Funnily enough, I saw a report about this on CNN just a minute ago; they hadn't updated their website yet with that newer report (which contained a response from the U.S. immigration authorities as well, IIRC), but I'm sure it'll follow soon enough.
U.S. Mistreats Immigrant Children, Amnesty Says
Wed June 18, 2003 05:02 PM ET
By Jane Sutton
MIAMI (Reuters) - The United States locks up more than 5,000 children a year who enter the country illegally and alone, often holding them in harsh conditions without access to lawyers, rights group Amnesty International said on Wednesday.
Some are jailed with criminals, strip-searched, shackled and physically abused, in violation of international accords and of a 1985 U.S. court ruling that children in immigration custody must be treated with "dignity, respect and special concern for their vulnerability as minors," Amnesty said in a report released in Miami and other cities.
Some have been sent by their parents to join relatives in the United States. Others are fleeing abuse, war and recruitment in rebel armies, Amnesty said.
"They come to this country seeking freedom only to find themselves instead facing abuse, detention and neglect on the part of U.S. authorities," said Ajamu Baraka, Amnesty's regional director for the southeastern United States.
"You are forced to appear before a judge to argue your case by yourself, often in a language you don't understand."
U.S. immigration authorities had no immediate comment.
Amnesty said children from all over the world, from toddlers to teens, are held for months and sometimes years while U.S. authorities decide whether to grant them political asylum or humanitarian resettlement.
EXTENSIVE INTERVIEWS
Amnesty's report was based on interviews with detained children and lawyers who work with them, and on surveys sent to 115 U.S. facilities that hold illegal immigrant children.
Among the 33 facilities that answered the survey fully, 48 percent said they held unaccompanied minors in the same cells as juvenile offenders and more than half said they used solitary confinement as punishment.
Eighty-three percent said they put the children in handcuffs, shackles, belly chains or other restraints when taking them to court or other places outside the facility.
Fewer than half of such children have contact with lawyers and there is no system to provide them with adult guardians to speak for them in court, Amnesty said.
The report cited examples of treatment it called cruel and degrading: Children at a Pennsylvania facility were kicked and thrown to the floor for infractions such as saying "Can I use the bathroom?" instead of "May I use the bathroom?" it said.
Staff at a Texas facility took away blankets and mattresses and turned up the air conditioning to make it "unbearably cold" when children misbehaved, the report said.
The report cited one cause for optimism. Responsibility for unaccompanied immigrant children was transferred on March 1 to the newly created U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement, and legislation pending in Congress would require that they be given legal guardians and access to translators.
Previously, they were in custody of the same immigration agency that was charged with prosecuting them for deportation.
Jimmy Noel was one of the lucky ones. He was 16 when he arrived illegally in October with a boat full of Haitian emigres, hoping to join his family in Miami. He was held under armed guard in a hotel room for two weeks.
"My family didn't know where I was ... I didn't get a chance to change clothes. At the hotel there was no staff who spoke Creole who could help me," he told Reuters on Wednesday through a translator.
He was held for two months more at a Boys Town facility in Miami, then released to his sister's custody on Christmas Eve after a baffling series of hearings.
"I was really scared because I did not know what was going to happen to me," he said.
Related article:
Official Amnesty USA press release