Many people have asked me recently what’s going on at the border, or with refugees. What they usually really want to know is, what’s going on with unaccompanied child migrants.
Many people don’t realize that unaccompanied children follow a completely different process than any other immigrants. When a child (under age 18) crosses our southern border without an adult relative, they are first taken into DHS custody. DHS stands for Department of Homeland Security, a law-enforcement agency formed in 2002 in response to 9/11, that includes ICE (Immigration & Customs Enforcement) and CBP (Customs & Border Patrol). DHS is not allowed to detain unaccompanied children for more than three days before transferring them to HHS, the Department of Health and Human Services.
The Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) is part of HHS, and is where unaccompanied children go upon release from DHS. ORR is responsible for the safety and care of the children, and for uniting them with family members in the U.S. ORR works with a network of partners including Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services (LIRS) to accomplish this mission. ORR seeks safe, appropriate places to house children outside of DHS custody, outside of for-profit prisons, while they unite them with their families. More than 85% of these children already have relatives living in the U.S. Part of ORR’s mission is to verify that the adults “claiming” the children are indeed related to them. Communicating with relatives, vetting them, and arranging for transportation that does not send children alone across the country all take time. The current situation is exacerbated by COVID, requiring more space to house the children. If you want to help unaccompanied child migrants, I suggest you check out LIRS.org.
Why are so many unaccompanied children coming now? Let’s go back to the root causes of migration: climate disaster, economics, and violence. Last fall Honduras and Guatemala were ravaged by two powerful hurricanes within a few weeks of each other. Infrastructure, food, and jobs are all scarce. Combine that with U.S. policies that have historically promoted violence and undermined those countries’ economies, and you are left with people who are desperate to find any opportunity for their children. For the past 50 years, plus hundreds of years before that, U.S. policies in Central America have toppled democratically elected governments, exported violent gangs, destroyed economies, and ravaged the land. That is the real crisis. That is what we need to address.
There is also a widespread misunderstanding that the southern U.S. border is now open. You’ve probably heard as much in the news. In reality, the border is not open. Our border is almost more closed now than ever before.
President Biden has not opened the borders. He did, however, put an end to the dangerous and illegal MPP or Remain in Mexico policy, and the U.S. has finally been allowing those particular asylum seekers who have been waiting in dangerous Mexican border towns for as long as two years, to enter, in an orderly way, in limited numbers weekly, at a few ports of entry, after covid testing. The real crisis here is that these people were ever forced to wait in Mexico in the first place, where they were vulnerable to abuse and recruiting by the cartels.
Now let’s talk about Title 42. Title 42 is an obscure public health code that uses covid restraints as an excuse to expel all but the most vulnerable asylum seekers back to Mexico. The previous administration put Title 42 in place, and unfortunately it is still in effect. Because of Title 42 our ports of entry are closed to families that are seeking asylum. So desperate parents who are not allowed entry themselves are sending their children across the border to surrender to agents and unite with family members already living in the U.S.
How can we prevent so many desperate parents from sending their children alone across our borders? We must address the root causes of migration and our country’s responsibility in those root causes. And we must repeal Title 42, allowing families access to ports of entry and granting them due process for their asylum claims, a domestically and internationally recognized human right.
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