Tag: unaccompanied minors
Family Takes In Guatemalan Teen Who Crossed Border

Family Takes In Guatemalan Teen Who Crossed Border

By Jeremy Redmon, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

CEDARTOWN, Ga. — It didn’t take Shad and Connie Ayers long to decide Alex Gomez Carrillo should join their family.

The couple spent a few days determining they had enough income to support the 17-year-old Guatemalan along with their two children. They could convert their unused dining room into a bedroom for him. Above all, they decided taking in Alex was the right thing to do.

Alex is among tens of thousands of Central American children and teens who have crossed the U.S.-Mexico border without their parents since last year. Many say they are fleeing deprivation and gang violence in their native countries.

The surge of juveniles has prompted angry protests across the country. Saying the children would be a burden on taxpayers, U.S. flag-waving demonstrators in Murrieta, California blocked busloads of the children and their parents from entering their town in July. That same month, Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal fired off a blistering letter to President Barack Obama about the hundreds of immigrant children and teens who have been placed in the care of sponsors in Georgia this year. Deal told Obama that Georgia has received a “disproportionate number of refugee placements over the past few years.”

In contrast, the Ayerses have welcomed Alex with open arms. Their Baptist faith and their immigrant ancestry — her forebears migrated to the United States from Mexico and he is the descendant of Irish immigrants — also figured in their decision to welcome Alex. Connie Ayers thought to herself: “What if I was in that situation and I needed help, would there be somebody there to help me?”

Ayers is now seeking in court to become the teenager’s guardian, which could allow him to obtain legal status here.

“I can’t sit back and watch someone suffer or be sent to a place where they are going to be hurt when I can do something about it,” said Ayers, who was born in Texas and grew up, like her husband, a few hundred miles north of the Mexican border.

Alex said the Ayerses have quickly become his family.

“Connie treats me like I am her son,” he said in Spanish with Connie Ayers translating for him. “I have shoes. I have clothes. I have everything … not like in Guatemala. It’s a different life.”

Connie Ayers first met Alex while attending a local church during the summer of last year. Alex told her he grew up in poverty in Guatemala, living with eight other siblings in an adobe house with dirt floors and no indoor plumbing. Food and clothing were scarce. He started working as a young boy, selling candy and ice cream to help support his family while missing years of education. He described a troubled relationship with his father. And he said a local gang member threatened to kill him.

Fearing for his life, Alex set off for America in May of last year, paying coyotes — or smugglers — to help him along the way. He traveled with a group of strangers by car across Guatemala and then set off on foot at the Mexican border. At times, the coyotes concealed him in a barrel and in a refrigerator. In all, it took him more than two weeks to finally cross the Rio Grande.

Federal immigration authorities apprehended him on the other side of the river. They put him in deportation proceedings before releasing him last year to the care of an older brother, who is also living without legal status in Cedartown.

So far this fiscal year, authorities have apprehended 66,127 unaccompanied children and teens like Alex on the southwest border, or nearly twice the number arrested by the same time last fiscal year. The surge of children has jammed immigration court dockets and prompted Obama to ask Congress for $3.7 billion in emergency funding to respond to the crisis. Congressional Republicans have pushed for a lower figure.

After befriending Alex, Connie Ayers drove him to his deportation hearing in downtown Atlanta in the summer of last year.

The judge scheduled a new hearing for Alex so he could find a lawyer. Ayers quickly found Rocky Rawcliffe, a local immigration attorney. Rawcliffe persuaded the judge to continue Alex’s deportation case until April while the teen seeks relief from deportation.

Meanwhile, with the help of another attorney, Tracie Klinke, Ayers is asking the Polk County Juvenile Court to declare Alex dependent upon the state and to approve her as his legal guardian. If the court grants that request, Alex could apply for a form of relief for children who are unable to be reunited with their parents. He could get a green card through the Special Immigrant Juvenile Status program.

Ayers giggled about how she had impulsively offered to take in Alex before consulting her husband.

