Detained Immigrant and Refugee Children's Initiative

Detained Immigrant and Refugee Children’s Initiative – created in 2000 - educates, empowers and provides legal assistance to children detained by ICE in Arizona. The Children’s attorney conducts rights presentations and pre-court counseling sessions, holds individual interviews, recruits pro bono attorneys and represents all detained children. The Initiative also engages with the Arizona State Bar’s Children’s Advocacy Committee that campaigns on behalf of detained children.

Background Information

• Immigration authorities in the United States detain several thousand children and youth annually, and the numbers of detained children in Arizona has skyrocketed in recent years.  Over 1000 children are expected to pass through Arizona detention facilities in 2005.  At present, approximately 160 juveniles are detained on any given day in Phoenix, with unknown numbers of immigrant children held at Border Patrol stations awaiting transfer.

• The children typically come from Central America (Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras), Brazil, and Ecuador, but others also come from China, Poland, Sri Lanka, and other countries.  Most Mexican children are turned around at the border and so do not make it to shelters in the United States, making them particularly vulnerable.  Most kids in detention are 15-17 years old, but there have been 1-year olds detained, and young children between the ages of 5 to 10 are also detained on a regular basis.  Not infrequently, pregnant girls give birth while in detention and their infants are detained with them.

• Children and adult family members who arrive in the United States together are separated immediately after their arrest and held in different facilities.  Children often go days or weeks without knowing what happened to their relatives.

• Most children come to the U.S. to escape poverty, starvation, lack of employment and educational opportunities, child abuse, and war. Many children arrive in the United States to find long-lost parents whom they have never known since many parents left their children behind during civil wars. Chinese and Indian children are typically smuggled into the U.S. by sophisticated smuggling rings that hire unethical attorneys to represent them. Some detained children are long-term residents of the U.S. who face deportation to a country they do not remember and risk permanent separation from their families in the U.S..

Issues for Children in Custody:

• Children should not be held as bait for undocumented family members. Currently the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) will release a child from detention to be reunified with an undocumented family member, but must notify the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) when the child is reunified. This ensures that the family member who comes forward for the child is at risk of being placed in removal proceedings, and discourages many families from coming forward.

• Confidential information should not be shared with BICE.  ORR keeps detailed intake forms and psychosocial evaluations of the children in detention.  In the past, BICE has used this information against the children in their asylum hearings and at their Special Immigrant Juvenile Visa interviews.  Caregivers authorized to gather sensitive information should not turn this information over to a prosecutorial agency without the children’s consent or knowledge.

Issues with Border Patrol and ICE:

• The mistreatment of children in Border Patrol custody must end.  Children apprehended and held in temporary facilities across the Southwest by Border Patrol have been severely and deliberately mistreated.  These children are being handcuffed, forced to sleep on the floor without blankets or pillows, denied medical treatment, and verbally and physically abused.  Children report that they are given only one piece of bread in the morning and a small taco at night, and then punished when they say they are hungry and ask for more food.

• Children should not be placed in “expedited removal”.  Expedited removal is a process that allows ICE to deport persons apprehended within 100 miles of the border, who cannot prove that they have been in the United States for at least two weeks, without a hearing before an immigration judge.  Children have been subject to expedited removal despite being afraid to go back to their countries.  Unless clearly accompanied by a responsible adult (parent, sibling, grandparent, aunt, or uncle), children should not be subject to expedited removal.

• No child should appear in immigration court without access to legal counsel.  Recently, children apprehended at the border have been forced to appear in immigration court before being allowed to contact their families or get basic legal information.  Confused and alone, many of these children accept removal orders despite being eligible for family reunification or even asylum.  In no case should a child be forced to appear before an immigration judge without family support or independent legal advice.

FIRRP’s ROLE:

Through the Children’s Initiative, FIRRP is providing legal orientations, assistance with family reunification, direct representation and advocacy for detained children. FIRRP conducts weekly rights presentations for the kids at the Southwest Key shelters and in foster care in Phoenix. The FIRRP Children’s Attorney conducts intakes of all the new arrivals to assess what the children should do next in their legal cases. FIRRP also meets with each of the children facing removal before their court dates to ascertain how the children wish to proceed.  FIRRP is part of the Arizona Detained Children’s Advocacy Network that includes local organizations and individuals advocating for systemic changes in the conditions under which immigrant children are detained.