Mother Jones called it “children as bait”: In 2017, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, began using private information about unaccompanied children to target their relatives and caregivers for deportation. In 2018, this practice expanded, giving ICE formal access to information about children collected in shelters, including in conversations between children and their shelter caregivers. In 2020, The Washington Post reported that ICE was gaining access to the confidential therapy notes of traumatized unaccompanied children, and using the information in deportation proceedings against them.
These practices resulted in public outrage. Congress took action and prohibited the data sharing. This prohibition continues today. Yet new reporting in The Washington Post indicates that the new presidential administration is working to give ICE agents access to unaccompanied children’s highly sensitive data, raising serious concerns about the protection of their privacy as well as children’s well-being.
Relying on a debunked report, the administration has claimed that ICE needs children’s data to protect children who have gone “missing.” Citing the protection of children as a pretext for unrelated policy goals is an old strategy, and one this administration has pursued in other arenas. Proponents of the recently enacted Laken Riley Act, the proposed Violence Against Women by Illegal Aliens Act, and numerous new administration policies invoke the safety of women and children to advance mass detention and deportation. Like the proposal to share unaccompanied children’s private data with ICE, these changes do little to protect women and families and, in fact, increased the vulnerabilities of vulnerable people.
Unaccompanied children—children who cross the southern border without a parent or legal guardian—are among the most vulnerable migrants who come to the United States. Most arrive from Central America, and they face heightened risks of violence, exploitation, and neglect throughout their journeys. Once they arrive, their legal caregiver becomes the Office of Refugee Resettlement, or ORR, which Congress tasked with providing care appropriate for vulnerable children. The majority of unaccompanied children will demonstrate a legal right to stay permanently in the US. Children who are not eligible for permanent legal status will often be granted a form of legal protection that protects them from deportation.
Unaccompanied children and the US government rely on family and community members to take over their care and support from ORR. This is for good reason. The gold standard in child welfare seeks to ensure that children live in family settings, to avert separations from caregivers whenever possible, and to minimize separations when they cannot be averted. Many unaccompanied children will reunite with family members who are undocumented or, if not, live in homes with roommates or others who are undocumented. To threaten these children’s caregivers with deportation contravenes these gold standards, and does great harm to both unaccompanied children and their sponsors.
The Women’s Refugee Commission documented the harms to children the last time unaccompanied children’s private data was shared. Because of the fear that sponsorship would result in contact with ICE, fewer sponsors came forward, including parents. Unaccompanied children stayed longer in group care, and more children were placed with distant relatives as sponsors rather than close relatives. As children lingered in ORR care, their mental health deteriorated. Traumatized children were unable to trust doctors and nurses, counselors, social workers, and psychologists, because of fear that anything they said would be used against them in immigration court. The chilling effect of ICE data sharing is clear. It keeps families apart, keeps children in group settings and out of family homes, and harms children.
ORR is “not a law enforcement agency” and it is “not an immigration enforcement agency.” The regulations on ORR data sharing are crystal clear: “it is incompatible with ORR’s program purposes to share information in a system of records, particularly confidential mental health or behavioral information in children’s case files, for immigration enforcement purposes.” ICE access to unaccompanied children’s data is a violation of federal regulations and is antithetical to children’s well-being.
Unaccompanied children need policies that treat them like children and that guarantee their safety and protection. The Washington Post warns of troubling access to rightfully protected data. Re-starting this data-sharing would be illegal and likely blocked by the courts.
We call on Congress to uphold its duty to provide critical and rapid oversight. As a nation, we must uphold the value that all children deserve protection because they are children, and we must reject attempts to exploit vulnerable unaccompanied children in furtherance of policy goals like mass deportation.