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Trump Border Patrol Using COVID-19 to Expel Asylum Seekers as Young as 8 Months
The Trump Administration isn't just deporting migrant children, it's expelling them as part of a shadowy program run by a private and seemingly unqualified contractor that is imprisoning them in hotels.
Citing the threat of COVID-19, it granted federal agents sweeping powers to almost immediately return anyone at the border, including infants as young as 8 months....under an emergency health order the Trump administration issued in March.
Children are typically entitled to special protections under the law, including the right to have their asylum claims adjudicated by a judge.
Under this new policy, the administration is not deporting children — a proceeding based on years of established law that requires a formal hearing in immigration court.
It is instead expelling them — without a judge’s ruling and after only a cursory government screening and no access to social workers or lawyers, sometimes not even their family....
Trump’s cruelty knows no bounds.
Little is known about how the process works, but published government figures suggest almost all children arriving at the border are being rapidly returned.
Between April and June, Customs and Border Protection officials encountered 3,379 unaccompanied minors at or between ports of entry. Of those, just 162 were sent to federal shelters for immigrant children run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the Health and Human Services agency tasked with their care. CBP would not say whether the remaining minors had been expelled or explain what had happened to them.
What’s different now is that children are not entering the U.S. system for migrant children at all. The majority are quickly flown back to Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador....
WE are doing this to children.
Lawyers have fielded frantic calls from family members whose children suddenly went missing after crossing the U.S. border. Of the thousands of unaccompanied minors expelled under the health order, advocacy organizations said that they have only found about three dozen after months of searching across the United States, Mexico and Central America.
...the secrecy reminds them of their search two years ago for thousands of immigrant children whom the Trump administration separated from their parents at the border.
Then, government agents sent children to federal shelters under ORR, often without tracking numbers linking them to their parents in ICE detention centers. It took a federal court order and months of taxpayer-funded efforts before many could be reunited with their parents. A few never were because their parents had been deported....
Sources:
https://www.texastribune.org/2020/08/04/border-migrant-children-hotels/