Immigration 101: Do They Really Put Children in Cages?

Note: This is the fourth and final post in a series of posts focusing on the illegal immigrant situation in the US. While much of this is informed by my personal feelings and opinions, I do not claim to be unbiased, I have tried to share sources whenever possible. Please feel free to share with me your thoughts, but I ask that you would do so in love. Any comments given that are hurtful will be deleted, though they cannot be deleted from my mind, so consider our relationship when posting please.

Image courtesy of WikiMedia Commons

I put off writing this post, I think. It's the hardest one for me to write because the subject is so precious and therefore so scary to me. Today I'm writing about how illegal immigration affects children. One wouldn't think that it's a major problem, but the more I learn, the more concerns I have. And it's not just immigrant children that are affected, other children are as well.

According to this article, nearly 150,000 come to the border by themselves every year (1). These unaccompanied minors can be as young as 2 years old. Can you imagine? Encountering a two-year-old child in this capacity? His father had presumably pinned a note to him saying, "My mother lives in South Carolina" and told him to go across. Is this a Moses-like case where his father was just trying to provide? Only God knows.

Unaccompanied minor can be a misnomer as well. Just because they are called this doesn't mean that they approached the border alone, it means they left it that way. Children can be in the care of their parents and then separated at the border. Sadly, they can also be brought there by smugglers. As I shared in this post, slavery is a very real evil that is alive and well in our nation and it is often fed in this way. The children that are separated from smugglers here are saved in a way, but to what end?

During President Trump's first administration, a shocking and tragic policy was enacted that separated families in the case of deportation. Family separations happened rarely before the policy was enacted. In 2016 it is estimated that 0.3% of children in the care of the Office of Refuge Resettlement (ORR) had been separated from their families by Border Patrol. That doesn't seem like much, but keep in mind 0.3% still represents over one hundred children! However, over the next year, the officials in this department witnessed a steep increase in the number of children who had been separated from their parents representing over 1,490 that year. This all took place before President Trump announced his "Zero Tolerance Policy" that officially allowed families to be separated. Thankfully, there were more checks and balances taking place at that point because while the policy was announced in April of 2018, it was stopped by June of the same year. A lawsuit was filed in order for a parent to be reunited with their children, and another family and another were added until it became a class action suit called Ms. L v. ICE. The judge on this case ruled that ORR had to reunite children under 5 with their parents within 14 days and those 5-17 years old within 30 days. (2)

While this seems like a win, further problems arose when it turned out ORR wasn't really keeping track of which kids had been separated from their parents very well. Kids were spread out everywhere and no one knew who belonged with who. It took the department more than 5 months, much more than the 14 days ordered by the court, to figure it all out and by that point they had identified 2,737 children that this class action applied to. There were still lots of others out there that didn't fall within the direct guidelines of this case. Mind you, this is not being reported by a biased media outlet, this information was all taken directly from a report published directly from ORR.

So how were these children cared for during the year or so that they were separated from their parents? For that matter, how do we handle the care of the tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors (UACs) that cross the border every year? It's a tough situation, I have no doubt, and I do not envy those in charge of figuring it out. I do, however, hold them accountable.

This picture was widely shared on the internet in 2018 and while this Snopes article points out that the picture was actually taken in 2014, it doesn't change the situation. This article was written to debunk a couple of photos posted by an actress as they did not directly apply to what she was talking about, but went on to share that conditions were actually worse: (3)

From sleeping on concrete floors with the lights on 24 hours a day to no access to soap or basic hygiene, migrant children in at least two U.S. Customs and Border Protection facilities face conditions one doctor described as comparable to "torture facilities."
...she described conditions for unaccompanied minors at the McAllen facility as including "extreme cold temperatures, lights on 24 hours a day, no adequate access to medical care, basic sanitation, water, or adequate food."