“I was like, ‘Wait a minute. Stop. Timeout,’ ” Shad Ayers recalled, laughing about his wife.

He thought about it for a few days, wondering whether Alex would fit in with their family and if they could afford to care for him. Then he and his wife invited Alex to their modest home for a cookout. Sitting in their den, they told Alex they expected him to respect them, go to school, and stay out of trouble. He agreed and moved in with them in July.

The transition hasn’t been easy. Shad Ayers works full time for a telecommunications company. And Connie Ayers is taking nursing classes while caring for Alex and her 13-year-old daughter, Alexis. After helping them with their lessons, she sometimes doesn’t get to her nursing homework until after midnight. The Ayerses’ 20-year-old son, Bobby, and Alex take turns sleeping on the couch. And their home has only one shower, so “the bathing schedule is awful,” Connie Ayers said.

So far, Alex has kept his promises. He’s doing well in school. And he voluntarily helps around the house, cleaning dishes, doing laundry, and sweeping.

“Nobody bothers me,” he said. “It’s a happy life.”

Asked about his future, Alex said he wants to become a U.S. citizen, go to college, and study to become a teacher. He also wants to become a professional soccer player. And an architect. He has lots of plans. And the Ayerses say they will be there to support him along the way.

AFP Photo/Mark Ralston

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Texas Schools Pressed To Accommodate Influx Of Young Immigrants

Texas Schools Pressed To Accommodate Influx Of Young Immigrants

By Molly Hennessy-Fiske, Los Angeles Times

HOUSTON — A year ago, the Las Americas Newcomer Middle School in the low-income Gulfton neighborhood started the semester with 150 immigrant and refugee students. When the new school year began last month, enrollment skyrocketed to 325 students, most of them newly arrived from Central America.

“It’s put a burden on me because I’ve run out of space,” Principal Maria Moreno said of the school’s dozen portable classrooms set up behind another middle school. She hired five new teachers and a social worker, converted a teachers lounge and school police office into classrooms, and used surplus money to buy projectors, laptops, and desktop computers.

But she still had to turn away more than 100 students.

“That’s not going to stop,” Moreno said. “Since I can’t handle them, they’re going next door. But is next door equipped to handle them?”

That’s a question facing educators across the country. School districts from California to Georgia and Maryland have had to add bilingual programs and social services to help new immigrants, with Oakland hiring an “unaccompanied minor support services consultant.”

Miami-Dade County Public Schools in Florida, home to one of the country’s largest Honduran communities, has requested federal assistance after enrolling 1,469 Central American students since the past school year, including 901 from Honduras.

But nowhere is the impact of the recent surge of immigration felt more strongly than in Texas.

More than 66,000 unaccompanied young immigrants crossed into the United States illegally in the past fiscal year, most entering through Texas’ Rio Grande Valley.

Of those, 37,477 had been released to sponsors across the country as of July 31, according to the Office of Refugee Resettlement. California received 3,909 children, while the largest number — 5,280 — went to Texas. Of those, 2,866 have been placed in Houston and the surrounding county.

Texas had long served students who were in the country illegally, and a 1982 Supreme Court case held that the state could not deny them an education. Texas also absorbed 35,000 students after Hurricane Katrina.

The current wave, though smaller, presents special challenges to educators. Many of these students, Moreno said, are fleeing countries in turmoil and need counseling and other social services.

There’s the 12-year-old student at Las Americas sent north by her mother from El Salvador after her cousin was gang-raped. The 11-year-old Salvadoran girl who persuaded a priest to smuggle her north without her mother’s consent. And the 14-year-old Honduran boy whose mother brought him as far as Guadalajara, Mexico, and then ran out of money and told him to hop cargo trains the rest of the way.

Most students don’t speak English. Some indigenous children barely speak Spanish, like the Honduran boy who spoke Mayan Quiche and kept asking Moreno in Spanish, “How do you say this in Spanish?”

