What happens when the federal government forcibly separates young migrant children and teens from parents at the border due to a barbaric “zero tolerance” policy? You get children, some barely old enough for kindergarten, facing a judge by themselves in immigration court:
“In some cases, children as young as 5 will be in front of an immigration judge, expected to explain why they should not be deported and manage the legal process that is required to prove that,” said Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch, an immigration lawyer who has been interviewing migrant women.
It’s a fact that when immigrants have legal representation, they are more likely to be able to stay in the U.S. But unlike the criminal court system, the law does not guarantee representation to immigrants in immigration court, including the most vulnerable. According to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University, last year only 33 percent of unaccompanied kids had representation.
No child can or should be expected to do this, but children already have been appearing in court by themselves. “Babies are subject to deportation,” said Wendy Young, president of Kids in Need of Defense (KIND). “The norm is that babies are supposed to be with their parent and the parent would speak for the baby.” But the administration has been creating unaccompanied kids, by tearing them from their parents, and now turning what was already a bad problem into an even worse one.
Experts anticipate this process to further traumatize kids who escaped dangerous situations with their parents, only to be torn from their arms at the border due to the Trump administration’s barbaric policy. Young kids who can’t describe much more than their names and where they lived cannot be expected to recount the asylum claims of their parents, leaving them all the more vulnerable to being deported back to danger and remaining separated from parents:
“If a mother is taking her child out of a situation where the child is in danger, she’s not going to tell her daughter that she could be raped or killed,” said [attorney Kate] Lincoln-Goldfinch. “She’s just going to tell her she’s going somewhere safe.” But if kids don’t know why they need asylum, Lincoln-Goldfinch added, they are at greater risk of being deported.
Despite Donald Trump’s sham executive order, there is still no plan in place to immediately reunite the more than 2,000 kids who have been separated from parents since last month. In fact, what he has done is instead indicate that the number of detained migrants will only surge, following reports that the administration is in the planning stages of building two “short-term detention camps on two U.S. military bases” in Texas to imprison as many as 20,000 migrants, maybe more.
This remains a crisis—but one that advocates are pushing hard against, including crowdfunding large amounts of cash to pay for legal representation for both kids and parents. While these kids shouldn’t be detained in the first place, if they are being forced to appear in immigration court without their parents by the federal government, the most helpful action to take is to make sure they have an advocate with them looking out for their best interests.
Can you give $5 to help keep families together and make sure that no child has to appear in court without an attorney?