New York Times
By Liz Robbins
August 23, 2015
Wearing
Vans shoes and rubber-band bracelets, hair gel and shy smiles, the
brothers Brayan and José looked like typical teenagers.
But the story they told of their turbulent past year revealed just how far from typical they have traveled.
In
separate trips, the boys said, they left El Salvador to avoid being
recruited by violent gangs and trekked across two countries. They were
caught by United States Border
Patrol agents in Texas in 2014 and sent to different detention centers
for several weeks before being reunited in Elmont, N.Y., with their
father, Arturo. They had not seen him in 10 years.
“That’s
why I brought them one at a time,” Arturo said in Spanish at the Long
Island offices of the boys’ immigration lawyer, “because if something
happened to one, at
least I would have the other.” The family requested that its last name
not be used because of its legal status.
Like
thousands of other children who fled the violence gripping several
Central American countries, Brayan, now 16, and José, 15, arrived safely
in the United States only
to spend the next 13 months navigating the justice system to prove they
have a right to stay.
They
have missed many days of school to appear in federal immigration court
and state family court, have helped their father complete a pile of
paperwork taller than they
are and have contended with bureaucratic requirements that seemed
endless.
Last
summer, President Obama declared a crisis along the border with Mexico
in response to the tens of thousands of unaccompanied children coming
into the country. Detention
centers in Texas overflowed, prompting the federal Department of
Homeland Security to open emergency shelters. Political tempers boiled
over — Rick Perry, who was the governor of Texas, ordered 1,000 National
Guard troops to defend the border. The Obama administration
created a priority juvenile docket in immigration courts to speed up
deportation proceedings.
One
year later, the number of children arriving at the border has sharply
decreased, in part because Mexico has been returning children to their
home countries before
they can reach the United States.
But
the crisis has not ended. It has simply shifted. It is playing out in
courtrooms crowded with young defendants but lacking lawyers and judges
to handle the sheer volume
of cases. Thousands of children without lawyers have been issued
deportation orders, some because they never showed up in court.
“The
situation last summer was characterized as part of the overall
immigration system being broken, and it’s taken us down the wrong policy
path,” said Wendy Young, the
president of Kids in Need of Defense, a national legal advocacy group.
“This is not an immigration crisis; it’s a refugee crisis.”
About
84,000 children were apprehended at the Southwest border during the
2014 fiscal year and the first six months of the 2015 fiscal year,
according to the Border Patrol.
Of the 79,088 removal cases initiated by the government, 15,207
children had been ordered deported as of June, according to the
Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research group in Washington.
While
a small percentage of children have been granted asylum, most are
seeking relief from deportation by applying for special immigrant
juvenile status, federal officials
said. And yet, rather than their claims being expedited, 69 percent of
the children on the priority docket still have cases pending, statistics
show.
The
burden is far more difficult for children if they do not have a lawyer —
a right not granted to defendants in immigration courts — especially
because of the accelerated
time frame the government established for their cases. After being
released to a sponsor, usually a relative, they are on the clock: They
are required to make their first court appearance within 21 days of the
court’s receiving their case to contest their
deportation.
New York Advantage
By
all accounts, there are legal advantages for child immigrants in New
York City that do not exist in other parts of the country where they
settled in large numbers,
including Los Angeles, South Florida and the Houston area. Last summer,
nonprofit agencies and pro bono lawyers formed a coalition at the
federal court in Lower Manhattan, backed by $1.9 million in financing
from the City Council and private philanthropy,
to help those without lawyers.
Although
the Council said the coalition took on 648 cases of the 1,600 children
screened at 26 Federal Plaza, not all were from the five boroughs and
only those children
in New York City were eligible for free assistance. Even then, only
those who were most likely to win relief could be helped.
“We
may have it a little under control in New York City,” said Jojo
Annobil, director of immigration for Legal Aid, “but it’s not under
control in Long Island,” where,
along with Westchester County and the lower Hudson Valley, large
numbers of the children have also settled.
It
is a disparity that underscores the contentious divide over what to do
about the country’s 11 million undocumented immigrants.
Federal
officials defended their approach. Gillian Christensen, a spokeswoman
for United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said the agency’s
lawyers work “with
advocates for the children, to ensure that these cases are processed in
as expeditious and fair a manner as possible.”
But
Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration
Studies, a Washington research institute that supports tighter controls
on immigration, said the
process for asylum or special immigration status served as a “rationale
for family reunification” and is inherently flawed.
“It’s
not that it should be more convoluted; it’s that the standards should
be higher,” Mr. Krikorian said. “You’ve got family court judges deciding
U.S. immigration policy.”
