Rewire News: The School-to-Deportation Pipeline
Tina Vasquez, Rewire.News, writes that:
With the blessing of President Trump, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is accusing immigrant teens of gang affiliation based on subjective “evidence” as a single tattoo or the act of giving someone “the finger.” And by cooperating with immigration authorities, educators are helping funnel children into a school-to-deportation pipeline from which they have little chance of escape.
This is how LVM, a 17-year-old asylum seeker from El Salvador who had never had any previous contact with the police, was arrested in 2017, according to a new series by Rewire.News’ immigration reporter Tina Vasquez. LVM was arrested at his home on Long Island in an ICE raid targeting alleged MS-13 members, for reasons never made clear to him or his mother.
Young people like LVM are targeted by immigration authorities and then transferred into the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), run by Scott Lloyd, the director of ORR most well-known for blocking access to abortion for pregnant immigrant teens. Lloyd, whose knowledge of and legal guidance for working on gang violence is flimsy, must now personally approve the release of every immigrant child in custody who has been in “secure” or “staff secure” facilities.
Detained children—denied information as to why they are being subject to prolonged detention—suffer mental health problems including anxiety and depression. Lloyd’s new policy has stripped authority from officials at the local level, leaving no one to explain to parents or to children in custody why they aren’t being released, when they will be released, or what needs to be done to get them released.
Children who are detained under these circumstances spend an average of 8 months in custody and receive no formal education. Twenty percent of children detained in New York who have been subjected to Lloyd’s policy have been separated from their families for over a year. The New York Civil Liberties Union estimates Lloyd’s policy has impacted more than 700 children nationwide. Only 12 percent of these young people have been released to an adult sponsor, a stark contrast to the 90 percent of all children in ORR custody who were released within 35 to 45 days in previous years.
The teens’ high schools provided federal immigration agencies with information that put them on ICE’s radar, who has long used the “gang member defense” in order to target undocumented immigrants for detainment and deportation, essentially racially profiling youth of color—something Vasquez says is encouraged by Trump’s rhetoric, including his recent outburst in which he called MS-13 gang members “animals.”
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KJ