Granted new authority by the CDC amid the COVID-19 pandemic, border agents have expelled 2,175 unaccompanied migrant children to their home countries.
EL PASO, Texas – Miguel sat in a Phoenix hotel room for the third night in a row, taking meals alone, watching TV in a language he longed to understand.
"The CDC order is just being used to prevent unaccompanied children from coming into the country," said Mark Greenberg, a senior fellow with the non-partisan Migration Policy Institute who led the agency responsible for the welfare of children during the Obama administration. A child by any other nameUnder the protocol, Border Patrol no longer automatically labels minors traveling alone as “unaccompanied alien children” except in narrow circumstances. Instead, the underage migrants are being called “single minors.”The new designation is more than semantics, advocates say: It allows the government to avoid triggering the anti-trafficking law that protects vulnerable people, especially children.
"Unaccompanied children who are denied protection are at risk for future victimization and forms of harm that no child deserves," the directors said. Miguel didn't want to talk about the threat with his aunt, but she said she knew something was wrong. By April, a majority of children arriving alone at the U.S. border — 600 — were processed as"single minors." Just 166 were labeled"unaccompanied alien children" and turned over to the refugee agency, CBP said.
"I can’t get too specific because it’s law enforcement sensitive," Dyman said."We don’t want smugglers to explain to people under the age of 18 how to avoid Title 42 expulsion. The CDC order states that immigrants arriving by land through Canada or Mexico without proper documents “must be returned to the country from which they entered the United States, to their country of origin, or to another appropriate location.”
In summer 2019, Office of Refugee Resettlement leadership determined that boosting capacity in its network of state-licensed, permanent shelters was the best way to prevent that dangerous bottleneck from happening again. Congress agreed and provided an extra $2.9 billion in emergency funding, in part to cover the costs of building new shelters.
At the peak of last year’s immigration flows in May 2019, CBP apprehended 11,475 unaccompanied minors and the Office of Refugee Resettlement had more than 13,000 minors in its care. As of March, Hayes is no longer overseeing the refugee agency. The Trump administration reassigned him to help with the coronavirus pandemic. He and 21 other minors boarded an ICE Air plane in Phoenix in late May, destined for Guatemala City. They were all quiet, Miguel said; if they were as anxious as he was about what would happen next, they didn't show it.
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