Lawyers filed a lawsuit Friday night to try to stop the impending expulsion of a group of migrant children previously detained at a South Texas hotel, the latest court challenge against a Trump administration policy that has banned most of border crusaders, regardless of age, applying for asylum in the United States.
The lawsuit was filed in the United States District Court in Washington, DC on behalf of an unknown number of children in custody of the United States government who were previously in a hotel in McAllen, Texas, this week.
Citing a directive from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, US immigration officials are trying to expel the children, who arrived at the southern border without their parents, to their countries of origin, according to the demand.
“The Trump administration keeps children secret in hotels, refusing to give lawyers access so they can expel them back to danger without even the opportunity for children to demonstrate that they justify asylum,” said Lee Gelernt, a American Civil Liberties Union attorney, who filed the lawsuit, told CBS News. “Unfortunately, this is just the latest in a series of steps taken by the Trump administration to abuse and terrorize children.”
The lawsuit said immigration officials declined to say how many children were detained at the McAllen hotel as of Thursday and provide their names. Advocates are also asking the Washington federal court to require the Department of Homeland Security to allow children the opportunity to speak to lawyers.
The Texas Civil Rights Project, which has been identifying families and children that US officials are seeking to expel, joined Friday’s lawsuit as the “next friend” of the children. The Center for Gender and Refugee Studies, Oxfam, and ACLU chapters in Texas and Washington, DC, also served as advisors.
On Friday night, Hilton confirmed that the hotel, the Hampton Inn & Suites in McAllen, no longer housed any immigrants in US custody. The hotel giant said it was in the process of ordering all franchises and management companies not to rent rooms for the purpose of keeping children and families in U.S. immigration custody.
“Our policy has always been that hotels should not be used as detention centers or to detain people. We hope that all Hilton properties will reject businesses that would use a hotel in this way,” the company said in a statement.
Gelernt applauded Hilton’s decision: “We are pleased that the hotels are pressing against this inhumane expulsion policy and we hope that the government will reconsider this practice.”
Until Friday, the whereabouts of the children who had been detained at the McAllen hotel were unknown.
Citing ongoing litigation, an ICE spokesperson said the agency “was unable to comment.” The spokesperson did not answer questions about the whereabouts of the children previously detained at the McAllen hotel.
The contested policy has effectively sealed the country’s border for most migrants without proper documents. Since March, United States border officials have carried out more than 72,000 summary deportations. More than 2,000 unaccompanied children have been removed from the country.
Authorities say the CDC’s public health directive is designed to prevent potentially infected migrants from spreading the coronavirus within the US expulsion. “
The Trump administration has used the order to suspend legal protections that Congress created for children who arrive at the border unaccompanied.
Under various laws, unaccompanied migrant minors are protected from accelerated deportations and border officials generally must transfer them to the U.S. refugee agency, which oversees shelters and accommodation facilities where children remain while awaiting their release to family members in the US or other sponsors.
In June, Homeland Security officials transferred only 61 unaccompanied minors, or less than 4% of the more than 1,650 arrests that month, to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, according to government data. first reported by CBS News last week. Before the CDC edict went into effect, the agency received an average of more than 70 migrant children daily.
The use of hotel rooms to detain children and families, a common practice before the pandemic, has become widespread in recent months due to politics. This is because Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials are not transferring these migrants to long-term detention centers or shelters, but are turning them over to the Office of Immigration and Control Customs (ICE) so that the agency can expel them.
ICE contracts with a company called MVM, Inc., to transport and accommodate unaccompanied minors and families with children in hotel rooms prior to their transfer.
An ICE official told CBS News that contractors are not law enforcement officers and that they are trained to adequately care for minors and defend their rights under the historic Flores Settlement Agreement. Contractors must pass background checks and criminal records and adhere to coronavirus containment guidelines, including by screening migrants every hour and providing them with soap, personal protective equipment and medical and sanitary supplies, the official said. Children held in hotels are examined daily by doctors, added the ICE official.
Unaccompanied minors prosecuted under the CDC order generally spend less than three days in a hotel room before being deported, according to the ICE official.
Hotels in McAllen, Phoenix, and El Paso were used more than 180 times in April and June to hold unaccompanied migrant children, according to data obtained by CBS News and first reported by the Associated Press. At least 169 children in ICE custody, including babies, were booked into hotel rooms during those two months. The statistics, which the government provided to the National Center for Juvenile Law, did not include figures for May.
The ACLU has already filed similar lawsuits on behalf of three unaccompanied migrant minors initially prosecuted under CDC directive. The group managed to stop the expulsions of two of them, while the other, a 13-year-old girl who had fled gang threats in El Salvador, had already been expelled when the lawsuit was filed. All of them were held in hotel rooms after being detained by border officials.
During an audience For one of those cases, a federal judge appointed by President Trump said the expulsion policy was probably not authorized by public health law and violated legal protections for unaccompanied children.
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