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Specialized Care Required: Migrant Youths in US Custody

Aline Barros

   WASHINGTON - Originally from Honduras, Oberlina lives in the U.S. state
   of Ohio. In 2018, she traveled with a migrant caravan to the
   U.S.-Mexico border, where she petitioned for asylum. Last week, the
   mother of two received a phone call from federal authorities.

   Her children, ages 6 and 11, had crossed the border into the United
   States, unaccompanied.

   "Immigration officials called me, and they said the children were OK.
   The next day they called me again. And they told me the children were
   feeling very sad. I talked to them through tears and so much anguish. I
   gathered all my strength to tell them not to lose hope," Oberlina told
   VOA.

   Oberlina's children are among thousands of unaccompanied minors who
   have crossed America's southern border so far this year in what has
   become an early and thorny challenge for President Joe Biden. Critics
   as well as some allies of the administration are calling the situation
   a crisis.

   Republican lawmakers have repeatedly faulted Biden's easing of former
   President Donald Trump's restrictive immigration policies, saying the
   new administration all but invited an influx of migrants. At a news
   conference Thursday, Biden rejected the charge, noting seasonal
   increases in border arrivals.

   "It happens every single, solitary year - there is a significant
   increase the number of people come in border in the winter months of
   January, February, March," Biden said.

   In a statement Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Health and Human
   Services (HHS) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said, as
   of March 23, there were 11,551 minors in HHS custody and 4,962 held at
   border patrol facilities.

   According to [1]U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), 29,792
   unaccompanied children were encountered on the U.S. side of the border
   with Mexico from last October through February. Nearly 3,000 were
   younger than 12 and more than 26,000 were between 13 and 17 years old.

   On Wednesday, Biden tapped Vice President Kamala Harris to head the
   administration's response to the influx of unaccompanied migrant
   youths, the only category of asylum-seekers currently allowed to pursue
   claims in the United States.
   While Washington scrambles to address the situation at the border,
   Oberlina said she is focused on being reunited with her children and
   hopes they will be released to her in about a week.

   Exemption for minors

   For most of 2020, the former Trump administration blocked
   asylum-seekers of all ages under Title 42, an emergency measure
   implemented in response to the coronavirus pandemic.
   The Biden administration kept the policy but exempted minors. Today,
   federal agencies are scrambling to house hundreds of migrant youths
   intercepted daily at the border, comply with strict rules governing
   where and how they are cared for, and observe pandemic protocols.
   "Border patrol can't handle all the children," said Dylan Corbett,
   founding director of Hope Border Institute, based in El Paso, Texas.

   Unaccompanied minors, like Oberlina's children, are afforded special
   protections and treatment arising from a 1997 federal court decision
   that limited the length of time children can be held in adult detention
   facilities.

   "In the 1990s there was a lawsuit, which is known as Flores, that was
   brought on behalf of children who were being held in regular
   immigration detention with adults and with other kids and they were
   languishing there for a really long time, months at a time," explained
   immigration lawyer Becky Wolozin of the Legal Aid Justice Center. "And
   this case was brought on their behalf because it's not appropriate to
   have children in a jail, basically."
   As with all who cross the U.S.-Mexico border without authorization,
   minors are first taken to a border patrol station. Within 72 hours,
   however, they must be transferred to the custody of the Office of
   Refugee Resettlement under the Department of Health and Human Services
   and placed in facilities designed to accommodate the needs of children.
   The Biden administration has scrambled to expand juvenile shelter
   facilities, going so far as to consider U.S. military bases, convention
   centers and hotel complexes as emergency sites. For now, however, U.S.
   officials concede they are not meeting the 72-hour transfer window for
   a significant number of minors.
   "HHS can't process the children quickly enough. You have more and more
   children spending time in border patrol facilities, and they're only
   supposed to be there 72 hours, and the reason it's 72 hours is exactly
   because the Border Patrol is not equipped to deal with children,"
   Corbett said.

   Foster services

   In addition to government-run facilities, some unaccompanied minors are
   placed in foster care programs until they are released to relatives in
   the United States.
   Tawnya Brown is the executive director at the Bethany Christian
   Services, one of many nonprofits that work with the U.S. government to
   provide transitional foster care.
   "They [migrant children] just go through multiple hands at the border.
   They go through detention. They go through all these circumstances
   until they can get somewhere --where, we would hope, is a small bed [at
   a] shelter or a transitional foster care," Brown said.
   Hundreds of American foster families have taken in migrant children on
   a short-term basis. Among them are Kim and Jason, a couple in
   Pennsylvania. VOA is withholding their last name to protect the youths
   they foster.
   "I can't imagine having the weight of the world on my shoulders
   traveling as a child, across borders, to a place I don't know, and I
   don't speak the language and everything else," Jason said.

   The last six minors the couple took in were between 15 and 17 years
   old.
   "I've learned to lay off when they first come in and give them space,"
   Kim said. "I just do it little bit by little bit because I realized
   that when they come in, there's only so much that they can process,
   remember, and handle."
   Jose Luis, 16, at the airport reunited with his parents. He crossed the
   Rio Grande Valley area in McAllen, Texas, as an unaccompanied minor
   after 13 years separated from his parents. (Celia Mendoza/VOA)

   First-hand experience

   Sixteen-year-old Jose Luis took a plane, then a bus, and finally walked
   across the U.S.-Mexico border. Like other unaccompanied minors, he made
   the journey without parents to guide or protect him.
   Though most unaccompanied children arriving at the border originate in
   Guatemala, Honduras or El Salvador, Jose Luis is from Ecuador. He
   crossed the border alone at the end of January. With this father's
   permission, VOA spoke with him about his journey to be reunited in the
   U.S. with parents he hadn't seen since he was 3 years old.
   "In immigration custody, there's a lot of children, older children, and
   adults. There is a bit of everyone trying to cross to the United
   States," he said.

   After his release from U.S. custody, Jose Luis was met by his parents
   at New York's LaGuardia Airport on March 3, an event that featured
   balloons, gifts, hugs and tears.

   "Meeting my mother and my father was the best thing that happened to me
   today," he told VOA. "It is the best feeling because of the happiness
   we can only feel with our parents. Because they're the ones who gave
   you life. They're the ones who support you to move forward no matter
   what."