Winding Path in Courts
On
a recent day on the 14th floor of 26 Federal Plaza, lawyers bustled
around with files, holding hushed and rushed conversations in Spanish
with their clients. Inside
the courtrooms, the judges presided like school principals; they
praised some children for their good grades and implored those without
lawyers to seek help on the 12th floor.
More
than a dozen of the teenagers who came to New York City and Long Island
recounted their hardships — adjusting to living with estranged parents,
learning English,
taking tests. They asked not to have their full names published because
of their undocumented status.
Of
the two main paths to winning relief from deportation, asylum is the
most straightforward, but also the most difficult to obtain. Children
must persuade a federal asylum
officer that they face life-threatening persecution based on race,
religion, nationality or membership in a political or social group.
Because
those cases are difficult to prove, many children instead seek relief
under special immigrant juvenile status, provided they can show they
were abused, neglected
or abandoned by one or both parents.
The
process requires going through three entities for approval: federal
immigration court, state family court and the federal citizenship
agency.
“It
means that no one entity in the process can crack the whip or control
the flow,” said Lenni Benson, a professor and director of the Safe
Passage Project at New York
Law School, which mentors volunteer lawyers working on youth
immigration cases.
Brayan and José’s case shows just how complex the journey can be.
They
must prove to the family court that they cannot return to El Salvador
because one parent abandoned them there. The court must also approve of
their guardian — even
if, as in the case of Brayan and José, the guardian is their father.
Their
father, Arturo, must try to get consent to be the guardian from the
boys’ mothers — who he said each abandoned her son in El Salvador.
Different
lawyers are handling different parts of the case. David Williams, 31,
an immigration lawyer from the Central American Refugee Center, a
nonprofit legal provider
in Hempstead, N.Y., is preparing their case for federal court. He acted
as a liaison for Janet Millman, who represented the brothers in family
court in Nassau County and was appointed by the state’s Attorneys for
Children panel, which provides legal services
for children in family courts.
Mr.
Williams and Ms. Millman tried to notify both mothers of their son’s
hearings. Neither woman responded from her last known address.
The
judge then requested that they put advertisements in newspapers in the
United States and in El Salvador, and provide copies of the papers.
Still, there was no word
from either mother.
Arturo,
44, also had to list every address he has had for the last 28 years so
New York State, according to immigration lawyers, can investigate
whether he has ever lived
with a sex offender.
Although
Arturo is an undocumented immigrant, the family court required that he
be fingerprinted, along with other members of the household. And when
one member moved,
the entire household was required to be fingerprinted again.
“It’s confusing,” Arturo said, “and there are times that I’ve had to redo paperwork.”
Finally,
when the lawyers had submitted all of the documentation to the court
and the family appeared in July, the judge postponed her decision
because she had an unusually
full caseload.
Arturo,
a car washer, was lucky to get a lawyer at the Central American Refugee
Center. Had he arrived weeks later, the organization would have turned
the family away
because all four of the group’s immigration lawyers had hit their
maximum number of 40 cases.
“I don’t want to sound coldhearted,” said Patrick Young, the program director of the organization, “but we can’t handle it.”
Atlas:
DIY, a community-based group serving immigrant children in Brooklyn,
stopped taking clients three months ago. To make the most of her
resources, the one lawyer
on staff, Rebecca McBride, 30, must turn away children whose cases she
deems too hard to win because they do not qualify for relief.
She took the case of Elicia, a 17-year-old from Honduras, soon after she was ordered deported in absentia last October.
“For me, it was all over,” Elicia said in Spanish. “I didn’t know if they were going to get me at home or at school.”
When
she arrived in July 2014, Elicia did not go to her immigration hearings
because friends warned her she could be deported just by showing up in
court. But Ms. McBride
reopened the case and argued for Elicia to get special juvenile status
because her father had neglected and abandoned her. With three days to
spare, the judge terminated Elicia’s deportation order.
For more than a year, Brayan and José lived in a similar limbo. It was still better than living in El Salvador.
“These
two kids couldn’t go to school, ” Ms. Millman said. “They didn’t know
whether they were going to be dead the next day. Their life was worth
not a whole lot. They
came because they want to live.”
Last
week, a family court judge in Nassau County granted a special findings
order, determining that both boys were eligible to receive special
immigrant juvenile status.
But
they are not in the clear. They still must submit an application for
the status to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services,
which, if approved, would
entitle them to permanent residency. On Sept. 9, an immigration court
judge in Manhattan will rule on whether to cancel their deportation
orders.
“It is still a case that is not 100 percent won,” Arturo said. “We still have to give it a little more effort.”
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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