MIAMI _ At the 3,200-bed Homestead, Fla., detention center for unaccompanied immigrant youths, one 15-year-old boy is an aberration: He has lived in the United States virtually his entire life.
Far from being a recent arrival at the southern border, the teen entered the country when he was a 9-month-old infant; he has lived in Houston his whole life, along with his mother, who brought him to the U.S. in 2004.
More than two weeks ago, the teen was detained in Texas when a local county cop pulled his uncle over for speeding. When they could not produce immigration documents, the boy and his uncle _ the Miami Herald is not identifying either one because of their immigration status _ were promptly arrested, then separated.
The teen, who was transferred among four different government agencies in four days prior to arriving in Homestead, is among thousands of detainees at the nation's largest detention center for unaccompanied minors in South Miami-Dade County. Both he and his mother originally arrived in the U.S. without documentation.
Lawyers for teens at the Homestead facility say they've represented at least 20 other kids with similar cases: all were apprehended in the United States far from border towns or ports of entries without immigration documents, and while they were not physically with their biological parents, who live in the U.S.
"These children were all at the wrong place at the wrong time _ arrested by Customs and Border Protection or Immigration and Customs Enforcement," said Michelle Ortiz, deputy director of Americans for Immigrant Justice, the organization that provides legal services for detained children in Homestead. "Some of our clients have been apprehended in Florida, and others were transferred after apprehension in other states."
Ortiz said the children whom her organization has represented were either passengers in a car during a traffic stop in which a local police officer asked passengers for their papers, at CBP checkpoints "many miles away from the border," or were detained by ICE when agents "showed up at their home looking for an adult with an outstanding removal order."
"Some of our clients have been apprehended in Florida, and others were transferred after apprehension in other states," Ortiz said, noting that "most of these children have lived the majority of their lives in the U.S., and speak limited Spanish."
"As you can imagine, they experience extreme trauma when they are suddenly ripped from their families and their communities and taken to detention," she said.
Officials at the Department of Health and Human Services, the agency in charge of running detention centers for unaccompanied minors and then reuniting them with their parents, told the Miami Herald these scenarios "are not common but totally possible."
"This is not the first time this ever happened, that a child was referred to us from a non-border area," said HHS spokesman Mark Weber. "For some reason this boy was determined to be an unaccompanied minor, yes, even despite him living here his whole life with his mom. It doesn't happen a lot, but it happens. These are symptoms of a broken system."
