He just wanted to earn some extra money over the summer to help his mom with bills and buy an iPhone. He ended up getting detained by federal immigration officials and thrown into a prison camp for migrant children in Florida.
The Miami Herald reports that a 16-year-old teen was separated from his family for two weeks and jailed in the Homestead prison camp after he was detained while on the way to a construction worksite with his uncle. The boy, who was released and reunited with his mom on Sunday, has lived in the U.S. since he was just 9 months old.
“According to Refugio County police, the boy was detained on an immigration violation,” the Miami Herald reported. “Because his biological parent was not present during the traffic stop, he was classified as an ‘unaccompanied minor,’” and sent to Homestead. The Trump administration has claimed that the prison camp jails only kids that came to the U.S. alone (not that that’s okay either, because kids don’t belong in detention), but children there have said they’ve been separated from their families.
Following his release, the boy recalled being taken first to jail, then to Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention. “I begged to call my mom at all three places but they were like: ‘You can’t get a call,’” in violation of policy, he said. “Oh, and I didn’t get to shower, or brush my teeth for those days,” he continued. He didn’t get his first call to his mom until two days after he was sent on a bus to Homestead.
Meanwhile, “though the mother knew her son was in custody, she still didn’t know where he had been taken to. For days, she called ICE and [Customs and Border Protection] and got no answers. She said they kept bouncing her from agency to agency.” She said, “It wasn’t until I lied and told them I knew my child was at Homestead that they confirmed. In reality I didn’t know that, I just remember seeing Homestead on the news.”
Advocates have been calling for Homestead’s closure for months, and in the past weeks have received support from a number of 2020 Democratic presidential candidates, all of whom have been blocked from entering the facility. Sen. Elizabeth Warren was among those refused entry, but she said she did catch a glance of the children through the fencing. “These are children who are prisoners,” she said.
This teen hasn’t been alone, either: “Lawyers for teens at the Homestead facility say they’ve represented at least 20 other kids with similar cases: all were apprehended in the United States far from border towns or ports of entries without immigration documents, and while they were not physically with their biological parents, who live in the U.S.”
While the boy is now back with his mom, his future is uncertain. Health and Human Services and Office of Refugee Resettlement “have the IDs of the child and his mother. Officials say that information is not supposed to be shared with ICE.” As the Miami Herald notes, the boy would have possibly been eligible for protection from deportation under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, but the Trump administration is allowing no new applicants.
Remember that the Trump administration’s policies aren’t only traumatizing children at the border; they’re also traumatizing children who already call the U.S. their home. “He begged to call his mom but the police and immigration agents didn’t allow him to,” the boy’s uncle recalled about their arrest. “My nephew was crying so bad, it was devastating seeing him be taken away from me.”