Lawsuit Claims Trump Administration Detains Immigrant Kids for Too Long

A federal lawsuit filed in New York on Tuesday night claims the Trump administration is taking too long to release immigrant kids in detention, putting them at psychological risk.

The plaintiffs include six teenagers, four of them in New York, plus their relatives. The teens are unaccompanied minors who were placed in shelters or foster care facilities after they crossed the southern border. They're supposed to be released to parents or other relatives here in the U.S. while their cases proceed in the immigration courts.

But attorney Paige Austin of the New York Civil Liberties Union said their release is taking too long because the government now requires fingerprints of all adults including parents.

"All six of these kids are sitting in custody months after they were detained because the simple process of getting back a fingerprint-based background check is stretching for weeks and sometimes months," she said.

The lawsuit says children in longterm detention through the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), which runs shelters for unaccompanied minors, suffer anxiety, a sense of helplessness, depression suicidal ideation and even suicidal attempts. It also says these mental health effects are "worsened by the fact most children ORR detains have survived trauma - such as persecution, assault, or torture - in their home countries, and prolonged incarceration exacerbates those injuries."

The number of children in federal custody has spiked to about 13,000 since the government began requiring more rigorous background checks last spring. The NYCLU is seeking class action status to speed the release of all children in detention to parents and other relatives.

The government has claimed the background checks are necessary to prevent children from winding up in the hands of traffickers. But Austin said children must be released from detention as soon as possible under the Flores Settlement, and she claimed their due process rights are being violated. She also noted that the adults' fingerprints can be shared with the Department of Homeland Security, scaring off undocumented relatives from stepping forward to sponsor the children.

The NYCLU won two similar individual cases including one last month in which a Honduran mother was reunited with her 14 year-old daughter after a federal judge found the background check was taking too long.

The plaintiffs in the new lawsuit include four teenagers who are in federal custody at Children's Village in Dobbs Ferry and Cayuga Centers in Manhattan, a boy detained in California and a 17-year-old girl in a Southwest Keys shelter in Brownsville, Texas.

That girl's mother, Norma Duchitanga, is also a plaintiff along with the parents and relatives of the other children.

Duchitanga lives in Rockland County, New York and said she left Ecuador for a better life 15 years ago. Her two older children remained in Ecuador. But she said her teenage daughter had to leave after she could no longer live with her grandmother. She said the girl was detained in Texas on Oct. 2.

"The appointments for the fingerprinting was very delayed," she said, in Spanish. "It was going to take one or two months to get an appointment here in New York.”

Duchitanga said she eventually went to Philadelphia to have her fingerprints checked because the waiting time was shorter there. But it will be another month or more before the background check is completed. She speaks to her daughter twice a week by phone but she worries about her constantly.

"She’s with fear that they’re going to send her back," she explained. "She is afraid they’re going to put her in jail. And that’s her fear. And I don’t want her to suffer. She’s already suffered since I came, and abandoned her to give her a better life."

She's also afraid of what will happen when her daughter turns 18 in December, at which point the government can place her in an adult detention center instead of a shelter for minors. Adult detention centers run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement are usually in county jails. 

"I hope that the lawsuit can help not just my daughter but the other children so they can be with us," said Duchitanga.

The ACLU and the National Center for Youth Law are also representing the plaintiffs with attorneys from Morrison & Foerster in New York.

The Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services, did not have an immediate reaction to the lawsuit. 

With translation assistance from Jose Olivares.