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$2 Billion Request Fails to Provide Legal Protections and Wastes Taxpayer Dollars

Statement of Mary Meg McCarthy, Executive Director, Heartland Alliance's National Immigrant Justice Center

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Heartland Alliance’s National Immigrant Justice Center is outraged by the White House’s intent to ask Congress to gut existing laws that provide due process to immigrant children and to expand its capacity to detain immigrant children and their families at a taxpayer expense of $2 billion. The White House must address the root causes of this influx—unchecked violence in Central America—rather than putting band-aids on a systemic problem. It is unconscionable for the White House to expedite deportation proceedings for children who pose no security risk to the United States and send them back to the violence in their countries. Many of these children would qualify as refugees but may never be able to seek protection if the laws created to protect them are eviscerated.

The U.S. government must not abandon its long-standing commitment to due process and refugee protection in a misguided attempt to address this humanitarian crisis. We call on President Obama to:

  1. Ensure legal protections for vulnerable people, including children, seeking protection in the United States;
  2. Ensure access to an attorney and a meaningful day in court;
  3. Use effective and less expensive alternatives to detention; and
  4. Address the root causes of this influx through engagement with governments in the region and the strategic use of foreign aid.

All people, including traumatized unaccompanied immigrant children, who seek safety in the United States must be afforded due process protections to ensure that they are not returned to situations of violence, persecution, and torture from which they fled. President Obama is reneging on his promise to reform the immigration system and instead leaving as his legacy diminished protections for children and vast expansion of immigration detention.

Curtailing due process is a dangerous path to choose. It is absurd to expect that children will be able to describe traumatic incidents from their past—including rape, incest, and physical abuse—within hours or days of their arrival in the United States to the very immigration officers who apprehend and detain them. A 14-year-old girl who fled her home country after being raped and threatened by gang members will not be able to reveal that traumatic event to immigration officers at the border. By obligating her to disclose persecution and torture under these circumstances or forfeit her right to seek protection, the administration is abandoning its domestic and international obligations to ensure that persecuted and trafficked children and adults are protected.

 

Mary Meg McCarthy and attorneys from NIJC’s Immigrant Children’s Protection Project are available for interviews with the press.