The Las Americas school, which serves grades 4 through 8, has students from 23 countries who speak 17 languages. Arabic, Nepali, and Swahili were more common than Spanish until recently. Houston public schools, which plan to expand the Newcomers program, have already enrolled 1,825 new students from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.

Some Texans fear that the schools cannot afford the newcomers. But Texas Education Agency officials, who oversee the state’s more than 1,200 school districts and charters, say they already budgeted to cover the extra students and can draw from a state fund with a $263 million surplus if new costs arise.

Agency officials estimate that it will pay districts $9,473 to educate each bilingual student this academic year. That’s $1,573 more than it paid for the typical student.

If most of the young immigrants placed in Texas enroll in school, the total cost of educating the newcomers could top $50 million.

Federal officials say that it’s difficult to estimate how many of the young immigrants have enrolled in schools. The U.S. Department of Education has released guidance to schools, but has not tallied costs.

“The financial impact of unaccompanied immigrant children is an incredibly complicated number to calculate in a particular state, district, or school, much less nationally. It depends on a range of local factors,” department spokeswoman Dorie Nolt said.

Those factors include the number of English-as-a-second-language students already in a school and the level of community programs and state support. Also key is existing enrollment, Nolt said, adding that some urban districts are underenrolled and may have extra capacity.

“There was this concern at first that there was going to be this flood of kids,” Nolt said. “Some urban districts have seen a lot, but the vast majority have not.”

But Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) and other Texas conservatives complain that the migrants will place new demands on already overcrowded schools.

“Regrettably, American taxpayers will be asked to foot the bill for the burden on these school districts,” Smith said.

In the Houston area, Liberty and Galveston counties and the cities of Magnolia and League City recently passed resolutions condemning federal efforts to house migrant children in temporary shelters, or directing officials not to cooperate with federal authorities to maintain the facilities. One resolution branded a shelter a health risk.

Moreno has spoken to conservative community groups and tried to allay such concerns, noting she screens birth certificates and proof of immunization.

“What’s better than having an educated child who can get a job and pay taxes?” she said. “You want them to be educated and fend for themselves.”

As Moreno walked among classrooms recently, she stopped to talk to the 14-year-old Honduran boy who rode the trains north and has transformed himself, in a few short weeks, from class clown to dedicated student, she said.

In a math class of 30 students, a girl with curly brown hair and dangling gold earrings gave Moreno a shy wave. It was the 13-year-old Salvadoran who had been struggling with her father.

Moreno bent low, whispering to the girl that she would catch up with her later. The girl’s father had not telephoned the principal for help this weekend. Moreno took that as a sign of progress.

Photo: Los Angeles Times/MCT/Molly Hennessy-Fiske

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Under ‘Rocket Docket,’ Kids Race Time — Few Of Them With A Lawyer

Under ‘Rocket Docket,’ Kids Race Time — Few Of Them With A Lawyer

By Dianne Solis, The Dallas Morning News

Lawyers call them “rocket dockets” — court schedules that speed deportation hearings for Central American children who crossed the U.S. border without a parent.

Some question whether the children are getting proper legal representation as immigration judges work their way through the fast-paced dockets. Leaders of the National Association of Immigration Judges said it is a mistake to move up cases of vulnerable children in an already backlogged system.

“We deal with cases that are often, in effect, death penalty cases,” said Dana Leigh Marks, union president and a San Francisco-based judge. “Immigration law enforcement must stand on its own and not be allowed to overshadow or to control the immigration judicial process.”

The Obama administration issued the fast-track order in July to discourage Honduran, Salvadoran, and Guatemalan families from sending children north.

Now, family dramas unreel at a furious pace before Judge Michael Baird, who hears the juvenile cases in a starkly lit courtroom in the Earle Cabell Federal Building in downtown Dallas. Children sit on their guardians’ laps. Attorneys crowd the center aisle. Mothers wipe tears as they tell the judge of deportation fears for their sons and daughters.

