Campaign Action
The Trump administration is trying to detain migrant families indefinitely based on a total lie. Officials are proposing to eviscerate standards protecting migrant kids under U.S. custody in order to keep them locked up for months, perhaps years, in part by claiming that “in many cases, families do not appear for immigration court hearings after being released”—except the facts say otherwise.
“Overall, 86% of families released from immigration detention attended all of their court hearings, according to a study by the American Immigration Council that reviewed more than 18,000 immigration court hearings initiated between 2001 and 2016,” Buzzfeed reports. “That percentage exceeded 90% when only families who'd filed asylum applications were considered.”
Parents have plenty of incentive to go to court—if they don’t, they risk losing their chance at winning asylum. Legal access also makes a huge difference. "With a lawyer explaining the immigration court process,” said law professor Ingrid Eagly, “I think people are more likely to understand what the process is and where and when they need to go.”
The numbers are even higher when looking at pilot programs like the Family Case Management Program (FCMP), an alternative to detention established under the Obama administration. “99 percent of the program’s participants ‘successfully attended their court appearances and ICE check-ins,’” The Atlantic reported last year. Yet, the Trump administration shut it down.
Children do not belong in detention, period. “The family detention facilities in our study have also been the sites of severe medical neglect and psychological trauma and have been found to violate basic standards for detaining children,” the AIC’s study said. Several of these facilities are managed by private prison companies, including the GEO Group and CoreCivic—corporations that have been widely criticized for operating facilities with substandard conditions and poor accountability.”