The Trump Administration Is Rushing Deportations of Migrant Children During Coronavirus
Their father was missing. Their mother was miles away. Two sisters, ages 8 and 11, were survivors of sexual assault and at risk of deportation. With the nation focused on COVID-19, the U.S. government is rushing the deportations of migrant children.
May 18, 2019
Despite the pandemic, asylum-seeking children who crossed the border alone are still being deported to their home countries, where many are at risk for violence, sexual assault or death.
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.
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