One in ten unaccompanied migrant children in Arizona say they were physically abused while in the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency’s custody since January of 2023, according to a September report by the non-profit Florence Project for Refugee and Migrant Rights

Based on a fifteen-month investigation and hundreds of individual interviews, the report also found that one in four of the interviewed unaccompanied minors say they were verbally abused. Many more report a lack of hygiene products, medical supplies, warm clothes, and food.

“Kids shouldn’t be held in inhumane conditions, subjected to abuse,” said Jane Liu, director of Policy and Litigation at the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights. “There really is just very little accountability.” Her organization works with the Florence Project, part of a collective effort to bring visibility to the conditions unaccompanied immigrant children are held in.

Detention centers for unaccompanied minors have long been criticized, and the Florence Project’s report is the most recent update in a history of attempts at change, says Liu. “Every couple years we’ve been raising these issues . And nothing has been done.”

 

The Customs and Border Patrol agency was created in 2002 as a subsidiary of the DHS, explains Luis Coronado, history professor at the University of Arizona and member of the Binational Migration Institute. Before then, the paths of unaccompanied migrant children were determined by Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS).

“If you think things are bad now, it was horrendous back in the 80s and 90s,” said Liu about detention facilities. Litigation against the US government for its treatment of unaccompanied immigrant children started in 1985, with the Flores v. Reno case. It was dismissed in 1993 after a long legal battle.

Despite the case’s closure, public pressure persisted, and in 1997 the Clinton administration signed the landmark Flores Settlement, the nation’s first formalization of unaccompanied migrant children standards for care.

Since then, CBP has become responsible for unaccompanied migrant children after their apprehension. Updates in 2008 resulted in CBP’s promise to hold minors for no more than 72 hours (notably excluding “exigent circumstances”) at which point they should be transferred to the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR).

But the reality inside the facilities often differs harshly from CBP’s promises.

In 2019, the agency apprehended an all-time high of 76,136 unaccompanied immigrant children, prompting what CBP called a “crisis.”

Elora Mukherjee, director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School, reported that at CBP’s Clint Texas facility that year, children were being held for over a month, without access to showers or sufficient food.

Between September 2018 and May 2019, six migrant children died in government custody – the first deaths in a decade. Then in June of 2019, Trump administration lawyers appeared in court arguing that the government isn’t legally required to give unaccompanied immigrant minors toothbrushes, towels, or “sleep.”

Just a week later, the state of Texas was sued for the inhumane conditions in the facilities of Rio Grande Valley and El Paso.

The facilities promised to improve, but in 2023 Anadith Danay Reyes Alvarez, 8-years-old, died in Texas CBP custody. An independent investigation attributed the failure to “systemic weaknesses.”

Despite the fact that unaccompanied migrant children apprehensions have steadily declined since 2019, CBP was sued again in February of 2024, this time for their open air detention sites – transitory spaces which, they argued, didn’t fall under the purview of the Flores settlement.

CBP declined to comment about any previous suits or allegations against them, including the Florence Project’s most recent report.

 

Liu fears that there will be no improvements even after the Florence report documents on-going abuse, “kids will tell us about literal abuse that they’ve suffered. But they don’t want to raise complaints because they fear retaliation.” She said that as a result, most abuse goes unreported.

Even when unaccompanied minors do raise formal complaints, they often don’t know the names of the officers. “It’s a bit of a black box in there,” said Liu. CBP facilities are inaccessible for non-government agencies, so reports like that of the Florence Project can only be taken retroactively.

Speaking of CBP’s internal failings, Coronado said, “It’s not because they don’t want to pay attention, but because it’s very functional for them to not pay attention.” Holding individual officers accountable, he explained, threatens their system.

There are reports that CBP is internally investigating over 200 of their officers, but Liu said she wasn’t aware of any internal investigation. Regardless of any internal efforts, she didn’t think CBP had been making the necessary systematic changes.

“The bottom line is that the CBP facilities are really temporary holding facilities,” says Liu. “They’re not meant for anyone, to be honest.”