One in ten unaccompanied migrant children in Arizona say they were physically abused while in the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency\u2019s custody since January of 2023, according to a September report by the non-profit Florence Project for Refugee and Migrant Rights<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cKids shouldn\u2019t be held in inhumane conditions, subjected to abuse,\u201d said Jane Liu, director of Policy and Litigation at the Young Center for Immigrant Children\u2019s Rights. \u201cThere really is just very little accountability.\u201d Her organization works with the Florence Project, part of a collective effort to bring visibility to the conditions unaccompanied immigrant children are held in.<\/p>\n
Detention centers for unaccompanied minors have long been criticized, and the Florence Project\u2019s report is the most recent update in a history of attempts at change, says Liu. \u201cEvery couple years we\u2019ve been raising these issues . And nothing has been done.\u201d<\/p>\n
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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).<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you think things are bad now, it was horrendous back in the 80s and 90s,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
Despite the case\u2019s closure, public pressure persisted, and in 1997 the Clinton administration signed the landmark\u00a0Flores Settlement<\/a>, the nation\u2019s first formalization of unaccompanied migrant children standards for care.<\/p>\n Since then, CBP has become responsible for unaccompanied migrant children after their apprehension. Updates in 2008 resulted in\u00a0CBP\u2019s promise to hold minors for no more than 72 hours<\/a>\u00a0(notably excluding \u201cexigent circumstances\u201d) at which point they should be transferred to the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR).<\/p>\n But the reality inside the facilities often differs harshly from CBP\u2019s promises.<\/p>\n In 2019, the agency\u00a0apprehended an all-time high of 76,136 unaccompanied immigrant children<\/a>, prompting\u00a0what CBP called a \u201ccrisis.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n Elora Mukherjee, director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School,\u00a0reported<\/a>\u00a0that at CBP\u2019s Clint Texas facility that year, children were being held for over a month, without access to showers or sufficient food.<\/p>\n Between September 2018 and May 2019,\u00a0six migrant children died in government custody<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 the first deaths in a decade. Then in June of 2019,\u00a0Trump administration lawyers appeared in court<\/a>\u00a0arguing that the government isn\u2019t legally required to give unaccompanied immigrant minors toothbrushes, towels, or \u201csleep.\u201d<\/p>\n Just a week later, the state of Texas was sued for the inhumane conditions in the facilities of Rio Grande Valley and El Paso.<\/p>\n The facilities promised to improve, but in 2023\u00a0Anadith Danay Reyes Alvarez, 8-years-old, died in Texas CBP custody<\/a>. An independent investigation attributed the failure to \u201csystemic weaknesses.\u201d<\/p>\n