A federal appeals court on Sunday left in place a federal judge’s ruling last month that ordered the Trump administration to stop detaining asylum-seeking children and families in hotels as part of its unlawful and secretive process quickly expelling them from the U.S. At least 660 children have been held by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in this manner and without appropriate oversight since July, BuzzFeed News has said.
The Associated Press reports that U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit judges “were sharply critical of the administration during oral arguments, questioning why children in the hotels were not guaranteed access to lawyers and why the government wasn’t using existing youth shelters that have thousands of empty beds.” But as I previously noted following Judge Dolly Gee’s ruling, while officials must stop hotel detentions, the expulsions continue.
The Trump administration has, under a Stephen Miller-led public health order, exploited the pandemic to block asylum-seekers from protections in the U.S., including nearly 9,000 children since March. But adding onto the lawlessness and cruelty of quickly kicking out children in violation of anti-trafficking law were reports that officials have bypassed the Health and Human Services (HHS) system entirely and kept kids detained at hotels and not licensed facilities, as they await expulsion.
Immigrant rights advocates flocked to one Hampton Inn & Suites location in McAllen, Texas, following the very first reports of the hotel detentions but were physically blocked from verifying the well-being of children being detained there.
In video from legal advocacy group Texas Civil Rights Project (TCRP) in July, Andrew Udelsman, an attorney with the organization, was violently confronted by men presumably with ICE contractor MVM Inc. after exiting an elevator at the hotel. The men, wearing protective gear but no identification, quickly blocked the attorney, who yelled in Spanish in the direction of the rooms that he’s a lawyer and was there to help. As one of the men then more aggressively shoved him back, he again yelled to the children in Spanish, asking them to say their names and if they’re in trouble. He wasn’t able to see any of the children.
TRCP’s Zenen Jaimes Perez said at the time that under Miller’s expulsion policy, “no one is being afforded due process. We have children and other asylum seekers in here, with no paper trail. This is literally a black box of information. If we cannot get their information, they will be expelled from this county, back into violence.”
There’s “no excuse for DHS to skirt the fundamental humanitarian protections that the Flores agreement guarantees for minors in their custody,” Gee said according to BuzzFeed News, “especially when there is no persuasive evidence that hoteling is safer than licensed facilities.” Of course, the best and most humane option is that kids not be held in these facilities at all and instead be allowed to stay with a relative or other sponsor as soon as safely possible, but ICE has a history of impeding that process as well.
Overall there’s no valid reason why this expulsion policy kicking out children and families is in place. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had in fact initially refused to give in to Miller’s demand, until he successfully pushed Mike Pence into intervening and pressuring CDC director Robert Redfield to sign off on the order. We already knew that Pence disguises his own cruelty behind that trademark concerned furrowed brow, but the fact that he allows himself to be bullied by a racist twerp is a more recent development.
“It is a sad fact that court involvement was needed once again to ensure the basic safety of children,” National Center for Youth Law attorney Leecia Welch said according to the AP.