While the nation is distracted by the pandemic, the Trump administration is continuing its cruel practice of separating children fromtheir immigrant parents.
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WASHINGTON — Dad lives about 10 miles from the White House, stringing together gardening jobs, not letting the kids touch him when he gets home for fear of contagion.
Mom lives in a makeshift refugee camp on the border in Matamoros, Mexico, one of the world’s most dangerous cities, rationing soap.
Three of the children — ages 10, 14, and 16 — just joined their father, Jose, after winning release from a government shelter where they had been held for more than two months. Now, they have deportation orders hanging over their heads.
U.S. officials are fighting in court to take the three children and deport them to El Salvador — to no one. The only way to avoid being separated from their parents, officials say, would be for their mother in Mexico to give up, too. Government lawyers said they’d put her on a plane with the kids if she agreed to return to El Salvador and never again try to join her husband in the U.S.
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This is the new family separation, two years after taking kids from their parents at the border blew up into a crisis for the Trump administration. Citing the coronavirus to seal the border to an unprecedented extent, the administration is engaged in a pressure campaign against immigrant parents to get them to give up either their kids or their legal claims to protection in the U.S.
Scores of migrant families across the country are being targeted, according to court documents and more than 20 officials, judges, lawyers and migrants. Many spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of jeopardizing their legal cases.
The fates of many of them may hinge on Jose’s family’s case, which has become a test of the administration’s latest policies to bar migrant kids and families, said Claudia Cubas, the litigation director for the Capital Area Immigrants’ Rights Coalition, and Jose’s lawyer.
With Jose’s family’s case the furthest along in the courts, “this is either going to make it or break it for people,” she said.
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Administration officials deny that they are deliberately trying to separate families.
“Consistent with President Trump’s June 20, 2018, executive order, it is the policy of the administration to maintain family unity,” Immigration and Customs Enforcement said in a statement.
The statement came after ICE officials this month presented the roughly 180 parents in its custody with the choice of separating from their children or remaining indefinitely detained with them, according to government filings in court and legal service providers. Several hundred more unaccompanied children have been united with a sponsor in the U.S., like Jose’s children, but remain at risk. ICE declined to say how many have final removal orders.
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Advocates argue that unaccompanied minors are entitled to receive immigration hearings under U.S. law. Government attorneys maintain that many of the children had a hearing under the administration’s “Remain in Mexico” policy after they first arrived at the border and still face deportation, even if that has the effect of dividing them from their parents. The Remain in Mexico policy requires people seeking asylum in the U.S. to wait in Mexico throughout their court hearings.
“There has been due process afforded to those minor children,” one administration lawyer said in a May hearing for Jose’s family, citing the previous proceedings.
Bridget Cambria, a lawyer with the Aldea People’s Justice Center in Pennsylvania, represents detained parents who testified that ICE officials pressured them to separate from their children, rejected the claim that the government’s actions constitute due process.
“Whatever you want to call it,” said Cambria. “It’s asking mothers and fathers to give up their kids.”
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Attorney Claudia Cubas talks to Jose and his children in April
Attorney Claudia Cubas talks to Jose and his children in April, shortly after they were released from a government shelter. (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times)
Jose’s three daughters — ages 16, 14, and 11 — are about as tall as he is. The 10-year-old boy doesn’t leave his father’s side.
In less than a year, the two oldest girls and their little brother have gone from safe-houses in El Salvador to a tent on the Rio Grande to a government shelter, and now to a home in a Washington suburb with a green lawn, a bicycle and a driveway.
Jose mostly speaks for them. He still doesn’t feel safe, even in the U.S.: MS-13, the gang in El Salvador that told his wife they’d kill the kids if she didn’t tell where he was, has offshoots in Maryland.
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“There’s still this sadness in them,” Jose said of his children. “The biggest change that I’ve seen is that now that we’re here, it’s like they can breathe again.”
In El Salvador, Jose was a street preacher. The gangs ordered him to stop, but he wouldn’t. He met his wife, who also proselytized, at their evangelical church. MS-13 had killed her first husband, the two eldest girls’ biological father, in 2006.
Jose fled first, thinking the threats to the family would lessen if he were gone. He crossed the border with his youngest daughter in Laredo, Texas, just short of one year ago. The decision to come separately — they couldn’t afford to bring everyone at one time — has splintered the family in the U.S. immigration system.
Jose told U.S. officials at the border that he was afraid of persecution in El Salvador and was allowed to go to Maryland, where he has a brother and close friend.
