On his 18th birthday last year, an unleashed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency entered a child detention facility to arrest Erik Javier Flores Hernandez, an unaccompanied minor who had fled an abusive dad in Mexico in late 2016. Previously, his “compliance with guidelines … would likely have allowed for his release from the Office of Refugee Resettlement custody at 18.” But now the Trump administration is intentionally roadblocking avenues for detained migrant minors to be released, which then increases how long they remain in custody, which is now leading to “record numbers” of Eriks:
...[D]espite a federal law stating that ICE should place these immigrants in the “least restrictive setting” possible, lawyers from the National Immigrant Justice Center have accused immigration officers of sending teenagers straight to adult detention in a recent lawsuit.
In an email, an [Office of Refugee Resettlement] representative told HuffPost that the agency would not “speculate and has no specific data to confirm this theory” that increased vetting has led to more age-outs. When HuffPost asked ICE about whether it was sending 18-year-olds straight to adult detention in violation of federal law, a representative responded that “18-year-olds are not minors.”
“Roberto” was detained when he was 17, and despite having an uncle here in the U.S. stepping forward to sponsor him, the federal government took months to process his information, eating up precious time until his 18th birthday. On that day, Huffington Post continues, “officers put metal cuffs on his hands and legs and a chain around his waist,” and drove him to an adult facility where, in the span of a few hours, he went from being held with other youth like him, to a facility for hundreds of adult men. “He was imprisoned, despite having a relative who had applied to sponsor him.”
The Trump administration now has a record number of migrant kids in custody, the vast majority of them unaccompanied minors like Erik, and has used this intentional overcrowding—increased sponsor vetting in collaboration with ICE has led some to back off—to justify an ongoing prison camp in the Texas desert. One recent report found that some detained kids had already been in ORR custody for months before being sent to Texas. Now their next fear could be turning 18 there and ending up like Erik and Roberto. “Turning 18 is sort of a coming-of-age ritual,” the University of California, Davis’s Holly Cooper said. “But for these children, it’s ‘Happy Birthday, we’re sending you to prison.’ It’s just a very inhumane process that’s happening.”