In 2017, the US Department of Homeland Security began separating refugee mothers from their children at the US-Mexico border. This is an attack on basic human rights and family values. In our response to this crisis, we must remember the individual lives that are impacted by this change in policy. As part of building awareness, the COWC offers this short reflection on our experience with immigrant rights at the border.
In 2016, the Central Ohio Worker Center sent three of our board members and several other participants to volunteer with the CARA pro bono project at the South Texas Family Residential Facility in Dilley, Texas. We spent one week working inside the facility with mothers and children who had fled gang violence, domestic abuse, and abject poverty and come to the United States seeking safety. Instead of providing support, our government arrests and detains these families in order to subject them to enhanced asylum procedures known as the credible fear process. Working alongside CARA attorneys and paralegals, we prepared the women for their interview and provided moral support to the children.
As COWC Board Member Jessica Camacho recalled at a recent deportation defense workshop, one of our volunteers took on the responsibility of keeping the children entertained while their mothers recounted horrifying stories with our volunteers. While we were on-the-ground, the private detention facility industry was trying to lobby the state of Texas to designate these detention facilities as “day care centers” to skirt federal laws that prohibited keeping children in detention for prolonged periods of time.
Rather than addressing the problems that we observed, the Department of Homeland Security added to the abuses of refugee families. Today, the DHS is separating mothers from their children at the border in an attempt to discourage families from seeking asylum in the United States. The right to seek asylum is a basic universal human right enshrined in both national and international law.
The hardship that this will cause for the women and children that we worked with in Dilley is unimaginable. Many women we met with were already suffering from PTSD and other forms of trauma. Many were raped on the journey north. Many had family members or spouses killed in their home country. To come so far and be forcibly separated from one’s children is heartbreaking and possibly illegal.
In reality, the Department of Homeland Security has been separating families for years. What we commonly call “family detention” is actually mother and children detention; fathers are excluded from “family” and put into separate detention facilities — even if they are the sole parent traveling with immigrant children. If teenage male children turn 18 in detention, they are transferred to male-only detention centers, often in federal or state prisons. Furthermore, as we’ve seen right here in Columbus, Ohio, by deporting non-citizen parents, US citizen children are forced to grow up without one or both of their parents. Many enter the foster care system or are taken in by friends and family members. This recent attack on immigrant families only adds to the history of injustices against immigrants.
Now more than ever we need communities to come together in support of justice for immigrants and workers. The Central Ohio Worker Center stands ready to do just that. Through our deportation defense trainings, worker rights projects, local and state policy advocacy, and partnership with organized labor unions, we aim to do our part in creating a more just and equitable country world for immigrants and citizens alike.