Guatemalan migrant children say they remain “traumatized” and “depressed” after the Trump administration attempted to quietly remove them from the United States during the holiday weekend despite having pending immigration cases, according to new court declarations.
A declaration by a 16-year-old describes how multiple Guatemalan children at a Texas shelter were awoken in the middle of the night Saturday and told they would be returned to their native country in a matter of hours.
“I am afraid to return to Guatemala,” said the teen, who fled Guatemala last year following their sister’s murder, according to a court declaration. “I was worried that I would be killed.”
“At around 2:30 a.m., I called my mother to tell her I might be deported to Guatemala. My mom started crying,” states the declaration from the teen, who is only identified by the initials A.J.D.E. in court records.
The mother, who lives in Guatemala, was not aware of any plan to have her child removed from the U.S., according to the teen’s declaration. “She does not want me to return. She does not have the resources to care for me. My father is not a part of my life. I have no other family who could receive me.”
Thirteen other declarations from teens like A.J.D.E, most of whom are 16 and 17, were filed in court Wednesday as part of the ongoing legal challenge that on Labor Day weekend temporarily blocked the removals of any unaccompanied Guatemalan child in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement who does not have a final removal order.
In the documents, the teens describe fearing gang recruitment in their home country as well as violence from relatives, criminal organizations and even the Guatemalan government.
A.J.D.E.’s declaration said he still feels “totally traumatized. … I don’t even know how to explain it.”
A 17-year-old at another Texas shelter woke up at 2 a.m. Sunday so scared that “I felt like I lost my breath for a second.” In a declaration, the teen, identified in court records by the initials A.R.M.D., stated: “I just keep thinking about them trying to return me to Guatemala. I feel depressed.”
The U.S. government and Guatemalan officials have said their efforts to remove unaccompanied Guatemalan children in ORR custody are “repatriations” and “reunifications of children,” according to court transcripts and public statements. The removals are part of an agreement reached between the two nations following Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s visit to Guatemala in July.
But legal advocates representing the minors dispute that the attempted removals were “repatriations” and not attempted deportations, stating there’s no indication that ICE is complying with obligations “to provide access to counsel or with the mandated safeguards it must implement before children agree to voluntary departure,” according to the lawsuit.
“If these are benign repatriations, that’s not how they happen,” said Efrén C. Olivares, vice president of litigation and legal strategy at the National Immigration Law Center, the organization that filed the lawsuit blocking the minors’ removal to Guatemala. He spoke at a virtual congressional briefing on Tuesday.
Dozens of advocates and organizations providing legal immigration services to many of these minors have characterized the attempted removals as “unlawful” because they disregarded a series of legal protections Congress granted to unaccompanied migrant children who are in federal custody as they go through immigration proceedings.
The Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008 outlines some of these protections. It generally requires children be placed in the “least restrictive setting possible” throughout the duration of their immigration proceedings. It also establishes protocols for safe repatriations and family reunifications to ensure the safety of these unaccompanied minors, who are considered among the most vulnerable migrant children.
Under these protocols, a child can request a voluntary departure that must be authorized by an immigration judge to ensure the child is not being coerced to return or a parent can come forward to claim their child.
In their court declarations, the unaccompanied children said they don’t want to go back to Guatemala or that their parents never requested their return.
Other declarations submitted by the attorneys representing the minors also included statements from some of their parents in Guatemala saying they never asked for their children to be returned.
Jennifer Anzardo Valdes, director of children’s legal services at the International Rescue Committee, told NBC News that two unaccompanied Guatemalan teenage girls her organization represents in Texas went before an immigration judge last Friday and were told their names were on a list of children who wanted to return to Guatemala.
“The children told the judge that was not true and that they were scared to go home,” Anzardo Valdes said. “So the judge continued the case for them to be able to continue their immigration application.”
Still, both girls and a third unaccompanied minor that IRC represents were picked up from their foster homes in the middle of the night and put on a bus. They were kept for over 12 hours Sunday before being returned to an ORR facility without the ability to say goodbye to their original foster families, according to Anzardo Valdes.
“All of them were really sad to be pulled away from their foster home,” she said.
They were also “terrified,” Valdes said, pointing out that one of the girls is Mayan, which is the largest Indigenous group in Guatemala. The girl said she comes from “a community where kids disappeared” and thought “that was going to happen to me.”
It is estimated that the federal government intends to remove up to 700 unaccompanied Guatemalan children from the U.S., according to whistleblower reports cited by Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon in a letter he sent to the Office of Refugee Resettlement last week.
Court records show immigration authorities placed at least 76 minors in planes to Guatemala that were later grounded. Another judge in Arizona blocked the removals of 53 other Guatemalan minors in the state last week. Court declarations and accounts from organizations providing legal immigration services to the children show that minors in ORR custody across at least eight states are at risk of being removed under these circumstances.
“Children who are in ORR custody have fled difficult circumstances. Some have been orphans, some have been persecuted, abandoned, trafficked or sold,” said Shaina Aber, executive director of the Acacia Center for Justice, during the virtual congressional briefing Tuesday.
“All of them have experienced significant trauma that remains ongoing,” Aber said.
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