Last month, we wrote about a 16-year-old Honduran boy whose deportation was blocked by a Trump-appointed judge. The boy, who’s identified in court documents only as “J.B.B.C.,” had been in imminent danger of being expelled back to gang violence under a Stephen Miller-led order that exploits the novel coronavirus pandemic to quickly kick out children seeking asylum, in violation of anti-trafficking law.
What we didn’t know then but we know now are further details into how J.B.B.C was detained by the Trump administration: The teen was among the unknown number of unaccompanied migrant children who have been held by the federal government at a hotel until officials can quickly deport them, BuzzFeed News reports.
Normally, children who come to the U.S. alone are sent by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to the Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), until they can be placed with a sponsor, usually a relative already here. “The ORR referral process was created by the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, which was signed by then-president George W. Bush in 2008,” BuzzFeed News reports. “Under the law, CBP officials are generally required to refer the children within 72 hours to the US refugee agency.”
But instead, that’s been bypassed altogether as part of Miller’s order, with some children being detained at hotel chains including Hampton Inn & Suites. It’s unclear which hotel J.B.B.C. was jailed at, but it’s clear it was inhumane. “I felt locked up. I felt alone and isolated,” he told BuzzFeed News. “I didn’t know what time of day it was. I didn’t know what day it was. I felt utterly disconnected from society. I just felt anxiety and depression.”
He said he’d get 20 minutes a day to go outside, and the rest of the time he’d stay inside his room with only ICE’s contractors as his company. The Associated Press report that broke the story about hotel baby jails said that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) wouldn’t comment if contractor MVM Inc. staffers are licensed or passed FBI checks, but we did see unidentified men who may have been MVM Inc. staffers physically shove an attorney who tied to check on detained children at a Hampton Inn & Suites location in McAllen, Texas.
BuzzFeed News reports that J.B.B.C. was shifted from hotels in Arizona and Texas as officials readied to deport him, until a federal judge intervened as part of a lawsuit against the administration over the policy.
The report said that the administration has since backed off its effort to deport the boy, and he’s now able to pursue an asylum claim while being reunited with his dad, who already lived here. “I found from my lawyer that I had won,” the boy continued to BuzzFeed News. “Throughout the entire time, I had accepted there was a 50% chance I would stay or leave. I was just excited that I would have the opportunity to hug my father and to see him.”
But what of the other children who have been held much more recently in hotels? A number of leading civil and immigrant rights groups have now sued the administration to stop their imminent deportation, saying “[t]he government is disappearing asylum seekers—even children—without a trace.” HuffPost reported that while children are no longer being held at the Hampton Inn & Suites location, federal immigration officials would not say where the children currently are.
J.B.B.C. may get a chance. But what about the rest of these children? “It is bad enough that the government is holding young children in secret in hotels,” American Civil Liberties Union attorney Lee Gelernt told BuzzFeed News, “but the fundamental travesty is that they are sending these children back from the danger they fled without giving them the opportunity to seek asylum,.”