United States Must Stop Unlawfully Turning Unaccompanied Immigrant Children Back to Danger

Today, the Young Center submitted a comment addressing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about a rule published by CDC on March 20th, 2020, barring entry to the U.S. due to COVID-19. The rule, in combination with a CDC order issued the same day, results in unlawful turn backs of unaccompanied immigrant children from the U.S.-Mexico border. Late March, our team in Harlingen, Texas, alerted us that DHS was unlawfully deporting unaccompanied children who had come to the border seeking protection to danger using the CDC order. This practice continues today, endangering the lives of countless children who are legally afforded protections.

According to federal law, children who arrive at the border alone must be allowed into the country and transferred to government custody where they will have the chance to seek reunification with family members or relatives, but this administration is using COVID-19 as a pretext for avoiding its legal obligation to children. In our public comment submitted today, we laid out how the rule contradicts U.S. and international law, which require continued protection for asylum-seekers during emergencies and specific legal protections for unaccompanied children. We also show how the rule endangers children’s safety and well-being (their best interests) by eliminating protections that ensure children’s designation as unaccompanied and their ability to access protection as established in law. By allowing the CDC order to include unaccompanied children in a blanket suspension of entry to the U.S., the rule puts children in grave danger and deprives them of any opportunity to seek safety.

The U.S. can both protect public health and ensure continued protection for the most vulnerable in our world and is in fact obligated to do so. At the Young Center, we understand the particular vulnerability of immigrant children who flee persecution, trafficking, abuse and other violence in their countries. They travel hundreds if not thousands of miles to the U.S., whether alone, with family, or in the company of strangers. We are gravely concerned that the CDC rule as written and as already applied will jeopardize the safety and well-being of immigrant children by forcing their return to persecution, their traffickers or their abusers or leaving them vulnerable to exploitation across the border in a country that is not their own, in violation of U.S. law and basic principles of child welfare and human decency. We therefore urge CDC to rescind the rule and ensure that any future regulation of a similar nature include a clear exception for unaccompanied children to any suspension of entry to the U.S. related to communicable diseases.