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The news will serve as confirmation of the worst fears of immigrants and their supporters: a recent decision by President Donald Trump's government to better control the people who care for undocumented immigrant children who are alone in the United States has been a way of the administration to track down and arrest more undocumented immigrants.
On Tuesday, the senior immigration and customs officer, Matthew Albence, told Congress that after signing a memorandum of understanding between health and social services and the "sponsors" Potential immigrant children, the ICE has arrested 41 people.
In response to a CNN investigation, an ICE official confirmed that 70% of these arrests involved simple immigration violations, which means that they were stopped because the ICE had discovered that they were illegally here.
The individuals could have been the parents or family members of the children and they could also have simply belonged to the homes of adults who asked to look after the children while they were fighting for a right to stay in the United States.
"Until now, we have arrested 41 people we have identified (memorandum)," said Tuesday Mr. Albence. "Nearly 80% of people who are sponsors or household members of sponsors are here in the country illegally, and a large part of them are criminal aliens, so we continue to sue these individuals.
ICE made these arrests from early July to early September; of these, only 12 were criminal arrests, according to an ICE official speaking on condition that their name is not used.
The remaining 29 were non-criminal or "administrative" arrests, as in the case of immigration-related offenses.
The number of immigrant children detained by the HHS has exploded to record levels, with more than 13,000 detainees as of Thursday. The average length of custody has almost doubled since 2016, reaching an average of 59 days, and the release rate has decreased by thousands of children each month. Overcrowding has pushed HHS to triple the size of a temporary tent that it opened in Texas at the height of the family separation crisis.
It has long been true that undocumented children who arrive in the United States on their own often seek to be placed with relatives who may also live illegally in the United States. The administration described the process of circumventing the law in order to exploit more lenient policies towards children, even calling them "smuggling" of children.
But the lawyers who work with the children and the lawyers who represent them say that many of these children are fleeing extremely dangerous situations in their home country and have legitimate claims to stay in the United States, which could take years. Family and friends who are already in the United States can offer them stable homes in pursuit of these possibilities of legal status.
HHS does not consider a person's immigration status to be a determining factor for its ability to take care of children, and the Obama administration has not taken the usual course of action. Stop people who have run for office. The Trump administration has hinted that it would take the opposite approach, and Thursday's revelation confirmed it.
The administration has made it clear that it considers that any undocumented immigrant can be arrested and has targeted laws designed to protect children as "loopholes" that attract more illegal immigration.
Experts who focus on children warn that the use of the HHS system, designed as a gateway for traumatized children in a situation where they can legally claim to remain in the United States, as an application branch of the law is contrary to the principles of protection of childhood.
Meanwhile, the system is already taxed beyond its normal population.
The HHS Refugee Resettlement Office "has a rather difficult job to do when it can focus on family service to reunite children with their families and when this mission is compromised by asking them to gather information for of immigration enforcement, which goes against their primary mission and is contrary to the best interests of children, "said Maria Cancian, former deputy assistant secretary of the HHS and professor at the 39, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
A former Obama administration official feared that the government's new tactics would harm children in his custody.
"These are children who have fled some of the most violent countries in the world, many of whom have suffered trauma … rapes, robberies, all sorts of exploitation," said Bob Carey, who ran the country's office. HHS. Obama Administration.
"The question I would ask is: do the measures legitimately strengthen security?" added Carey, who is now a member of the leadership and government with the Open Society Foundations. "The ultimate safety is not giving children to a sponsor, because nothing would happen to them, but how much harm are you doing by keeping children in detention indefinitely in contexts that have never been designed for that? "
In September 2017, ICE Acting Director Tom Homan said at a public event that his agency would arrest undocumented migrants who volunteered to take care of children.
"You can not hide in the shadows," said Homan at a security event on the Washington border, adding that parents had to be "shoulder to shoulder" with their children in front of them. courts. "We're going to put the parents on trial, the immigration procedures, at least, is it cruel?" I do not think so. "
CLARIFICATION: This story and its title have been updated to clarify who ICE has stopped.
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