Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been illegally jailing children as young as 5 years old in a migrant family jail in Texas, an immigrant rights advocacy group said in a complaint filed this week. Under a decades-old court agreement, the government can detain migrant children for a maximum of 20 days. But the group says that in blatant violation of that order, some kids have been jailed anywhere from 41 to 58 days now.
“All children in detention, even those detained with their parents, have the same rights under Flores,” immigrant rights advocacy group RAICES said in the filing with the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. “The Flores agreement states that a child must be released from detention ‘without unnecessary delay’ so long as they do not pose a flight risk or danger, i.e. they must be released within 20 days. Prolonged detention of children, even with their fathers, is a clear violation of Flores.”
Children do not pose any risk, and under prolonged detention, it’s in fact the children themselves who are at risk. RAICES said that one child detained with his dad for over 40 days at Karnes Detention Center was traumatized. “His son ‘used to be a very active and friendly boy’ but has become ‘depressed’ and ‘feels the heaviness of this place’ in his weeks-long detention.” But rather than being released together, they were separated, the dad sent to one facility while the boy to another.
These aren’t even the youngest of ICE’s victims. Under pressure, ICE was recently forced to release at least 15 babies and their moms from Dilley’s South Texas Family Residential Center. At least nine detained babies were under the age of one. Children do not belong in detention, period. “The United Nations notes in its Convention on the Rights of the Child that child detention should be ‘used only as a measure of last resort and for the shortest appropriate period of time.”
“We ask DHS to immediately release all of these families, allowing them to continue fighting their cases outside of detention,” RAICES continues. “We call on the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties to investigate all violations of Flores protections at Karnes and we call on Congress to investigate conditions in the Karnes Detention Center.”
