Children Being Seperated From Family Due to Deprtaion
The Washington Post fact-checks some of the statements made past the Trump assistants regarding child separation at the Southern border.
Olivier Douliery / TNS
Administration officials have pointed to a set of laws and courtroom rulings that they said forced their hand, including:
--A 1997 federal consent prescript that requires the government to release all children apprehended crossing the border. The "Flores" consent decree began as a class-action lawsuit. The Justice Department negotiated a settlement during President Pecker Clinton's administration. According to a 2016 decision past the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Excursion, the Flores settlement requires the federal authorities to release rather than detain all undocumented immigrant children, whether they crossed with parents or solitary. The agreement doesn't cover any parents who might be accompanying those minors, but it doesn't mandate that parents exist prosecuted or that families be separated. Moreover, Congress could laissez passer a constabulary that overrides the terms of the Flores settlement. Waldman said the Flores settlement requires the government to keep immigrant families together for only 20 days, but no part of the consent decree requires that families be separated after 20 days. Courts have ruled that children must exist released from detention facilities within 20 days under the Flores consent decree, but none of these legal developments prevents the regime from releasing parents forth with children.
RON EDMONDS/STF
The human fallout from the Trump administration'due south abruptly reversed policy of separating children from their parents at the U.S. border has reached California, where some 100 of those children are living in state-licensed group intendance and foster homes.
While the administration moved to begin detaining families together Wed, temporary caregivers have no answers about when or how the dozens of children housed here — or the thousands elsewhere — might be reunited with their families. On Th, President Trump said that he was directing multiple federal agencies "to reunite these previously separated groups."
"We have not seen the full ramifications of this," said Angelica Salas, executive managing director of Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights in Los Angeles. "All the residue of the consequences, we haven't even begun to deal with the entirety of this problem."
According to state licensing reports and publicly available accounts of federal contracts, at least four nonprofit agencies in Southern California are receiving the 100 or so immigrant children whose parents have been jailed for entering the country illegally. Immigrants rights organizations say most of the children are ix and younger.
The 100-year-sometime David and Margaret Youth and Family unit Services, based in La Verne (Los Angeles County), is among those caring for the children.
For the past seven years, the agency has contracted with the federal government's Office of Refugee Resettlement to house up to 59 unaccompanied minors at a time. Those children have ranged in age from five to 17 years old, with an average stay of most 30 days before sponsors can be found, said Maggie Bohlman, the bureau'southward director of development. 4 children have been moved from federal oversight into long-term foster intendance in California's child welfare organisation.
Co-ordinate to Bohlman, the immmigrant children now arriving are housed in cottages of no more than x children, with two to three per room. Typically, they are grouped past gender, which may crave separating sibling groups. They consume breakfast and dinner in the cottages, and lunch in a central cafeteria. They go to an on-site school with lessons in Castilian, and are provided mental health care if needed, Bohlman said.
Another agency involved with the recent wave of children is Crittenton Services for Children and Families in Fullerton (Orange County), which provides residential programs for trafficked youth and teenage mothers and their babies, among other vulnerable groups. State records show that this twelvemonth the facility has served children ages viii through 17 who are unaccompanied refugee minors arriving through the federal authorities'south Division of Unaccompanied Children's Services.
Two agencies that place children in foster family homes are too providing shelter for those recently separated from their parents: International Christian Adoptions in Temecula (Riverside Canton), and Nuevo Amanecer Latino Children's Services in Los Angeles.
A representative of the Christian adoption agency declined to comment, only referred a reporter to a website that described undocumented and unaccompanied minors: "These children have also fled from their land in hopes of finding something ameliorate … hope … a future … something that is normal … a family unit, food, shelter, education … something," it states. "Children from strange countries who are in the U.South. as a directly result of fleeing whatsoever they came from. They are part of a 'system' in that our government knows about them and has programs in identify to help."