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By the time Jose’s wife and the three other kids arrived at the border about three months later, the Trump administration had imposed its Remain in Mexico policy across the entire southern border, dramatically changing the rules. Officials turned the four back to Matamoros.
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In January, an immigration judge in Texas denied their asylum claims. Jose’s wife believed the judge said she could not appeal without a lawyer.
In roughly four months in Matamoros, the kids had “suffered physical and sexual assault; endured illness, extreme temperatures, and malnutrition,” according to a legal filing. Ten days after the judge ruled, Jose and his wife decided she should take the children to the bridge and send them across the border on their own.
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Many parents have chosen to take that chance rather than risk keeping their children in the refugee camps along the border. Of some 65,000 migrants subject to Remain in Mexico, at least 1,114 have been kidnapped, raped or assaulted in Mexico, including children, according to Human Rights First. Of asylum seekers subject to the policy, fewer than 1% have ultimately been granted relief.
On Jan. 17, the three children turned themselves in to U.S. officials at the port of entry between Matamoros and Brownsville, Texas, and were designated as unaccompanied minors, affording them special protections under the law, including a hearing before an immigration judge.
As soon as officials located Jose, he applied for custody. But the reunification stalled when the government discovered the kids had prior removal orders dating from the ruling against them and their mother in January.
Cubas and the children’s legal team sued for their release in March. The case has moved through the immigration system and federal court.
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For already traumatized children, Cubas said, “it’s been an emotional roller coaster.”
In the little boy’s legal declaration — in El Salvador, the family moved so much to hide from the gangs that he never learned to read and can hardly write — he says he doesn’t really remember what happened after they crossed into the U.S. “because I’m little.”
“I miss my mom I don’t know what is happening to her,” he said. “I don’t want to return to Mexico because it is a bad place and in El Salvador the gangs are after us.”
Jose’s wife
Jose’s wife, seen in April, is stuck in a makeshift refugee camp on the border in Matamoros, Mexico. She faces dim prospects for reuniting with her family.(Javier Escalante / Los Angeles Times)
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Their mother now lives alone in a blue-tarp tent in Matamoros.
“It’s just me left here,” she said in an interview last month.
The camp, which exploded in size with Remain in Mexico, has no cleaning materials or private bathrooms. Many people bathe in the muddy Rio Grande, where her three kids once saw a dead body floating. Sickness is rampant.
Public health advocates and experts have warned that a coronavirus outbreak in the migrant camps along the border would be devastating.
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The mother is not so worried for her kids anymore, now that they’re in Maryland with Jose. She says she talks to them every day.
The legal battle over the children has left Jose trying to play the part of both parents amid a pandemic. He takes as many precautions as he can.
“I have to provide for them,” he said, “but then I’m exposing myself.”
He’s even more worried for his wife in Mexico. So long as they’re apart, he said, “I have this gap in my heart.”
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A young migrant named Stephanie
A young migrant named Stephanie, 10, near the Rio Grande in Matamoros, Mexico.(Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)
On May 8, lawyers for the government submitted a proposal for Jose’s family:
If the children agreed to “their expeditious and immediate repatriation to El Salvador” and withdrew their suits against the government, and if their mother presented herself at the border, ICE would deport them together to El Salvador, “thus, ensuring that Plaintiffs remain in the care of a parent.”
But, they warned in a footnote, should Jose’s wife try to pursue her immigration case, they could send the kids to El Salvador alone.
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“To be removed with her children, Plaintiffs’ mother would have to immediately elect an expeditious reunification and joint repatriation with her children,” they wrote, “and choose to forego further action.”
They are far from the only family to be presented with such a choice; a very similar case involving two sisters, 8 and 11, unfolded recently in Texas.
The girls crossed the border by themselves after their father was mugged in Matamoros, where they’d been required to stay under the administration’s policy after seeking asylum last September. Their mother, who entered the U.S. on an existing tourist visa and is also applying for asylum, is in Houston. Thirty minutes before the girls were due to be reunited with her, ICE moved to deport them to El Salvador.
After lawyers filed suit, the girls were released to their mother. ICE has agreed not to deport them until a decision by the immigration appeals court — but they still have removal orders.
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“This is another form of family separation, and it’s quite in your face,” said Elizabeth Sanchez Kennedy, immigration legal services Director at YMCA International Services, who represents them.
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At a hearing in early May in Jose’s family’s case, federal district Judge Randolph D. Moss said he was “troubled” by the government’s effort to “orphan” the children.
“The plaintiffs here are very young,” Moss said.
