chamerionwrites:

The girls, 8 and 11, were alone in a rented room in a dangerous Mexican city bordering Texas. Their father had been attacked and abandoned on the side of a road and they didn’t know where he was.

For seven months the children had waited with their dad in Matamoros, across from Brownsville, to ask U.S. authorities for asylum. They had fled their home after death threats from local gang members and no help from police. They had also been victims of sexual assault.

But in March, after their father suddenly didn’t return from his construction job, a neighbor took the children to the international bridge. He said they should present themselves to U.S. immigration authorities, who would reunite the girls with their mother in Houston.

“Mami,” the eldest panicked in a brief call immigration agents made to the mother. “Daddy didn’t come home.”

The mother, at work in Houston, said she nearly fainted.

Before the coronavirus pandemic upended everything, the children likely would have spent a few weeks in the care of a U.S. shelter until they were released to their mother to pursue their asylum cases.

Instead, government officials placed the children in foster care through a federal shelter for two months. In mid-May, they suddenly notified their caseworkers that they intended to deport the sisters in a few days to El Salvador, where they have no place to go and fear the gang members who vowed to kill the family. At the last minute, the girls were released to their mother Thursday, pending an emergency federal appeal of their deportation.

As the nation remains focused on COVID-19, the U.S. government has aggressively begun to rush the deportations of some of the most vulnerable migrant children in its care to countries where they have been raped, beaten or had a parent killed, according to attorneys, court filings and congressional staff.

While the deportation of children to dangerous situations is not a new phenomenon for U.S. authorities, what has shocked even veteran immigration attorneys is that the government is trying to so quickly remove, arguably against federal law, those most imperiled — all during a global pandemic.

At least two children deported in recent weeks have been tracked down by international refugee agencies after U.S. counterparts asked them for help because the minors face such danger, including a 16-year-old Honduran girl who had been raped back home.

One boy is locked down in a relative’s home in Honduras, and said in an interview that he fears going outside because of abuse related to his sexual orientation. His mother is stuck in Mexico after her asylum case at the Texas border was denied and the pandemic halted travel across the Americas.

Another teen was deported without his attorneys being notified and despite an immigration judge agreeing to reopen his case. At least seven more children are fighting deportation with last-minute federal court filings after their attorneys said the U.S. moved abruptly to put them on planes home.

“These cases are probably the tip of the iceberg,” said Stephen Kang, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union who is monitoring the increasing reports…

“The government is removing very young children to no one,” Cubas said. “But our courts are in a state of emergency. Our media is COVID-19 all the time. We don’t even have congressional hearings right now in full force. There is less scrutiny.”

Some lawyers fear the recent surge of such deportations is related to an April order in the landmark 1997 settlement agreement governing migrant children in detention. In response to concerns that they would be exposed to COVID-19, U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee in California found children should be quickly released from government facilities, which she called “hotbeds of contagion,” unless their removal was “imminent.”

The government around that time seemed to escalate its enforcement of prior deportation orders for children, said Holly Cooper, an immigration attorney with the University of California at Davis, who is involved in litigating the federal consent decree. She called the timing “uncanny.”

(via cassatine)

chamerionwrites:

The girls, 8 and 11, were alone in a rented room in a dangerous Mexican city bordering Texas. Their father had been attacked and abandoned on the side of a road and they didn’t know where he was.

For seven months the children had waited with their dad in Matamoros, across from Brownsville, to ask U.S. authorities for asylum. They had fled their home after death threats from local gang members and no help from police. They had also been victims of sexual assault.

But in March, after their father suddenly didn’t return from his construction job, a neighbor took the children to the international bridge. He said they should present themselves to U.S. immigration authorities, who would reunite the girls with their mother in Houston.

“Mami,” the eldest panicked in a brief call immigration agents made to the mother. “Daddy didn’t come home.”

The mother, at work in Houston, said she nearly fainted.

Before the coronavirus pandemic upended everything, the children likely would have spent a few weeks in the care of a U.S. shelter until they were released to their mother to pursue their asylum cases.

Instead, government officials placed the children in foster care through a federal shelter for two months. In mid-May, they suddenly notified their caseworkers that they intended to deport the sisters in a few days to El Salvador, where they have no place to go and fear the gang members who vowed to kill the family. At the last minute, the girls were released to their mother Thursday, pending an emergency federal appeal of their deportation.

As the nation remains focused on COVID-19, the U.S. government has aggressively begun to rush the deportations of some of the most vulnerable migrant children in its care to countries where they have been raped, beaten or had a parent killed, according to attorneys, court filings and congressional staff.

While the deportation of children to dangerous situations is not a new phenomenon for U.S. authorities, what has shocked even veteran immigration attorneys is that the government is trying to so quickly remove, arguably against federal law, those most imperiled — all during a global pandemic.

At least two children deported in recent weeks have been tracked down by international refugee agencies after U.S. counterparts asked them for help because the minors face such danger, including a 16-year-old Honduran girl who had been raped back home.

One boy is locked down in a relative’s home in Honduras, and said in an interview that he fears going outside because of abuse related to his sexual orientation. His mother is stuck in Mexico after her asylum case at the Texas border was denied and the pandemic halted travel across the Americas.

Another teen was deported without his attorneys being notified and despite an immigration judge agreeing to reopen his case. At least seven more children are fighting deportation with last-minute federal court filings after their attorneys said the U.S. moved abruptly to put them on planes home.

“These cases are probably the tip of the iceberg,” said Stephen Kang, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union who is monitoring the increasing reports…

“The government is removing very young children to no one,” Cubas said. “But our courts are in a state of emergency. Our media is COVID-19 all the time. We don’t even have congressional hearings right now in full force. There is less scrutiny.”

Some lawyers fear the recent surge of such deportations is related to an April order in the landmark 1997 settlement agreement governing migrant children in detention. In response to concerns that they would be exposed to COVID-19, U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee in California found children should be quickly released from government facilities, which she called “hotbeds of contagion,” unless their removal was “imminent.”

The government around that time seemed to escalate its enforcement of prior deportation orders for children, said Holly Cooper, an immigration attorney with the University of California at Davis, who is involved in litigating the federal consent decree. She called the timing “uncanny.”

(via cassatine)