A number of top civil and immigrant rights organizations have sued the Trump administration to stop the imminent expulsion of unaccompanied migrant children who were being illegally held at the McAllen, Texas, location of a popular hotel chain by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) contractor in recent days.
“This week, we’ve uncovered potentially hundreds of asylum-seekers and children detained in a hotel in McAllen, Texas,” the Texas Civil Rights Project (TCRP) tweeted. “The government is disappearing asylum seekers—even children—without a trace. Without due process, there’s no paper trail. When we tried to provide legal assistance at a hotel in McAllen where they are illegally detaining people, our staff was violently shoved and removed.”
Public furor over the jailing of children who came to the U.S. by themselves at several of Hampton Inn & Suites’ Arizona and Texas locations escalated after unidentified men presumably with ICE contractor MVM Inc. shoved an attorney who attempted to at least verify the well-being of the children detained at a McAllen, Texas, location. “Outside of the hotel, we saw families from the windows asking us for help but they don’t have phones to contact us,” TCRP tweeted.
Hampton Inn & Suites owner Hilton publicly rebuked the detentions, claiming in a statement that individual franchises made the decision to rent their rooms as baby jails and that the company would be contacting all locations to remind them of their policy against this practice. But even more terrifying is that as Hilton tried to assuage public anger by saying the children were no longer at the McAllen location, no one seems to know where they are now.
“The suit was filed in U.S. district court in Washington, D.C., on behalf of an unknown number of children in U.S. custody who were at the hotel—but have since vanished,” HuffPost reported. “Immigration officials have refused to say how many children were being held at the hotel as of Thursday, provide their names, or reveal where they are now, according to the lawsuit.” Completely fucking outrageous.
“The Trump administration is holding children in secret in hotels, refusing to give lawyers access to them so it can expel them back to danger without even a chance for the children to show they warrant asylum,” American Civil Liberties Union attorney Lee Gelernt told CBS News. “Unfortunately, this is just the latest in a series of steps taken by the Trump administration to abuse and terrorize children.”
As TRCP’s Zenen Jaimes Perez warned outside the location last week, under white supremacist Trump adviser Stephen Miller’s policy exploiting the novel coronavirus pandemic to quickly deport kids in violation of anti-trafficking law, “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.” Where those kids TCRP advocates tried to check in on are now is unknown, now leading to this legal action:
In a statement released following initial reports of the Trump administration’s actions, advocacy group Kids In Need of Defense called the detentions a “violation of basic child welfare standards,” and said the practice “flagrantly violates” the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act. “This is yet another egregious example of how the Trump Administration is circumventing laws and policies designed to protect immigrant children to advance its deeply flawed immigration agenda.”
