These kids asked for asylum. The U.S. government locked them up. They need a fair hearing.
Nine-year-old Esme (a pseudonym) came to the United States with her mother and two siblings seeking asylum from violence in Central America. But rather than finding a safe haven, U.S. officials picked up Esme and her family and put them in immigration detention. The family has been locked up in Pennsylvania for the better part of a year, which means her baby brother’s been behind bars for nearly half his life.
Instead of shopping for school supplies and wondering about what’s in her lunch box, Esme is thinking about things no kid should have to consider. She worries about guards waking her up at night, whether the prison food will make her sick, and whether her family will ever be free and safe.
Esme doesn’t understand why the government is locking her up. But her mother is one of 28 Central American women with children whose asylum applications were rejected and who sued in federal court seeking new hearings because their initial asylum hearings were conducted improperly.
An appeals court rejected their petitions, saying they had no right to sue. The ACLU is working to get that decision overturned, saying it violates their basic constitutional right to challenge the legality of the government’s restriction on their liberty. Over this country’s long history, that right has been guaranteed to all noncitizens subject to deportation or exclusion at our borders as well as to alleged “enemy combatants” held at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
Esme’s mom brought her here to escape violence in a place where police can’t or don’t help. Esme has a different sort of world in mind. When she grows up, she wants to be a police officer so she can “catch bad guys.”
To find out more about the plight of these Central American women and children, read this piece in The New York Times.