These facilities are intended to hold people for up to 72 hours, but when detainees were interviewed for the previous articles, ALL of them had been there longer, some for three weeks or more. They were not given soap, toothbrushes or toothpaste, inadequate food and no way to clean themselves, or even their babies' bottles. President Trump's administration's response: The 1997 consent decree, known as the Flores Settlement Agreement, didn’t say anything about providing a “toothbrush,” “towels,” “dry clothing,” “soap,” or even “sleep,” the administration has argued. (4) You're kidding me, right? In 2019 the administration went to court to fight a 2017 ruling that stated they had not provided safe and sanitary conditions for migrants. They argued, "that it shouldn’t be required to give detained migrant children toothbrushes, soap, towels, showers or even half a night’s sleep inside Border Patrol detention facilities." (5) Sadly, that article went on to share that six children had died in the detention center in the last nine months. The judges hearing the case were astounded. But these are the conditions faced by children, many of the children having just been ripped away from their parents. Some of them are infants, less than six months old. And the separations didn't stop with the end of the "Zero Tolerance" protocol. Over the next year more than 700 children were removed from their parents. (6)

In this June 17, 2018, file photo, provided by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, people who have been taken into custody related to cases of illegal entry into the United States, sit in one of the cages at a facility in McAllen, Texas.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection's Rio Grande Valley Sector via AP

What happens to these kids when they finally leave the detention facility? The lucky ones are found sponsors, family or friends who are willing to take them in. The rest go into ORR care and are placed into immigrant youth shelters. This article destroyed me, and I caution you against reading it if you are sensitive to descriptions of abuse and harm to children, but it opened my eyes and broke my heart for the plight of these children. Inspectors have visited these facilities and cited them with hundreds of violations, and yet the government keeps giving them millions of dollars and sending vulnerable children there. The article, published in 2018, shared that American tax payers had given these privately owned shelters more than $1.5 billion over the previous four years. With inflation, I can't imagine what our last four years have cost us!

A 10-year-old girl recovering from brain cancer was removed with her undocumented parents last month. The Texas Civil Rights Project blurred the photograph for safety purposes.Texas Civil Rights Project

But all that was during Trump's last presidency. What's happening now? I didn't think you could shock me after all that I had read leading up to this, but I was definitely shocked to hear that children who are US Citizens are being deported when their parents are not here legally. I guess this is President Trump's answer to avoiding breaking up families, just deport them all. And while I can hear an argument for this in the interest of keeping families together, there has got to be limits. This week a story came out about a 10-year-old girl, a US citizen, who was being treated for a brain tumor. She was having symptoms of brain swelling (hydrocephalus) and was on her way to see her doctor when officers at a check point detained and then deported her family, including both her parents and three of her other siblings - another of which has a serious medical condition as well. And yes, two of her other siblings were US citizens as well. The family shared in the article that they had letters from their daughter's doctor that had previously been suitable for passing through checkpoints like the one they faced, but under the current administration and its staunch anti-immigrant policies, they were no longer accepted. Her parents had no criminal history apart from being in the country without documentation. They were taken to a detention facility and from there moved by van to the other side of the border with Mexico and dropped off. The girl was still suffering symptoms of her brain swelling causing speech difficulties and trouble with motor control on the right side of her body. I personally feel for this little girl as I, too, have a brain tumor and have suffered from hydrocephalus. Her medical care is critical and I'm certain she cannot find the type of care she needs where she's at now. This girl matters. Her siblings matter. Her parents matter. Yes, they were given the opportunity to relinquish custody of their children to the Department of Human Services (DHS) but under the circumstances, would you? This family was living in America for 13 years, working jobs, paying taxes. They didn't harm anyone. They didn't take any jobs you would want. They were just trying to live life and provide for their children, just like you and me. (7)

Starting with his first week in office, President Trump began enacting policies and directives that reversed earlier protections given to people in vulnerable positions. No child should feel unsafe when going to school or church, that's just a basic truth. But that's exactly what is happening. Immigrant children, children who are US citizens with immigrant parents, and US children with US parents are all having their lives upended by the fear of ICE. Schools have seen unprecedented absences since these policies began. This article shares, "Students who are undocumented, students in households where one or more relatives are undocumented, immigrant students with visas or other temporary protections against deportation, and U.S.-born citizens with friends who aren’t showing up to school out of fear of deportation are among those experiencing fear and concern over the Trump administration’s priority of mass deportations and other changes to federal immigration policy." All the kids are being affected.

Here's the Thing: I can't do anything to fix this. I can't stop families being separated. I can't stop the horrific abuse of children that my tax dollars are going to fund. I don't have the answers to fix the system if you asked me. I just know it's wrong. I know it makes my Savior weep. I can't imagine my children being put in that situation for even a day, let alone months or years. I didn't even tell all the stories I read, I just couldn't. All I can do is count on my just God to make it right.