On Friday, September 4, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to end its practice of detaining immigrant children in hotel rooms by September 15. However, not only is DHS fighting to continue to keep kids in hotels by appealing the judge’s order but it’s also asking the appeals court to not have to comply with the order while it’s appealing the ruling. In other words, DHS is fighting to be able to keep children hidden in hotels, supervised by adults they don’t know, with no access to lawyers, Child Advocates, or child welfare experts.

How did children end up hidden in hotels?

Under the pretext of COVID-19, DHS has unlawfully turned away at least 8,800 unaccompanied immigrant children seeking protection at our borders since March. Despite data from health experts demonstrating that the government’s decision to close the border is unnecessary and ineffective in protecting public health, DHS has returned thousands of unaccompanied children to their abusers, persecutors, and traffickers without asking them a single question about their safety and without confirming who will receive them when they are forced to return. At least 6,500 of those children were returned to Mexico, even though many of them were not Mexican citizens and likely did not have someone to care for them there. While waiting to “expel” these children from the United States, DHS held more than 577 unaccompanied children in hotels, hidden from public view without any of the protections guaranteed to them under federal law. Hundreds of children spent days, even weeks, in hotel and motel rooms—two beds and a bathroom—supervised by unknown adults with no expertise in child development, trauma, or children’s legal rights.

How is this legal?

It is not. This DHS-created process violates both the Flores Settlement Agreement and a 2008 anti-trafficking law, which require children to be placed in state-licensed programs where they can seek protection from deportation and reunification with family members. Likewise, the United States is required under international treaties to ensure that all people have a chance to seek protection from persecution before they are sent to their countries of origin. In turning all people away during a pandemic, DHS is blatantly violating U.S. law and treaty obligations towards those seeking humanitarian protection. And its goal is not about public health or they would not place children in public places like hotels. Rather, this so-called “health policy” is part and parcel of the administration’s long-sought plan of closing the border to children and families seeking safety —especially those from Central America, the Caribbean, and Africa. Because the government’s decision to turn away unaccompanied children is unlawful, we joined litigation challenging it.

How is the Young Center fighting back?

In recent months, Young Center staff learned of more than a dozen children held in these hotels. We fought for their transfer to safe, state-licensed programs. Determined to help end this egregious practice we didn’t know about, we filed a declaration to document the violation of children’s rights and explain the harm of holding children—as young as five years old and as old as 17—in hotel rooms with strangers. We are also advocating on behalf of individual children and on Capitol Hill, with government agencies, and even at the international level, for all unaccompanied children and asylum-seekers to be allowed into the country so they can pursue legal relief in safety.

What is next?

In her September 4 decision, Judge Dolly Gee flatly rejected DHS’s argument that detaining children in hotels protects public health in a pandemic. She found that the agency “cannot seriously argue in good faith that flouting their contractual obligations to place minors in licensed programs is necessary to mitigate the spread of COVID,” expressed serious concerns over DHS’s failure to provide “qualified, specialized supervision” to children and ruled that the conditions in hotels “are not adequately safe and do not sufficiently account for the vulnerability of unaccompanied minors in detention.” She ordered DHS to stop holding children in hotels and to transfer all children currently held in hotels to state-licensed programs.

It’s therefore unacceptable that at this moment, DHS is fighting against having to comply with her order and continues to detain children who are seeking protection from violence and persecution in unknown hotels for indefinite periods of time before deporting them to the same dangers they escaped in the first place. At the Young Center, we’ll continue to advocate for these and other immigrant children, for their right to seek safety at the border without fear and without barriers, and for their reunification with their family members and caregivers.

Thank you for supporting us in this work.