Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been sweeping up dozens of undocumented high school students and falsely accusing them of being members of Central American gang MS-13, advocates say. Immigration lawyer Bryan Johnson told NPR that ICE has been using even the most remote of links to round up the teenagers in this witchhunt. Even if “they were seen sitting in class next to someone who was a gang member, they're fair game.” One teen was arrested and spent a month in detention before being released by a judge due to lack of evidence. Now the girl is terrified of continuing her education. "I'm scared to go back to that school," she said. "Look at everything I went through just for attending that school”:
"None of them have been convicted of crimes, keep that in mind," Johnson said. "They have no criminal history. They never hurt anyone. They are from Central America and this administration is hunting them in the false name of public safety."
The teen from Long Island walked to the U.S. from El Salvador, without a parent, when she was 16-years-old. It took a month-and-a-half.
NPR agreed not to name the students because they worry that speaking out could hurt their cases.
Thousands of so-called "unaccompanied minors" have fled violence in Central America in recent years. The classifications mean the government cannot turn them away, and must resettle them somewhere in the country. But if immigration authorities believe they are a threat or danger, they can seek to deport them.
And they would deport them back to the violence they fled from in the first place. ICE has already been shown to have a history of doctoring evidence in order to falsely accuse immigrant youth of having gang ties, earlier this year framing Seattle Dreamer Daniel Medina in what his attorney called “one of the most serious examples of governmental misconduct that I have come across in my 40 years of practice.”
Now the federal immigration agency is escalating arrests of innocent kids under Donald Trump’s alleged MS-13 crackdown, which has been nothing more than an excuse to further demonize immigrant families and continue ramping up his immoral, mass deportation force:
In one case, Johnson says his client was suspended from school for drawing bull horns on a school calculator, a symbol associated with the MS-13 gang.
He is now in detention.
Another young person is in detention after being arrested by police for fighting on a soccer field with a suspected MS-13 member.
According to documents obtained by his lawyer, police were notified when he was suspended from school from drawing the numbers 503 in a notebook. It's the international calling code for El Salvador, where the teen is from, and where the gang, which started in Los Angeles, has ties.
“If you’re Hispanic and in the Brentwood area here, and you’re a young kid who came here recently, you’re living in a police state,” Johnson told the New York Times. “Anything you do, you go to school, you’re under investigation.”