On a recent day, attorney Bill Holston surveyed the scene and then did quick client-lawyer prep work. He gave a fist bump to 11-year-old Jordan, a skinny Honduran boy who wore a gray-and-black shirt with a fierce-looking eagle. Within minutes, the two took their turn before Baird.

The mother, a pregnant housekeeper, came to the initial hearing three days earlier and was given time to look for an attorney. She found Holston, the executive director of the Human Rights Initiative of North Texas, a pro bono agency with a track record of victories.

Baird granted Holston more time to prepare. “You are well aware these cases are moving at a very brisk pace,” the judge told them. Baird said he has orders to follow from the government.

At least Jordan has a lawyer. Many children do not. Some families can’t find a lawyer who can quickly return to court with them. Some can’t afford the thousands of dollars in attorney fees. Others turn to agencies that do pro bono work, but those lawyers struggle with the load.

Without an attorney, deportation is a 90 percent certainty, according to a Syracuse University research center called the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC).

The Human Rights Initiative now passes out guidelines to immigrants on how to represent themselves. The director of legal and immigration services at Catholic Charities of Dallas says it performs legal triage, picking cases most likely to win.

The Dallas chapter of the National Council of Jewish Women started a court-watching program. Their concern: “full and fair hearings for the kids,” said attorney Cheryl Pollman, the group leader.

More than 63,000 children have been apprehended this fiscal year crossing the border without parents. Many were sent on the dangerous journey by their families, who hope they will find refuge from the poverty and gang violence of their home countries. Some come looking for their parents or other family already in the United States.

The number of apprehensions this year is already eight times that in 2008. But the flow is slowing: In July, about 5,500 children were picked up, compared with 10,000 in June.

Now the children are going through the nation’s immigration courts, where there is a backlog of about 375,000 cases of adults and juveniles from around the world. Juvenile cases make up about a tenth of that backlog.

In Dallas, the five immigration judges, who serve North Texas and the entire state of Oklahoma, have a backlog of about 5,200 adult and juvenile cases, according to TRAC.

“These children are coming off a traumatic journey,” said Jonathan Ryan, executive director of Raices, a San Antonio pro bono law firm that represents juveniles. “It takes time for a person to decompress and be able to process through these experiences. … You want to cram them through a legal process, a legal gantlet in which they have no representation? The due process is essentially gutted.”

Marks, president of the immigration judges association, warned that children need more time, particularly when there’s trauma involved. “There is only so far you can go without compromising fairness,” she said.

She noted that judges face disciplinary action if they refuse to speed ahead. “A truly independent court needs separation from the executive branch’s enforcement prerogatives,” she said.

During a July hearing on Capitol Hill, Juan Osuna, head of the Justice Department agency that runs the immigration courts, responded to criticism.

“The utmost priority for every case … will remain — that every fact is considered and that every application of law is correct and that people appearing before our immigration judges receive due process of law,” Osuna said. “We will do these cases quickly, but we will do them right.”

In Dallas, Baird’s courtroom staff schedules five to six rocket dockets a week, up from one a month last year.

Baird, a former assistant district attorney in Georgia, has a laser focus on the bench, and his “yes” rate is restrained. Over five years, he denied asylum petitions about 60 percent of the time, according to government records obtained by TRAC. The national average is about 50 percent.

On a recent day, Brian, a 5-year-old Honduran, smiled through the gravity of his initial hearing. He slipped into a big black leather chair to face the judge. His legs didn’t touch the ground, but the loose laces of his sneaker did.

He playfully poked his 8-year-old sister, Evelyn, during the hearing. His 26-year-old mother was given a continuance to hunt for an attorney.

That same day, Holston, the seasoned attorney, showed up with Jordan and waited his turn with his battered leather briefcase. After watching several other hearings and then getting his own continuance, Holston walked out red-faced, angered by what he’d witnessed.

Baird is in a “very difficult position,” Holston said, but “this rocket docket is so upsetting. … They speed the process so lawyers can’t do their jobs.

