For months now, the Trump administration has used a Stephen Miller-led public health order to unlawfully kick out thousands of unaccompanied migrant kids, claiming that allowing them into the U.S. is a COVID-19 risk. Under the CDC order, officials have bypassed immigration judges entirely to expel children including infants, and because kids aren’t even assigned identifying information after they’re taken initially taken into custody, advocates have said many are now “virtually impossible” to find. Remember—all of this is happening because officials claim it’s a matter of public health.
But new reporting from Dara Lind and Lomi Kriel in ProPublica lays the administration’s false claim to waste. Not only is Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) testing nearly all of these children for COVID-19, it’s still expelling them even after they test negative. “ICE’s comprehensive testing appears to undermine the rationale for the mass expulsion policy: that it is necessary to ‘prevent the introduction’ of COVID-19 into the United States,” they write.
“Between April and June, Customs and Border Protection officials encountered 3,379 unaccompanied minors at or between ports of entry,” Kriel reported earlier this month. But rather than quickly transferring them to Health and Human Services (HHS) custody to wait for placement with a relative already here or other sponsor, officials have kept many kids in hotels for days at a time until they can quickly kick them out, federal anti-trafficking laws be damned.
“The CDC’s original order banning the ‘introduction’ of migrants, from March, assumed that it would be impossible to test migrants for COVID-19,” Lind and Kriel report. “That was key to its rationale for barring their entry.” But it’s testing nearly all children, court documents and congressional hearings reveal, apparently as part of agreements with the countries where children are expelled back to. “Asked specifically about its claim to Congress that all countries agreeing to accept children required testing, and whether that was at odds with the stated rationale for the expulsion policy, ICE declined to clarify, citing ‘pending litigation,’” the report continued.
How convenient. Trump administration officials are also likely to not want to comment on how difficult it has been to locate these children after they’ve been sent back to whatever dangers they were escaping from in the first place. In her report earlier this month, Kriel reported that of these expelled children, only about three dozen have been located by advocacy groups. “Nobody can find them,” Kids in Need of Defense vice president for policy Jennifer Podkul told her.
In a recent letter led by Jacky Rosen of Nevada and Kamala Harris of California, more than two dozen senators demanded officials respect the rights of children and fully adhere to the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, further noting that acting CBP Commissioner Mark Morgan made “misleading” statements to them under oath. He had claimed that all children are screened for trafficking and protection concerns.
“Yet the available evidence does not support these claims,” senators write. “There have also been reports of children being required to sign documents in English, without a translation, and being expelled without explanation of what is happening to them.” He lied (nor is he the only current Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official to have lied to Congress).
Due to a recent lawsuit, a small number of adults and children who had been held at a Texas hotel will be allowed to remain in the U.S. to pursue their claims. But in the meantime, a racist twerp continues to head an unlawful effort to quickly kick out thousands of other children who have fled for their lives to the U.S., and quickly expelling them based on a racist lie that they pose a danger to the nation. Nope—it’s Stephen Miller and coopting of federal agencies like DHS that pose the actual danger. As Jean Guerrero recently noted in The Nation, “Acting DHS secretary Chad Wolf is regurgitating Miller’s apocalyptic talking points.”
“The Trump administration’s claim that they need to summarily expel children because of COVID was always a pretext,” Lee Gelernt of the American Civil Liberties Union told ProPublica. “If they are now actually testing and know the children do not have COVID, then the policy is that much more unjustified.”