California must protect immigrant children forsaken by President Trump | Opinion
Imagine being 10 years old and sitting across from an immigration judge in a hearing about why you are in California.
It’s not make-believe, but all too real today in immigration hearings being held nationwide. “Unaccompanied minors” — undocumented children sent into the U.S. by Central American parents desperate to get them out of their crime-ridden native lands — are having to attend immigration hearings often without any legal representation.
That’s because the Trump administration in March stopped paying for the service that lined up attorneys for undocumented children summoned to immigration hearings.
According to Save the Children, a group that advocates for the rights of young people across the world, nearly 129,000 unaccompanied minors entered the United States in 2022. “The vast majority of these children hailed from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador,” the group notes on its website. “These countries have some of the highest child homicide rates in the world.”
A recent immigration hearing for a minor in California was outlined in a Sacramento Bee story.
Immigration Judge Loreto Geisse wanted to learn more about the 11-year-old boy in his Sacramento courtroom.
“Are you bored?” the judge asked the boy, whom The Bee did not name to protect his privacy. “Yeah,” he replied.
His grandmother told Geisse she could not find any attorney to represent the boy.
As reported by Bee staff writer Stephen Hobbs, the boy gets sad and fearful over what might happen to him. “Don’t be scared,” Geisse said. “The government cannot remove you until I tell them they can.”
Trump administration ends service
The federal government must allow young people in its custody the chance to tell a judge why they should be allowed to stay in America. But the authorities do not have to provide a lawyer.
“The Trump administration in a March letter notified the organization that coordinates legal representation for children across the country that it would stop paying for that service,” Hobbs reported. “The move is being challenged in a California federal court and a judge has ordered the government to keep funding the legal support while the case continues.”
American law has legal protections for children who face dangers if they are returned to their home countries. Special Immigrant Juvenile Status protects children who have been abused, abandoned, or neglected, according to Vera, a civil rights group focused on ending incarceration.
The government can also grant asylum to anyone fleeing persecution, even a minor. There are also specific protections for survivors of crime or human trafficking.
But most adults, let alone children, are unaware of such rights or laws. Vera notes that 90% of the cases between 2005 and 2017 involving unaccompanied minors who did not have lawyers resulted in the children being ordered to leave the U.S.
“Given the high stakes and complexity of immigration proceedings, children, like all immigrants facing deportation, need a public defender system that ensures that no one appears in immigration court alone,” Vera says on its website.
Juvenile rights for representation
To remedy the problem of no legal representation for the minors, California Assemblymember Mia Bonta, a Democrat from Oakland, has authored a bill, AB 1261. It calls for California to pay the attorney’s costs.
“During the last fiscal year alone, more than 10,800 of them were released into the care of family members and other sponsors across the state after they were taken into custody by immigration authorities,” Hobbs reported. “A legislative staff analysis estimated that Bonta’s bill could cost more than $37 million annually. The measure is awaiting a key vote in the Assembly Appropriations Committee later this month.”
Even though California is facing a budget deficit, $37 million out of a $323 billion state budget is not too much to spend to provide critical rights to children in distress.
It is unconscionable for the Trump administration to pull back its funding meant to help children. Having lawyers to represent minors does not mean they will get to remain in America. It simply means they will have a fair hearing.
But that does not seem to matter to Trump immigration officials, who seem hellbent on removing any manner of fairness from immigration decisions.