The children who have arrived under Trump'due south "nothing-tolerance" policy are much the aforementioned as the unaccompanied minors the agency previously has housed, Bohlman said, and typically are traumatized by their experience. Having made a terrifying journey to the U.South. border, they then arrive in a strange country and terminate upwardly in group care, adding to their fright and uncertainty.
"The kids are withal the same kids. They're kids who've been separated from their parents," Bohlman said. "We simply really want to take intendance of the kids and keep them out of harm's style — that's all we desire to do."
The Crittenton agency issued a statement Thursday evening pledging that the youth in the bureau's care "will always exist treated in a dignified and respectful way," and reassuring the public that "they are doing well despite the circumstances they observe themselves in." The agency too stated: "We are heartbroken by what has transpired at the southern edge. We have no say in national public policy but can only continue to hope that the perspective of child welfare continues to be taken into consideration."
With regard to California's role in housing immigrant children, Michael Weston, a spokesman for the California Department of Social Services, said only "a fraction" of California's individual group homes and foster agencies were caring for undocumented children. The state'due south responsibleness is to ensure the homes and group care facilities meet licensing standards, merely California officials practice non control where the federal government might identify children.
More than than two,000 minors have been separated from their parents under the policy instituted in April by the Trump assistants, in which all individuals caught crossing the edge into the U.S. illegally were charged with a misdemeanor. The parents taken into federal criminal custody were so separated from their children, who were speedily transferred to the Function of Refugee Resettlement.
On Wed, after days of protests across the country, Trump signed an executive order calling on officials to keep such families together in detention centers.
Immigrant advocate Salas said she believes California may get a large per centum of the children separated from their parents considering of the resources available in the state.
Children separated from their parents are put into the care of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which places them into available temporary shelters. They are asked questions, such as whether they have any family unit members in the country, so that they can be connected and potentially placed with them. In rare instances, unaccompanied children are adopted if no relative is available.
Salas believes that the children recently taken from parents volition remain in temporary shelters for a long period of time. "I don't call back any of this was thought through," she said.
On Th, California Attorney Full general Xavier Becerra said he would join a grouping of ten states to sue the Trump administration over its border policies, saying they violate due process rights. "Children belong with their families, non lone and fearful in metal cages. We are filing this lawsuit because ripping children from their parents is unlawful, wrong and heartless," he said.
Amy Cohen, a California kid psychiatrist who one time worked in the Alameda County juvenile hall, left 1½ weeks agone for McAllen, Texas, to offer her services to immigrant families leaving the nation'south largest immigrant processing center — which contained what she described every bit an ice-cold, chain-link muzzle, where children slumber on the flooring on light-green mats with aluminum-based blankets.
"I knew precisely what the impact was of what we were doing to these children, and I could not bear to accept information technology done in my name as an American citizen and as a doc and a mother," Cohen said. "Equally a kid psychiatrist who has done a lot of work with severely traumatized kids, the thought that nosotros were severely traumatizing kids who would never be the aforementioned was intolerable to me."
In recent days, Cohen has volunteered to help a local humanitarian bureau with care for family members released by Border Patrol agents from the Texas facility with GPS monitors.
But some members of families are missing.
"I had a very, very distressed 7-year-one-time today whose father was removed from the family. They had no idea where the father was. They came to the Edge Patrol station, they were led one style so the father was gone and they haven't seen him since," Cohen said.
Since then, the picayune daughter has shut down, Cohen said. She clings to her female parent.
"This kid was near mute," Cohen said. "Her mother said she hadn't eaten pretty much anything. She'd been vomiting whenever her mother pushed her to eat. She'd been excessively crying and screaming and asking for her father."
Another family Cohen has treated spent a week in the processing center afterwards fleeing Republic of guatemala. During that time, she said, a 14-year-former girl was allowed to meet her female parent for a half-hour a day. Her teenage blood brother saw his mother just once during the week before their release.
Karen de Sá and Hamed Aleaziz are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: kdesa@sfchronicle.com, haleaziz@sfchronicle. com Twitter: @KarendeSa @Haleaziz
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Source: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/California-housing-about-100-immigrant-children-13015087.php
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