|
 |
 |
 |
|
 | ||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
| ||||
Children who flee abuse can often be mired in legal limbo
By Ofelia Casillas and Vanessa Bauzá
Tribune reporters
In 1999 the 9-year-old boy fled the Dominican Republic, where his abusive mother had tried to strangle him, forced him to kneel on a cheese grater and had her name tattooed on his arm as a symbol of her ownership.
The boy boarded a plane by himself and illegally entered the U.S. to join his father, who died in 2003. Two years later, police arrested the boy for bringing a knife to school and sent him to a federally funded detention center for illegal immigrant children in Indiana.
Suffering from isolation, loneliness, numbness and fear about the future, he fought another boy, threw furniture and cracked a window, according to an evaluation and other records from 2006 reviewed by the Tribune.
"No one wants me," said the boy, now 16, according to the report.
The boy was among a growing number of unaccompanied illegal immigrant children detained by federal authorities at 42 sites across the country.
Such children must navigate U.S. courts and bureaucracy if they hope to gain legal residency because of conditions such as prior abuse, human trafficking or a fear of persecution in their home countries.
But because the government does not pay for court-appointed lawyers, the majority of the children must rely on attorneys willing to work for free to help them, and the surge in the number of illegal immigrant children has strained the availability of free legal help, leaving some teens to face the system on their own.
More than 10,000 children will be detained by the end of the year, the
government estimates, compared with 4,615 in 2000.
The Vera Institute of Justice, a New York-based non-profit group, estimates that more than half of these children are not getting adequate legal representation.
Legal aid lacking
Children detained after crossing the border illegally and alone face several outcomes: they can be placed at a federally funded facility, legally reunited with a guardian, deported or experience a combination of these.
Even for those children released from detention to relatives or sponsors, it is unclear how they fare because their safety is rarely monitored after they are handed over, according to a federal report.
Congress transferred the care of these children from the former Immigration and Naturalization Service to the Office of Refugee Resettlement in 2002, with a directive that each child receive timely legal counsel.
Wait can be long
Yet because of bureaucratic delays and difficulties obtaining documents to prove their cases, some teens stay in the system so long they become adults, eliminating visa options available only to minors and possibly making it more difficult for them to stay in the U.S.
"They really have been stripped of their childhood," said Mary Meg McCarthy, director of the National Immigrant Justice Center, which provided legal help for more than 500 undocumented children last year.
At the federally funded facilities in Chicago and Indiana, psychological evaluations reviewed by the Tribune revealed the deep scars that remained from the abuse some children fled.
A Guatemalan girl escaped her father, who shaved her head, beat her and put her in an oven. Officials detained her in New Mexico at age 16, put her in a Texas federal facility then, months later, released her to a friend in Skokie.
A year later, an interviewer noted the thin girl expressed hopelessness and compared herself to a candle "that is about to go out." Her appetite was "nearly nonexistent."
Her anxieties sometimes subsided when she painted, read her Bible or listened to music.
She dreamed of becoming a nurse for the elderly. She said she never wants to get married.
"I can't think about the future. I feel empty inside," she told an interviewer. "Every time I think about the things that happened, I want to die."
Shelter tries to be home
Aware of the children's struggles, shelter workers line the hallways with photos of the children's field trips, their essays and bright paintings like those that would hang on a refrigerator at home, said Sharon Pinto Khurana, director of the International Children's Center in Chicago, which houses 54 children.
On a recent Wednesday evening, a strobe light softly pulsed as teens stepped onto a makeshift stage in the basement cafeteria for their monthly talent show and sang a romantic ballad, rhymed to a hip-hop beat or harmonized to recall earthquake survivors in their home country.
Juan Pecina, a 17-year-old awaiting deportation to Mexico, said he came to the U.S. to study English and has found friendship at one of the two Chicago shelters where he lives with 14 other boys.
"Here there's no color, race, no country," he said. "We have to treat each other like brothers."
Pecina was once housed at a center in Vincennes, Ind., a five-hour drive from Chicago, where detainees face a problem common to unaccompanied illegal immigrant children: getting free legal help when they live in rural areas far from the attorneys who would provide it.
David Siegel, acting director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, said that he is aware urban areas have more available lawyers than rural communities and that his agency is working with the Vera Institute of Justice to find solutions.
Stacey Strongarone, head of Vera's unaccompanied children program, said the increase in detained children is "stretching resources" and agencies are "shaping their programs accordingly."
Tough to get details
Attorneys struggle, too, to get information from the kids, who are traumatized or may have been coached by smugglers or their parents not to tell the truth, complicating their applications for permanent residency based on previous abuse, trafficking or a credible fear of persecution.
Another worry for advocates is that the Office of Refugee Resettlement does not always monitor the safety of children once they are released from shelters to the custody of a sponsor or relative, according to a March report by the U.S. Office of Inspector General.
Siegel said his agency works to "provide a safe and appropriate environment" while the children are in custody.
Federal authorities said the law does not give agencies the authority to track children after they are released.
Khurana said her staff carefully reviews the families who will be taking children, but there's little more that they can do.
"It would be great to have data on what happens to those kids," she said.
Attorneys take the cases of illegal children and begin the race against the clock as they travel far and wide at times to find parents or relatives to sign affidavits that prove abuse or neglect. Once adults, these immigrant teens are no longer eligible for juvenile visas.
Time ran out for a juvenile visa in the case of an 18-year-old boy whose lawyers are now appealing his case.
Boy now an adult
Abandoned by his parents, the boy traveled around Central America before crossing illegally into the U.S. in 2006, looking, he said, for a better life.
He was detained and moved among facilities in Florida, Indiana and Chicago.
When he became an adult, the young man moved to a suburban residential facility outside Chicago, where he studies for his high school equivalency exam, learns English and dreams of becoming an auto mechanic.
"I've always had faith," he said. "That's why I'm still here, waiting."
ocasillas@tribune.com
vbauza@tribune.com
Copyright © 2008, Chicago Tribune
