The group of migrant children who were being held by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) contractor MVM Inc. at a Texas hotel will be able to remain in the U.S. for now to pursue their asylum cases, BuzzFeed News reports, after a number of top civil and immigrant rights organizations last week sued the Trump administration to stop their imminent deportation.
“We have stopped the expulsion of all unaccompanied children that were detained in the Hampton Inn Hotel,” Texas Civil Rights Project (TCPR), which launched the legal action alongside the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), said in a tweet. “This is a clear admission of wrongdoing by the Trump administration. However, we know there were many other families that were detained in that hotel and might still be disappeared. We’ll continue our efforts to stop this.”
The groups sued following a horrific AP report on July 22 finding that ICE has detained unaccompanied kids at a number of Hampton Inn & Suites locations in Arizona and Texas before quickly deporting them under a Stephen Miller-led order, and in violation of anti-trafficking law. According to an analysis by National Center for Youth Law attorney Melissa Adamson, over 200 kids were detained at hotels and then deported from April through May. Some were as young as 1.
When a legal advocate with TCRP tried to verify the well-being of an unknown number of children being detained at one Hampton Inn & Suites location in Texas within the past several days, he was violently shoved by unidentified men. Following public outrage, Hampton Inn & Suites owner Hilton rebuked the detentions and laid blame on individual franchises, saying that the company would be contacting all locations to remind them of their policy against this practice.
But as Hilton tried to calm public anger by saying the children were no longer at the McAllen location, immigration officials then refused to say where they had instead been sent, HuffPost reported Saturday. Following the groups’ lawsuit, the federal government has since said that the group numbers 17 people and includes some adults.
TCRP’s Efrén Olivares told BuzzFeed News that public pressure was significant in blocking the quick deportation of the group. “But for the efforts of the brave people who exposed this illegal practice ... the government would be perfectly happy to expel children without a trace,” he said in the report. “The legal groups that sued Friday night said they still plan to fight the larger practice in court,” The AP reported.
While the administration backing down following the legal action is a significant victory and helps secure this group’s presence in America so they can try to continue pursuing their claims, it only affects the 17, meaning many other families seeking safety in the U.S. continue to remain in danger. Additionally, “the Trump administration has not said it will stop using hotels to detain children,” the AP said.
Persistent pressure to protect families must continue. “The children in this hotel averted disaster only because we happened to hear about them before they were deported, yet hundreds if not thousands of other children are being sent back to harm in secret," ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt said, according to The AP. "The government must stop expelling children in secret without giving them asylum hearings.”