Gather your things, they told him, and he felt the familiar trembling return to his gut.
“I thought they would take me away again, put me in some other place,” said Alfredo Lopez Sanchez.
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The slight Guatemalan 17-year-old nervously pondered what the Immigration and Naturalization Service intended to do with him this time. Then a paralegal arrived at the Boystown youth shelter in southwest Miami-Dade County and broke the news. After 18 months in detention and 11 transfers among shelters, jail and a hotel, the teenager who had fled chronic abuse in his Guatemalan home was to be freed.
He is one of about 5,000 unaccompanied youngsters who pass through or linger in federal immigration custody each year. They include victims of human-trafficking operations, runaways and abandoned children.
For two decades, advocates have battled what they consider the prolonged detention and harsh treatment of some of the most vulnerable members of society. Now they eagerly await big changes written into the Homeland Security Act.
Under the new law, custody of children will shift from the immigration service to the Office of Refugee Resettlement in the Department of Health and Human Services, separate from the immigration-enforcement authorities who seek to deport the children. Advocates hope that with its experience resettling thousands of traumatized children, the refugee office will be more sensitive to the conditions of children’s detention, quicker to release them to sponsors and more likely to let them assert abandonment and abuse in juvenile court, as Alfredo did.
“Believe me, I’ve got my fingers crossed,” said Carlos Holgun, chief counsel for the Los Angeles Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law.
That group’s suit against the immigration service 17 years ago led to the 1997 Flores federal court settlement, in which the agency agreed to certain standards in its treatment of children. The agency has pledged repeatedly to improve its record with kids, and maintains that it has largely complied with the Flores agreement.
Advocates disagree. They say the agency still violates standards in hundreds, perhaps thousands of cases, as they believe it did in Alfredo’s.
On the car ride to the Lake Worth, Fla., home Alfredo now shares with Sonia Cabrera-Lopez, the woman who for months interpreted legal proceedings in his Maya-Mam language, Alfredo glimpsed an agency-contracted budget hotel from the window. He spent last Christmas there in his room.
“They didn’t do anything,” he said. “When they brought food, I couldn’t even eat it. Everything, it just felt bad.”
At Cabrera-Lopez’s cozy home, he sleeps under a colorfully striped spread, hand-woven by his new custodian’s grandmother in a Guatemalan town not far from his.
“I’m happy,” Alfredo said, flashing a dimpled smile.
Fleeing abuse at age 16
It is quite a change for him. He says he often wished for his own death in federal immigration detention and as victim and witness to his father’s brutal attacks. Alfredo once watched his father knock his mother to the ground, killing the baby strapped to her back, court records show.
At 16, he fled to the United States, where he planned to seek out a cousin, but was arrested in Texas after a paid smuggler abandoned him there. Here, Alfredo was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, and found himself being shuttled among facilities and states.
The immigration service’s juvenile program bases transfers on available beds and the appropriate facility. Critics, who charge that the agency overuses juvenile jails and too often overlooks children’s best interests, are optimistic about the pending transfer of children’s custody to the Office of Refugee Resettlement.
This shift was incorporated into the Homeland Security Act with a big push from leading advocate Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.). The change will eliminate what advocates consider the conflict of interest at the heart of current problems.
“The INS is acting as the jailer, the prosecutor and the parent all at the same time,” said Wendy Young of the New York-based Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children. “To expect them to provide daily care of the children, as well as their deportation, leads to a really schizophrenic program.”
A deportation officer with the agency once told a federal judge in Miami that he would not consider future requests that Alfredo be released to a sponsor because he believed the teen had an undocumented relative in the United States, court records show.
Alfredo’s lawyers waited 10 months for the immigration service to let him present his case in juvenile court. When the agency at last consented, attorneys say it marked the first time the agency agreed to let a juvenile judge consider a refugee child’s case in South Florida.
Chronic problems for kids
On Dec. 3, Circuit Judge Cindy Lederman ruled Alfredo was abandoned and neglected and determined it was in his best interest to remain in the United States. Now he is eligible for a visa that advocates say many can never seek because federal immigration authorities rarely permit abused and abandoned children to go to juvenile court before deporting them.
The coordinating agency in Alfredo’s case was the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center, which recently released a report on child clients and problems that many advocacy groups consider chronic.
For example, advocates believe most children in federal immigration custody face legal proceedings without an attorney. Feinstein has said she plans to reintroduce legislation to guarantee legal counsel, a provision that did not make it into the Homeland Security Act.
Alfredo’s story illustrated the claim that the immigration service uses children as bait to get to undocumented relatives, as well as the unnecessary use of handcuffs and shackles during transfers. In the cases of several Haitian teens, the report depicted the agency’s alleged overuse of juvenile jails, and its resistance to releasing minors to a willing relative or sponsor–in one boy’s case, his mother.
The immigration service does not discuss individual cases but disputes many of the general complaints. The agency says it has made major improvements since the Flores settlement and again after a critical report from the Justice Department’s inspector general last year. These include the creation of the Office of Juvenile Affairs this past spring, which has centralized and standardized decision-making on children’s issues and shifted responsibility out of the agency’s detention branch.
“Dealing with unaccompanied alien children is very difficult and INS does its best to ensure that children are kept safe and well-cared-for while in its custody,” said John Pogash, acting juvenile affairs director.
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Pogash said the immigration service provides education and appropriate services to children, most of whom are released within two weeks, although the average detention can run up to 34 days.
`I just wanted to die’
At the small dining table in his new home, Alfredo discussed his 18-month detention in the Spanish that he learned from other detained kids. But when he tried to describe the recurring sensation that at times overwhelmed him, he turned to his custodian to interpret his native tongue.
“You just feel like your heart is being squeezed, it hurts so much. I just wanted to die,” he said. “Especially when they put me in the jail. My stomach was hurting and my heart was hurting. I just couldn’t breathe, it was so much pain.”
For two weeks Alfredo was held at the Monroe County Jail after immigration authorities labeled him a flight risk. Alfredo says he never planned to flee. His attorneys say the agency never substantiated the charge against a boy who hardly understood Spanish or English.
Later, while Alfredo was at the agency-contracted hotel, an attorney who knew of the teen’s fondness for drawing brought him an art set. Locked in a room all day, Alfredo was not allowed to receive it, his attorneys say. It was not until another transfer landed him in a Pennsylvania facility, 1,200 miles from his legal team and interpreter, that Alfredo got the set.
“I don’t know, maybe they thought I would write all over the walls,” said Alfredo.
Many of the detailed and precise landscapes Alfredo drew at the shelters feature grounded or soaring eagles. In one, a wildcat bares its fangs, poised to attack a young hunter boy who has stopped to sleep in the woods.
Now free, Alfredo continues to draw. Last week he sat at his own desk in his own room and drew a colorful house atop a long flight of steps, far above a small boat banked next to a stormy sea.
He said he was happy to have slept a night with no nightmares, neither of Guatemala, nor of life in detention. But the wakeful nightmare of the past year and a half has not yet left him completely.
“I still feel like I’m there, like I’m still locked in,” he said. “I feel it in my stomach. I can’t get it out.”