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“You’re taking a nine-year-old child, removing that child from the parent and sending that child to a place in which the child has no guardian.”
With the judge questioning the constitutionality of separating Jose’s family, ICE said it would hold off on deporting the children until November or a decision by the immigration appeals court. That allows Jose time to pursue his separate asylum claim.
Getting a hearing, however, is no easy feat, with already backlogged immigration courts thrown into further chaos by the coronavirus. Already, Jose has been waiting close to a year for the Baltimore immigration court to schedule one.
Ashley Tabaddor, president of the National Assn. of Immigration Judges, noted that the administration repeatedly has pushed back Remain in Mexico hearings while insisting that unaccompanied children continue to attend court during the pandemic.
“It’s clearly more driven by law enforcement priorities than health considerations,” Tabaddor said.
Meanwhile, ICE’s stay is at the agency’s discretion; Jose’s kids still face removal orders. If he ultimately wins asylum, he likely could include his children, and potentially their mother.
In Matamoros, she said she will never allow her children to return to El Salvador.
“My wish is to be with my children there in America one day,” she said. “But if it is my turn to return, I have already lived my life. They are just beginning to live.”
SIG
Vice TV recently told the story of an additional 1500 children that are unaccounted for. The ACLU is working to find the children and their deported parents. Some of these children have been placed with family members in the US while others still remain in custody. It is also difficult because children are sometimes moved from one facility to another. Who said private companies are more efficient than government? The ACLU hires people in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala to hunt for parents in rural communities in these nations. The sleuth is a guy on a motor bike that speaks Quetzal, a Mayan language. The ACLU got the government to agree to give the found children a hearing, if the ACLU agreed to fly the parents in for the hearing.
The ACLU found about fifty parents. Sadly, in many cases there were no families left to find. The hearing is a legal formality in which fewer than 5% are granted immunity. Kudos to the ACLU for trying to bring some modicum of justice to what is an inhumane, incompetent policy of this administration.
I would expect nothing less than this continued display of heartlessness from the president who retweeted a video this week of someone saying, “The only good Democrat is a dead Democrat” and threatening the shooting of looters in Minneapolis, which appear to be dog whistles inciting violence in his base.
Trump seems to be very desperate and, lacking higher order thinking skills, his go-to methods of problem-solving are immature knee-jerk reactions that involve ways of hurting people. What a sicko.
Who said private companies are more efficient than government?
Too many people who are out to privatize land, water, and every public institution.
The ACLU is doing heroic work on immigration and on other fronts. Trump has got to go, but he is setting up everything to contest the results of the November elections. He is scared ……about the civil lawsuits he and his family, especially DonJr., face in his after-life as Commandeer in Chief.
The statute of limitations has also not run out on a number of the sexual assault charges against our predator in chief, including charges of rape. And then there’s the money laundering. And the misappropriations of charitable funds. And the illegal emoluments. And much, much more.
This article by the author of The Art of the Deal explains how this is part of a grand conceit (strategy not an appropriate term in this case).
https://gen.medium.com/the-psychopath-in-chief-aa10ab2165d9
I’ve made my living as a writer and editor for most of my life, and though I have tried, I cannot find words sufficient to express my loathing for this vile creature in the now Whiter House.
That’s why profanity exists.
I highly recommend this book if you can find a copy:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1347478.The_F_Word
My mother no longer uses his name at all. She just texts a pile of dung emoji, as in today’s, “[emoji] wants the protestors and looters shot.”
There are many false etymologies of this word floating about as memes, and its actual etymology is in dispute. However, it’s curious, isn’t it, that a word describing pleasurable experience should also be hurled like a weapon. Well, the most likely candidate for the actual etymology is some Germanic kin to the Swedish dialectical “focka,” meaning to push or strike. So, aggression at its root, which says something pretty disgusting about the history of male behavior.
I’ve never used his name. I’ve settled on The Idiot.
I pray that I live long enough to see our racist in chief and his propaganda minister, Stephen “Goebbels” Miller standing in the dock at the International Criminal Court, charged with crimes against humanity.
Nazis.
Not wannabes, the real article.
Is there anyone lower than he who will not hear the cries of children?
When Trump leaves the White House, I want to see Trump and his administration tried for crimes against humanity just like the world did to the Nazis at Nuremberg after World War II.
I made a similar comment a few days ago. They should be tried and jailed at the Hague along with war criminals from Serbia and Liberia.
Too bad we couldn’t have them jailed and tried by the fictional Star Trek Klingons.