U.S. Border Patrol Agency Violated Its Own Rules in Deporting Thousands of Children

A federal audit released this week shows that U.S. border patrol agents deported thousands of unaccompanied immigrant children between 2009 and 2014 without determining if they would be safe when they returned to their home countries.

The Guardian reports:

The US Government Accountability Office audit said that US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) repatriated 93% of unaccompanied children under age 14 from Mexico and Canada without documenting how they decided that the children would be safe when they return to their home countries. …

“The part that is illegal is not that they have not been giving them documentation, the part that’s illegal is that they have not been adequately screening them according to the law,” [senior program officer for the Migrant Rights and Justice program at the Women’s Refugee Commission Jennifer] Podkul said. …

Detention centers have been overwhelmed by the recent spike in unaccompanied child migrants, who primarily come from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, and cross the Mexico border to get into the US. …

There was a vast reduction in the amount of unaccompanied children who made it to the border in the first five months of this year, compared to the same period last year, according to a study released by Pew Research Center in April. This, as Mexico deports a record number of Central American immigrant children.

Read more here.

— Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.