The Trump administration has summoned at least 70 children under 1 year old to immigration court for their own deportation proceedings since Oct. 1, according to new Justice Department data provided exclusively to Kaiser Health News.
These children, who may be staying with a sponsor or in a foster care arrangement, need frequent touching and bonding with a parent and naps every few hours, and some are of breastfeeding age, medical experts say. Theyre unable to speak and still learning when its day versus night.
For babies, the basics are really important. Its the holding, the proper feeding, proper nurturing, said Shadi Houshyar, who directs early childhood and child welfare initiatives at advocacy group Families USA.
The number of infants under age 1 involved has been rising up threefold from 24 infants in the fiscal year that ended last Sept. 30, and 46 infants the year before.
The Justice Department data show that a total of 1,500 unaccompanied children, from newborns to age 3, have been called in to immigration court since Oct. 1, 2015.
Roughly three-fourths of the children involved are represented by a lawyer and they have to make their case that they should stay in the United States.
Officials who review such deportation cases say most children under 1 cross the border with a parent and their deportation cases proceed together.
But some of the infants were deemed unaccompanied only after law enforcement separated them from their parents during the Trump administrations zero-tolerance immigration policy. The children were sent to facilities across the U.S. under the supervision of the Department of Health and Human Services.
This is to some extent a crisis of the creation of the government, said Robert Carey, who previously headed the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which takes custody of unaccompanied minors. Its a tragic and ironic turn of events.
It was an early morning in May when Maria was released from the T. Don Hutto Residential Detention Center in Texas. She had been granted bond and was permitted to stay with her brother in Washington D.C. while her asylum case was pending.
After gathering her belongings, she was escorted to a loading area fenced with razor wire and placed into a cage inside a van. The driver was a male guard named Donald Dunn. Shortly after leaving Hutto, Dunn pulled off the road.
He grabbed my breasts He put his hands in my pants and he touched my private parts, she said. He touched me again inside the van, and my hands were tied. And he started masturbating.
In 2014, a 19-year-old asylum seeker, E.D., was staying in a family detention center in Pennsylvania with her 3-year-old son. A few months into her seven-month stay, she was sexually assaulted by a male guard. I didnt know how to refuse because he told me that I was going to be deported, she said. I was at a jail and he was a migration officer. Its like they order you to do something and you have to do it.
Our video follows Maria and E.D., who are among the thousands of migrants who have said they were sexually abused while in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the past 10 years, according to data from the Department of Homeland Securitys Office of the Inspector General. Both were seeking asylum in the United States.