Federal and state policy efforts targeting immigrant kids are on the rise.
The new wave of cruelty includes plans that plainly violate existing law. Many of these attacks seem designed to tee up court battles intended to weaken the rights and wellbeing of children in the United States.
Mass Child Deportation Plan
An ICE memo that leaked this week directs the agency to work up plans to arrest and deport kids who entered the country without their parents. The deportation plans reportedly focus on children with removal orders, including tens of thousands of cases where a child was ordered removed solely due to missing a court date. The plan also includes introducing removal charges in immigration court against children who do not already have removal orders.
ICE’s mass child deportation plan will presumably rely in part on records from the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), the agency tasked with caring for unaccompanied minors and releasing them to sponsors—many of whom are parents or other relatives. The Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services have reinstituted policies from the first Trump administration, including allowing ICE access to ORR’s database of information regarding unaccompanied children and their sponsors. The agencies will also require fingerprinting of all adults, not just sponsors, in any household where a child will be released.
Similar policies under the prior Trump administration were challenged in court because they deterred sponsors from coming forward to care for children out of fear that doing so would subject them to immigration enforcement. This led to children being detained for longer periods of time, at the expense of their wellbeing. ICE’s use of ORR data for enforcement purposes will again chill sponsors from stepping forward to care for children because they fear being caught up in ICE’s dragnet.
The administration’s purported justification for seeking to deport children is ensuring they are not victims of human trafficking or other exploitation. But targeting children—including the very young—for arrest and deportation will upend their lives while doing little to combat child trafficking and exploitation. A child’s failure to show up to an immigration court hearing is not, on its own, an indication that they have been trafficked. It’s much more likely a sign that they do not have an attorney. If the administration really cares about the trafficking of migrant children, it should pursue traffickers, not children.
The Trump administration’s overarching mass deportation plans also spell disaster for millions of other children. Lawfully present immigrant children, as well as the 5.5 million U.S.-born children who live in households with at least one undocumented resident, are also at risk of family separation and other trauma.
Attempted Cuts to Legal Aid for Unaccompanied Kids
The administration took steps to fast-track more children into its mass child deportation plan by trying to take away their lawyers. Last week, the administration issued a “stop-work” order to the federally funded nonprofit attorneys providing representation to 26,000 unaccompanied children in immigration court. After a groundswell of opposition to the order, the administration restored the program just days later. This may not be the end of the story, however, because the attorneys’ five-year contract expires at the end of March. Several lawmakers have urged the administration to renew it.
Representation is key to obtaining relief from removal, and that is especially true for kids. One recent study found that a child with legal representation at some point during their case was more than seven times more likely to be allowed to remain in the United States.
Attacks on Public Education
A number of state legislatures, including in Tennessee, Oklahoma, Indiana, and Texas, have introduced bills that would bar undocumented children from receiving free public K-12 education. These bills are a blatant attack on Plyler v. Doe, a longstanding Supreme Court case articulating the bedrock constitutional principle that states may not deprive children of education based on their immigration status.
Ending Birthright Citizenship
Not to be forgotten is the administration’s attempt to end birthright citizenship for children of a large swath of immigrants here with and without legal status. Multiple courts have put a halt to that effort, for now, citing its clear conflict with the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. But the government has already appealed one such order to the Ninth Circuit. Ending birthright citizenship in this way could turn millions of children from U.S. citizens into undocumented immigrants, subject to deportation, overnight, and it would likely leave many of them stateless.
These developments are shocking but unfortunately not surprising. After all, this is the president that separated immigrant families during his first term, with approximately 1,000 children still not reunited with their parents.
“The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.”
– James Baldwin, in the Nation, 1980
FILED UNDER: Children, Deportation, Trump administration
