Civil rights advocates said in a letter to US officials that the federal office is using data to ‘arrest and deport’ families

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

The federal agency tasked with caring for asylum-seeking children separated from their parents at the US-Mexican border has officially taken on a new, little-publicized role in recent months: helping to deport relatives of the young migrants.

Trump to appeal judge's order blocking asylum ban for immigrants at border Read more

More than 40 potential sponsors of detained migrant children in the US may be deported because a government agency that is supposed to help refugees instead uses minors to glean information on their US-based relatives, activists warned on Wednesday.

Civil rights advocates said in a letter to top Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials on Wednesday that this data is being employed to “arrest and deport those families”, making these relatives “too scared to step forward to sponsor children”.

Sign up for the new US morning briefing

The initiative – described as an information-sharing accord that was “quietly” solidified in April – reflects a novel role for the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which comes under the HHS umbrella. The HHS section is supposed to help unaccompanied migrant children by reuniting them with family until their immigration cases are decided.

“Children are being turned into bait to gather unprecedented amounts of information from immigrant communities,” Becky Wolozin, a Legal Aid Justice Center lawyer, said in the letter.

From July to September, at least 41 family or household members of children who have been separated from their parents were detained for deportation due to this information-swapping. An Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) official recently told Congress that more than 80% of potential sponsors lived in the US illegally.

Potential sponsors’ fingerprints and other personal information are entered into a DHS system. While this database was initially meant to track criminal records, it was modified in May to assist with immigration verification. Because authorities at local, state and federal levels of the US government have extensive access to this data, would-be sponsors could be put under unprecedented scrutiny.

While federal authorities maintain this initiative is geared toward protecting migrant children from abusers and traffickers, migrant children entering the US unlawfully are spending increasing amounts of time in federal custody.

Bob Carey, who ran the resettlement agency for nearly two years until January 2017, said the average time in custody for unaccompanied children “hovered around 33 days the entire time I was there”. Now it’s closer to 70 days, HHS says.

Trump administration officials show no signs of budging.

The Associated Press asked the Office of Refugee Resettlement how the new policies square with its mission to place children as quickly as possible with relatives or other sponsors. The office did not respond directly, but in an emailed reply called the longer stays “a symptom of the larger problem, namely a broken immigration system that encourages them to make the hazardous journey”.

'Turn around, go back home': Trump claims migrants commit more crime than US citizens Read more

Harrison Rudolph of the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law School says the arrangement effectively puts prospective sponsors in an “active queue” for deportation because their case files appear prominently when Ice enforcement agents open the database.

DHS privacy policy says Ice can also share the information with “appropriate federal, state, local, tribal, territorial, foreign or international government agencies”.

The revelations come amid ever heightening tensions over the US’s handling of asylum seekers – and increasingly rancorous debate over immigration policy.

Dozens of people rushed toward the border crossing at Tijuana and San Diego on Sunday. A handful tried breaching the border fence, and US customs agents fired teargas to stop migrants from approaching.

Mexico, which deported at least 100 migrants following the incident, announced plans to expel some 500 accused of trying to “illegally” and “violently” cross the border.

American authorities said on Monday that they had arrested 42 migrants on the US side of the border.