March 15, 2007

Children are paying the price for our dysfunctional immigration policies.

In an effort to prove that the United States is hard on undocumented immigration, the federal government has implemented policies that hurt children, the most vulnerablein our society.

Refugee advocacy groups recently released a report revealing that the Bush administration housed immigrant families in prison-like facilities. The report, issued by the Women's Commission for Refugee Women and Children and Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services, painted a dismal picture of life for children behind bars.

The T. Don Hutto Family Residential Facility in Texas, which opened last year, was one of two centers visited by the advocacy groups. It is also one of two facilities in the United States that holds unauthorized immigrant families and children on noncriminal charges.

Many immigrants are asylum seekers awaiting their day in court. Hutto currently houses about 375 people, more than 200 of them children, according to a recent National Public Radio story.

Children live like jail inmates. Detention center employees separate many of them from their families and use the threat of separation to discipline both parents and children. Children are forced to wear prison-like jumpsuits and IDs.

According to the advocacy groups' report, children were receiving one hour of schooling and one hour of recreation a day. The center has now increased the hours, under public scrutiny.

The predicament of immigrant children caught in a broken system came to light in December when Immigration and Customs Enforcement raided six Swift & Company poultry facilities in six states. The agency detained more than 1,200 employees on immigration violations, according to the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law. Legal residents who did not have their papers with them were arrested along with undocumented immigrants from El Salvador, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Honduras, Laos, Mexico, Peru and Sudan.

Some children lost both parents to the raids. Mothers found it difficult to get information on fathers who did not come home afterward.

In mid-February, the Sioux City Journal in Iowa reported that the Swift raids continued to affect school enrollment. There is tremendous fear in the immigrant community as people wait to see what happens to their family members. Some parents still have not had their court appearances. Others are planning to return to their homelands.

But their children, many of whom have lived their entire lives in the United States, are fearful of leaving their own homeland, the United States.

There has to be a better way, particularly for children who are caught between the economic desperation of their parents and the cruelty of U.S. immigration policies.

We must urge our government to stop the inhumane immigration policies that are separating families and traumatizing innocent children.

The children deserve this from us.

Yolanda Chávez Leyva is a historian specializing in border and Mexican American history. She can be reached at pmproj [at] progressive [dot] org.