“It is an ugly thing to watch.”

AFP Photo/Stan Honda

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Obama Suggests He’ll Need More Time On Immigration Policy

Obama Suggests He’ll Need More Time On Immigration Policy

By Kathleen Hennessey, Lisa Mascaro, and Christi Parsons, Tribune Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama is suggesting that he will defer his self-imposed deadline for announcing an expected change in immigration policy, as the White House wrestles with the political and legal dilemmas involved in making significant alterations without congressional approval.

Fed up with congressional gridlock, the president has said he’ll use his executive power to make changes. One proposal under discussion would delay a decision on the more sweeping and controversial changes under consideration until after the November midterm election, according to a White House official familiar with the discussions.

Under that plan, the president would first announce measures aimed at tightening enforcement of current law, then put off until the end of the year a decision on a more sweeping program that could temporarily shield millions of immigrants from deportation.

The two-step plan would bow to the concerns of Democratic lawmakers running in Republican-leaning states who have expressed opposition to Obama’s plans to act unilaterally on the hot-button issue. Some Democratic senators have said he should wait for Congress to pass legislation.

And some Democratic strategists fret that the move would spark opposition among Republicans and energize the GOP base just weeks before the midterm election. The GOP is expected to maintain its House majority and needs a net gain of six seats to take control of the Senate.

Aides say the president has not made a decision on precise actions or timing. The official familiar with the talks, who would not be identified discussing internal deliberations, said the two-step proposal was one of several on the table.

At a White House news conference on Thursday, the president hinted that he may need more time than expected.

Obama declared in June that he was fed up with lawmakers’ deadlock on immigration legislation and ordered Homeland Secretary Jeh Johnson to recommend a series of changes that did not require lawmakers’ approval.

Obama said he expected the recommendations “before the end of summer” and intended “to adopt those recommendations without further delay.”

He has not yet received Johnson’s review.

On Thursday, Obama reiterated his plans to take some action, but did not repeat his deadline.

Instead, Obama noted that a recent surge of unaccompanied minors turning themselves in at the border appears to have subsided. The crisis had consumed headlines for much of the summer, adding to Democrats’ worry that public support for easing the path to citizenship for those in this country illegally could slip.

Obama said Thursday that the crisis “changed the perception of the American people about what’s happening at the borders,” and argued that it demonstrated the need for changes. The situation also demanded his administration’s attention and resources, he said.

“Some of these things do affect timelines and we’re just going to be working through as systematically as possible in order to get this done,” Obama said at the news conference. “But have no doubt: In the absence of congressional action, I’m going to do what I can to make sure the system works better.”

White House officials say the president wants to enact broad changes, including a program modeled on one he established in 2012 for so-called Dreamers — those illegally brought to the United States as children who have met other qualifications, such as a high school diploma or military service.

The new program could protect some groups of immigrants — such as those who have deep roots in the United States or who have children living in the United States legally, for example — from deportation.

Delaying that action until after November could give lawmakers more time to find consensus on immigration. Although few on the Hill think that is likely, Obama said he had not closed the door.

“Hope springs eternal,” he said Thursday.

A delay is far more likely to frustrate immigration advocates who have been pushing Obama to act — and who are expecting the announcement soon.

Complicating Obama’s deliberations is the budget fight awaiting lawmakers when they return from their August recess early next month.

Congress must pass legislation to fund the government in the upcoming fiscal year by Sept. 30, when the current law expires. Key conservatives have warned that Republicans may try to stop the president’s actions by attaching prohibitions to the spending bill.

Such a move could resemble last fall’s 16-day government shutdown, when Republicans tried unsuccessfully to undo Obama’s landmark health care law.

Some Democrats have welcomed the shutdown scenario as an opportunity to portray the Republicans in Congress as extremists, particularly on immigration — an issue especially important to Latino voters. But others have suggested that such a fight could damage both parties as voters have grown weary of crisis politics in Washington.

AFP Photo/Saul Loeb

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