Providing Safe Passage for Immigrant Children
Last night I watched a rally in Arizona where our President bragged, with a smug vengeful grin, that he was “liberating towns on Long Island” of violent, murderous immigrants.
He often turns my stomach, but this was particularly upsetting for me, as I had just learned the truth about what is happening, as we speak, to immigrants on Long Island.
Adelmo’s Journey
A few weeks ago, in the Pro Bono room of a courthouse in lower Manhattan, I heard a story about a boy Adelmo, a 17 year old Salvadoran immigrant living in Suffolk County, Long Island. Earlier this year Adelmo was rounded up by ICE agents as he stood on a sidewalk for smoking a cigarette. The charges on paper were “serving as a danger to yourself or the community.” He was sent to a detention center in California, on his way to deportation, before any contact with his guardians was attempted.
This story was recounted by the woman who had been advocating for Adelmo since his unlawful detainment — Stephanie Gibbs, an Immigration Attorney with Safe Passage Project, a non-profit committed to ensuring that all indigent immigrant youth have access to legal advice and counsel. A division of the Justice Action Center at New York Law School, Safe Passage works with volunteer attorneys and New York Law School students to provide representation to unaccompanied minors in the immigration process. She was addressing me and a handful of other visitors in the federal courthouse where once a month, hundreds of children come seeking representation in immigrant court.
“Long Island, Suffolk and Nassau counties in particular, have the greatest disparity between needs and resources,” Stephanie told us. Out of 60,000 children and youth detained annually at America’s southern border, the majority of them end up in New York City or Long Island trying to connect with family members or friends who have already settled there amongst large communities of Honduran, Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees.
Fleeing violence in their home countries, where children as young as 10 years old are recruited to gangs with threats of death to family members, kids like Adlemo arrive at the southern border after having walked alone through the desert or driven through Mexico in a bus deemed “La Bestia” (The Beast).
Though it shouldn’t have to be said, these immigrants are not murderous rapists. They are risking their lives to escape murder and rape.
Without a parent or guardian by their side, desperate to escape violence and death, President Obama granted these unaccompanied minors temporary protective status and indefinite stay. If they originated from a non-contiguous country, the law stated that agents must make an effort to place them with a friend or family member in the United States, hence the growing communities of refugees in areas like Long Island.
Navigating the System
And yet, the place that so many fight for so long to reach, their home base after a harrowing journey and a violent past, is inhospitable to them once they arrive. With Trump at the helm, tensions between refugees on Long Island and law enforcement have reached a boiling point. In December the Suffolk Country Sheriff declared that he would no longer need a judge’s order to detain immigrants facing deportation. It is not surprising that ICE now has one of its largest forces operating from these counties.
To make the picture even scarier and the outcomes worse for these children, remember that Immigration Court is situated under the Department of Justice…. and that defense attorneys report to Jeff Sessions himself, not known in most circles for his humanitarian record. One more thing — the prosecutors are from the Department of Homeland Security, which up until the most recent administration switcheroo was led by John Kelly. Kelly oversaw the arrests of one-third more undocumented immigrants from January through mid-March, including 5,441 without criminal records — double the number of previous years.
As if those dragons weren’t hard enough to slay, child refugees like Adelmo have no right to counsel. They are expected to represent themselves in immigrant court, advocate for green cards, visas, and permanent residency, in a language and a homeland that is not their own.
On the day I visit, the Pro Bono courtroom is a bustling space filled with lawyers, translators, blocks and puzzles and books, and hundreds of young people yearning to call America home. I was honored to bear witness to the moment where these young people arrive and find dozens of Safe Passage Project attorneys ready to advocate and represent them in court, all entirely free of charge.
Without any legal representation, only 17% of unaccompanied minors are able to gain a green card.
With legal representation, their chances soar to 90%.
With the guiding principle that no child should have to face immigrant court alone, Safe Passage Project is the largest provider of counsel to the unaccompanied minor population. And yet they only have the capacity to serve 8–10% of the immigrant population on Long Island needing representation.
The Golden Door
The way we treat the most vulnerable individuals doesn’t feel like liberation to me. Adelmo being shipped across the country to a detention center for smoking a cigarette does not make me freer.
And as I sat there in the courthouse and watched elementary school aged children, clinging closely, patiently, as their relative or guardian spoke to the attorney through a translator, I wondered if America would always be a place that people would yearn for. How long will it take for our wall to be built, for Lady Liberty’s torch to be extinguished, for Emma Lazarus’s poem “The New Colossus” to be erased? How many more years until La Bestia starts riding in the other direction?
I looked over and saw one of the attorneys gently put their hand on the back of a young girl wearing two little buns on her head. When I was little we called them “puffs.” Her head was down and her hands folded in her lap. Her feet couldn’t touch the ground. As the attorney asked her questions she nodded and then slowly looked up, finally making eye contact with this stranger who wanted to help her. Who saw it as her professional duty to step in when the government would not. Who was willing to put herself on the line, in front of the judge, to uphold the principles and promises of America, even if her President was actively working to derail them.
And I had the hopeful thought that as long as America is a place where organizations like Safe Passage can be conceived of, built, made into a reality — the torch will shine. America has never been the soul of one person, and though laws and rhetoric and violence oppress us, we will always have the ability to protect what is sacred.
We already are The New Colossus. A President’s actions can threaten us but they cannot change us.
Thanks to Safe Passage and their hundreds of pro bono attorneys, this golden door stays open.
To learn more about the Safe Passage Project and make a donation to protect more Long Island youth like Adelmo, please visit their website and share this powerful, brief film: https://youtu.be/gxbG5MHRGIM
