Trump Has Quietly Cut Legal Aid for Migrant Kids Separated from Parents
When the Trump administration announced this month it would criminally prosecute everyone who crossed the border illegally, which meant jailing immigrant parents and separating them from their children, it effectively manufactured a whole new group of unaccompanied minors who now must navigate the complicated US immigration system by themselves. In less than two weeks, 658 kids were divided from their mothers and fathers—and the policy is still ramping up.
Meanwhile, the government has just quietly shut off a legal lifeline for this very population, putting them at an even higher risk of deportation. The Office of Refugee Resettlement, a federal program that for over a decade has funded organizations representing unaccompanied minors in immigration court while those children live with adult relatives or guardians, told the groups to stop taking new cases just days after the family separation policy began, multiple sources from nonprofit groups funded by ORR told me.
“The government is creating unaccompanied kids, then releasing them to someone other than parents, and then further restricting their ability to access counsel,” said Manoj Govindaiah, director of family detention services for Texas’s Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES), which has represented kids through the ORR funds. “So they’re almost ensuring people cannot successfully navigate the immigration court process.”
RAICES, which typically represents about 300 unaccompanied minors a year in the Dallas-Fort Worth area thanks to ORR funding, had just screened a new round of applicants when they received the announcement earlier this month to accept no further cases, staff attorney Jennifer de Haro told me.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a3a798/trump-has-quietly-cut-legal-aid-for-migrant-kids-separated-from-parents?utm_campaign=sharebutton
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