The Trump administration has started sending a majority of undocumented children who came to the US alone and have new immigration court cases to Texas, where government facilities for them are unlicensed, their chances of getting a lawyer are low and advocates fear that “a deportation churn-out factory” awaits them, the Guardian has learned. Almost 80% of children in federal custody who arrived unaccompanied by a parent or legal guardian and who were placed in immigration court proceedings in July – and over 90% in August – have been funneled into shelter networks somewhere in Texas, a dramatic upswing from the months prior, according to analysis shared exclusively with the Guardian from researchers at the immigration data insights platform bklg.org. This is understood to amount to a total of 925 children in the care of the Health and Human Services (HHS) department’s office of refugee resettlement (ORR) and in open immigration court proceedings based in Texas, with 651 sent there in July and August alone.
Federal officials’ sudden shift toward ushering these vulnerable kids to the Republican-controlled, deeply conservative state for no publicly stated reason has alarmed immigrants’ rights advocates amid concerns about their treatment and access to due process under US laws. Experts who spoke to the Guardian fear the advent of a mass apprehension campaign – forcing immigrant children from their communities within the country’s interior to gather them in Texas to ultimately pack them onto repatriation flights, which often leave from areas along the US’s southern border. And it’s close to the border, where they can just get planes,” said Roxana Avila-Cimpeanu, deputy director at the Arizona-based legal service non-profit, Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project.
She added that these facilities could be “a deportation churn out factory that has attorneys in name but not real representation”. Unaccompanied immigrant kids, who often come to the US fleeing abuse, neglect, abandonment, trafficking or other harms, regularly cross the US-Mexico border and enter the custody of ORR, which is legally tasked with their welfare, not the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency. There were more than 1,800 kids in ORR’s care nationally at the end of July, scattered among shelters, foster care and secure facilities across the country.
Yet already, more than 60% of those still detained with ongoing immigration court proceedings are now believed to be living in Texas, compared with fewer than half in June. ORR did not respond to a request for comment from the Guardian. The processing to Texas is occurring despite the state’s GOP-dominated government refusing to provide state licensing for ORR care providers, a policy that hasn’t stopped the facilities from operating there, but has meant less child welfare oversight and protections for kids.
And so I think the Trump administration knows that not only will there be no pushback from the state government and from the governor, but that people like Governor Greg Abbott are willing accomplices,” Veronica Escobar, a Democratic congresswoman from west Texas, told the Guardian in a phone interview this week. Meanwhile, many of the kids – from toddlers to teenagers – are navigating the US’s byzantine immigration laws mostly without attorneys. Already, only 31.7% of children in ORR custody with active immigration court proceedings nationally have had a notice of legal representation filed in their cases.
Kids held in Texas are faring even worse, with 17.2% in Houston, 18.6% in El Paso and just 8.7% in San Antonio having a legal representation form filed on their behalf, bklg.org’s research found. These kids deserve lawyers,” Escobar said. At the same time, ORR officials have alarmed advocates by seeking multiple contracts for “emergency influx facilities” of up to 3,000 beds – despite the fact that such facilities can only open when the agency’s operational capacity reaches 85% or higher for multiple days, and ORR’s shelter and foster care network, by its own count, is operating at about 27% capacity.
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