The White House Is Quietly Deporting Children

[Beringia]

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/22/opinion/coronavirus-children-border-deportation.html


The Trump administration is flouting the law to turn away minors in desperate need of protection.

By Maria Woltjen, executive director and founder of the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights. June 22, 2020

EXCERPTS

The Supreme Court decision last week protecting the DACA program was reason for celebration, but the Trump administration’s assault on immigration isn’t over. President Trump has already said he plans to keep pushing to end DACA. But more immediately, under the guise of the pandemic, the Trump administration is turning back unaccompanied children at the border in violation of federal law.

In October 2017 the White House issued a wish list of immigration policies it wanted to carry out. First on the list was building the border wall. No. 2 was deporting children who were traveling on their own. That is quietly happening right now, with public health as the excuse.

Last week, the Centers for Disease Control indefinitely extended an order barring the entry of migrants seeking protection at land borders, including children. This order, first issued in March, flouts the federal anti-trafficking law that requires the government to place unaccompanied children into protective custody and allow them to go before an asylum officer or judge.

Our government is returning children targeted by gangs right back to their tormentors, abused children to their abusers. I’ve worked with unaccompanied children for 16 years. It takes time to unravel these children’s stories, to figure out what, if anything they have to return to.

The child welfare laws of all 50 states require that before a child is placed with family, or sent across state lines, a judge must consider whether the child will be safe. That requirement doesn’t disappear because there’s a pandemic. Unaccompanied immigrant children deserve no less — we have an obligation, under federal and international law, to learn their stories and make sure the next place they land they’ll be safe.

https://www.theyoungcenter.org/