The Misery For Child Migrants

Susan Terrio spent years interviewing children who had crossed into the US unaccompanied and were detained by US immigration. In a distillation of her research, she gives a sense of what life is like in the facilities:

Being locked up with no set endpoint creates feelings of helplessness among children who are already suffering from trauma. Ernesto remembers his feelings of disorientation: “You don’t know what’s going to happen. I asked, ‘Why do they send me here?’ We were so afraid. Were they going to take us somewhere and kill us?’”

In 2012, the length of stay in [Office of Refugee Resettlement] facilities for unaccompanied children averaged 60 to 75 days, ORR officials told me. And the longer the children stay, the more anxious they tend to feel and the more likely they are to act out. Some who qualify for protective status instead choose to self-deport in order to escape prolonged confinement. …

Based on site visits and 100 interviews with federal staff, I found that immigration custody is plagued by systemic problems. It takes an ad hoc approach that undermines consistency and fairness, lacks coordination in data collection, restricts information flows, enhances redundancy and concentrates power in the hands of senior government administrators whose decisions are difficult to review or appeal. Complaints about the abuse of children by facility staff have continued. Government officials have been slow to report abuse and have repeatedly failed to hold abusers accountable. More troubling is the lack of independent oversight to track the government’s compliance with its own detention standards—those who oversee operations are supervisors working for the ORR.

(Photo: A young boy bows his head in a holding cell where hundreds of mostly Central American immigrant children are being processed and held at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Nogales Placement Center in Nogales, Arizona on June 18, 2014. Brownsville, Texas, and Nogales, have been central to processing the more than 47,000 unaccompanied children who have entered the country illegally since October 1. By Ross D. Franklin-Pool/Getty Images)