality is that the opioid drugs work for certain patients, and there are certain situations where the opioids are the only drugs that work for those patients.” Scott Gottlieb FDA commissioner