They broke records. During fiscal year 2019, the Border Patrol of the southwestern United States-Mexico border detained 76,020 unaccompanied migrant children. That is almost 26,000 more than in 2018: 52%, according to the latest data from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection office.
They arrived from the countries of the Northern Triangle –Guatemala (30, 329 children), Honduras (20,398) and El Salvador (12,021)– and from Mexico (10,487).
The figure not only greatly exceeded the previous year’s arrests, but also went higher than the record number of arrests of unaccompanied minors in 2014, during the Obama administration.
In 2014, the massive arrival of unaccompanied children at the border was considered an unprecedented immigration crisis.
That year, the number of unaccompanied minors detained from the countries of the Northern Triangle reached 68,541. The crisis pushed then-Vice President Joe Biden to travel to Central America and meet with the authorities of the three countries. “We see this wave of unaccompanied immigrant children along the southwest border of the United States as a serious humanitarian challenge,” Biden said in an interview at the time. President Barack Obama, for his part, asked parents in an interview with ABC: “Don’t send your children to the border. If they arrive, we will send them back and, more importantly, they may not make it.”
This time, with Donald Trump’s zero tolerance immigration policy, the numbers take off.
Univision’s Patricia Clarembaux explains in an article that the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement is in charge of guarding these minors until their deportation. The authorities send them to shelters run by nonprofit organizations, where children should spend no more than 45 days.
But in 2018, Clarembaux continues, the time children spent in these centers increased. “Among other things, because of changes in policies that slowed the process of checking the background of potential guardians and because many of the parents did not directly claim the children but through a relative with legal status for fear of being deported.”
In January 2019, a 3,800-bed facility in Tornillo, Texas to house minors was shut down, transferring them to other shelters.
According to an Associated Press and Frontline investigation published this month and signed by Garance Burke and Martha Mendoza, the Trump government is diverting a portion of migrant children’s care from mostly religious nongovernmental organizations to a private, for-profit organization. Comprehensive Health Services is the private company that provides this service with federal funding. As of June 2019, according to the investigative report, more than 20 percent of migrant children in their custody were in their care.
Much more families were arrested, too
The number of families arrested by the Southwest Border Patrol also grew rapidly in 2019: 342% in one year. If in 2018, patrolmen arrested 107,212 families, this year they arrested 473,682.
The families arrived from the same countries as the unaccompanied minors, but in this case the majority were coming from Honduras (188,416).
The number of adults detained rose less, 26% from 2018. That is 301,806 adults; 149,967 of them arrived from Mexico.
Trump’s immigration policy has impacted the migrant families in other ways. For example, as indicated in a report by Europa Press and Reuters, the authorities sent 13,000 minors, 400 babies among them, to wait in Mexico with their families for the date of the hearings of the immigration courts on their application for asylum in the U.S. This has happened since January 2019. The wait could take months. They come mostly from the countries of the Northern Triangle.
This is part of the Trump administration’s program called Migrant Protection Protocols, which began in January.
“The risk of violence and disease is high and of special concern to families with young children or those suffering chronic health conditions, according to interviews with health professionals, migrants, human rights defenders and lawyers,” says the Europa Press and Reuters report.
Trump government authorities have separated more than 5,400 children from their families at the border since July 1, 2017. The American Civil Liberties Union recently revealed these data that the government provided to its lawyers.
A San Diego judge ordered a halt to the practice in June 2018, “except in limited circumstances, such as threats to child safety or doubts about whether the adult is really the father,” as La Vanguardia recalls. He also ordered those children to be reunited with their mothers and fathers.
In eleven months (July 2017-June 2018), 1,566 children had been separated from their parents. 207 of them were less than five years old; five of them were less than a year old.
Fulfilling the judge’s order to reunite families has been complicated, says La Vanguardia, because U.S. systems for tracking children have been inadequate. Volunteers from the American Civil Liberties Union work to find families and reunite them with their children, “door-to-door in countries like Guatemala and Honduras.”
Main photo: Michael Gaida/Pixabay
Image by GDJ/Pixabay