ICE targets immigrants who host migrant children



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Photo: Joe Raedle / Getty Images

The United States government does not have the resources to expel all undocumented immigrants to the United States. America has too many deportation judges, detention beds and agents of the CIE. Thus, federal authorities must set priorities for the implementation of immigration. In the last years of the Obama administration, the ICE has given priority to the removal of undocumented migrants suspected of involvement in serious crimes; Under the Trump administration, the agency is ostensibly prioritizing the expulsion of immigrants who volunteer to care for migrant children stranded in states. United States without guardian. As reported by CNN:

Federal officers have arrested dozens of undocumented immigrants who have come forward to take care of undocumented immigrant children in government custody, and the Trump administration is taking action. is committed to go further.

On Tuesday, senior immigration and customs officer, Matthew Albence, told Congress that after signing an agreement protocol between health and social services and "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.

When unaccompanied minors cross the US border without papers – and pretend to seek asylum because of adverse conditions in their home country – they have the right to apply for asylum in court a process that can take months or even years. While migrant children are waiting for their day in court, the Refugee Resettlement Office (ORR) of the Department of Health is responsible for either taking them into federal custody or placing them in a sponsoring family in the United States.

ORR has traditionally considered the latter as preferable. In most cases, the children will be better off with a sponsoring family than they will be locked out, and placing them in the parents' family is also a less burdensome burden for the federal coffers. To facilitate the placement of migrant children – many of whom have undocumented immigrant parents in the United States – the immigration status is not taken into account in assessing whether an individual is fit to care for a child migrant. to present oneself.

But earlier this year, in response to previous cases in which the government put children in dangerous circumstances – or lost track of them – the HHS and ICE adopted a background check policy of all the sponsors. And instead of using these checks exclusively to ensure the safety of migrant children, the Trump administration has decided to use them as a means of identifying undocumented immigrants so that the ECI can hunt them down.

This policy would be expected to increase the number of migrant children stranded in federal detention centers (by fleeing a large category of potential sponsors). And this expectation seems to be correct: the number of migrant children placed in police custody by the HHS has exploded in recent months, with a record 13,000 detainees as of Thursday.

In all appearances, the White House sees this as a feature, and not a bug, of its policy of "abolishing undocumented immigrants who wish to ease the burden of their child." The administration has already lamented the fact that migrant children are allowed to live comfortably with their undocumented parents in the United States, while waiting to apply for asylum, describing the practice as a subversion of the law. As they have made clear in their family separation policy, Trump and his advisers believe that the US government has a duty to make the asylum claim in the US as unattractive as possible in order to discourage cross-border migration. And one way to do this is to keep as many migrant children as possible locked up in makeshift jails, giving priority to the expulsion of future caregivers from that of hardened criminals.

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