Trump administration puts child victims of abuse and neglect at risk of being deported

The Trump administration's crackdown on illegal immigration has now placed child immigrants fleeing abuse or neglect at risk of being deported.

Children who have been abandoned, abused or neglected by parents in their home country have long been able to secure a special immigration standing in the US, known as Special Immigrant Juvenile Status. Immigrants who receive this classification are given a Social Security number, a work permit, and a green card – regardless of whether or not they crossed the border legally.

Last year, the U.S. government granted this status to about 15,000 children. Now, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is seeking to deport many of them anyway.

One group of Central American immigrants – all four of whom received Special Immigrant Juvenile Status – has sued in federal court, challenging ICE’s decision not to close their immigration cases.

“You wouldn’t send them back to a country where they’ve dealt with this harm,” the children’s lawyer, Bridget Cambria, told Billy Penn. “In these cases, these four children all have approved status. They’re just simply waiting for their green cards, and immigration has said they want to deport them.”

One of the plaintiffs, an El Salvadorian child who goes by the initials VG, crossed the border with his mother after his father abandoned them. According to Reveal, VG and his mother told the border patrol agents who apprehended them that they were being targeted by gangs in their hometown. A Pennsylvania judge and the US Citizenship and Immigration Services agreed to let VG stay in the country.

Now, however, the 16-year-old may never get his work card. ICE is using a process known as “expedited removal” to deport VG, and immigrants like him, without the usual due process constraints. Under this process, immigrants who are captured within 100 miles of the US border without valid travel documents are not allowed to appeal their deportment to an immigration judge. They are are also banned from entering the US for five years.

Migrants rights activists say this process can cause people with serious asylum claims – and even some legal residents of the US – to be turned away at the border.

The use of expedited removal has increased in recent years, and is set to expand even more under the Trump administration. In 2004, when the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) first authorised border patrol officers to use expedited removal, the process made up 21 per cent of all formal removals. In 2013, it made up 44 per cent.

Under the Obama administration, expedited removal could only be applied to immigrants who had been in the country for two weeks or less. This year, however, DHS Secretary John Kelly expanded the process to those who had been in the country for two years, citing the “record high” number of pending immigration cases.

“In some immigration courts, aliens who are not detained will not have their cases heard by an immigration judge for as long as five years,” he wrote in a memo. “This unacceptable delay affords removable aliens with no plausible claim for relief to remain unlawfully in the United States for many years.”

This policy could subject a minimum of 328,440 additional undocumented immigrants to expedited removal, according to the Immigrant Legal Resources Centre.

The Trump administration has also recently started targeting adult relatives who house and shelter undocumented child immigrants – a decision that could results in hundreds, if not thousands of arrests.

Leon Rodriguez, former Director of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services under President Obama, condemned the administration's decisions.

“The immigration administration is saying they don’t care – that the risks that lie beyond the border are not their problem,” he said.