The American Council of Immigration does not approve or oppose candidates for elected offices. We aim to provide an analysis of the impact of elections on the US immigration system.
Federal and state policy efforts targeting immigrant children are on the rise.
The new wave of abuse includes plans that clearly violate existing laws. Many of these attacks appear to be designed to increase court battles aimed at weakening the rights and well-being of American children.
Large-scale deportation plan for children
The ICE memo, leaked this week, instructs agents to plan to arrest and deport children who enter the country without parents. The deportation plan reportedly focuses on children with removal orders, including tens of thousands of cases in which children were removed just because of lack of court dates. The plan also includes the introduction of removal fees to immigration courts for children who have not yet had a removal order.
ICE’s public deportation plan likely relies in part on records from the Refugee Resettlement Office (ORR). This is tasked with caring for unaccompanied minors and releasing them to sponsors. The Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services have restored policies from the first Trump administration, including allowing ICE access to an ICE database of information about unaccompanied children and their sponsors. Agents also require all adult fingerprints, not just sponsors, in every household where a child is released.
A similar policy based on the previous Trump administration was challenged in court as they prevented sponsors from coming to look after their children for fear that they would be exposed to immigration enforcement by doing so. This led to children being detained for longer periods at the expense of their well-being. Using ORR data for ICE enforcement purposes will again get colder for sponsors towards caring for children, as they fear they will get caught up in ice dragnets.
The regime’s justification for seeking to deport children is to ensure that they are not victims of human trafficking or other exploitation. However, targeting children, including very young people, for arrest and deportation, does little to combat child trafficking and exploitation. If the child fails to appear at an immigration court hearing, it does not in itself indicate that they have been trafficked. It’s much more likely that it’s a sign that they don’t have a lawyer. If the administration actually cares about migrant children’s trafficking, it should pursue human traffickers, not children.
The Trump administration’s comprehensive mass expulsion plan also writes about disasters for millions of other children. Like 5.5 million US-born children living in families with at least one undocumented residents, legally presented immigrant children are at risk of family separation and other trauma.
Attempts to reduce legal aid for unaccompanied children
The administration has taken steps to help more children quickly track their public’s deportation plans by trying to steal their lawyers. Last week, the administration issued a “stop work” order to a federally funded nonprofit lawyer who provides representatives to 26,000 non-accompanied people in immigration courts. After the ground opposed the order, the administration restored the program a few days later. However, this may not be the end of the story as the lawyer’s five-year contract expires at the end of March. Several lawmakers urged the administration to renew it.
Expression is the key to getting relief from removal, and that is especially true for children. A recent study found that at some point in the case, a legal representative child is more than seven times more likely to be allowed to remain in the United States.
Attack on public education
Many state legislatures, including Tennessee, Oklahoma, Indiana and Texas, have introduced legislation that prohibits undocumented children from receiving free public K-12 education. These bills are Plylerv. It’s a blatant attack on Doe. This is a longtime Supreme Court case that clarifies the principles of the bedrock constitution, where states may not be taking children from education based on immigration status.
End birthright citizenship
What is unforgettable is the administration’s attempt to end birthright citizenship for the large numbers of immigrants here, with or without legal status. For now, several courts have halted their efforts, citing a clear conflict with the 14th amendment of the US Constitution. However, the government has already appealed one such order to the 9th Circuit. Ending birthright citizenship in this way could turn millions of children into undocumented immigrants of US citizens, an overnight subject to deportation, making many of them stateless.
These developments are shocking, but unfortunately not surprising. After all, this is the president who separated immigrant families during his first term, with around 1,000 children still not reuniting with their parents.
“Children are always ours, and we are all around the world. And I suspect that anyone who can’t recognize this may not be able to moralize.”
– James Baldwin, Domestic, 1980
Submitted below: Children, deportation, Trump administration
