At Immigration Detention Center, Every Child Has Same Christmas Wish: Freedom

By Ed Pilkington, Guardian UK

25 December 16

 

The wishlists of the children – some as young as two, all spending Christmas locked up by the US government – bear the same core plea: ‘To get out of here’

hat do you ask Santa for Christmas when you are a child as young as two and you are facing your second holiday season locked up by the US government? What present could ease the pain of having spent almost half your life incarcerated?

Today the Guardian publishes the Santa wishlists of children aged two to nine years old. They are some of 19 children spending their second consecutive Christmas essentially behind bars in an immigration detention center in Pennsylvania.

In their cards, the children ask for toys and trinkets in keeping with their young age. A six-year-old girl asks for an iPad, some candy and Frozen-themed headphones. The youngest of the pack, a boy just two, struggles to come up with any specific request – all he can ask for is “things”.

But there is more to the wishes of the children. Each card bears the same core plea, repeated over and over. The girl with the doll wants “to get out of here, to be with my daddy”. The little two-year-old boy does rustle up one specific desire: he asks for “a present of my liberty”.

For more than a year, the children of Berks have been held along with their mothers under the custody of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice). The facility is officially classed a “county residential center”, but with its austere brown brick facade and chain-metal perimeter fence, it better resembles a prison.

Another two-year-old boy called Said has also spent almost half his young life detained in a room which he shares with his mother Amparo, 27, and two other mother-and-child pairs. They were picked up on the border of Texas as they tried to enter the US to seek asylum. Amparo counts the days they have been held by US immigration authorities: 422.

The mother and son fled Honduras in October 2015 when Said was just 22 months, having been issued death threats from local drug gangs. All the 17 mothers at Berks who are facing their second Christmas in the detention facility similarly came to the US from the northern Central American triangle of Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, where drug crime and murder rates have escalated to exorbitant levels in recent years.

As a single mother, Amparo was targeted by “pandilla” gangsters for protection money, until she feared for her own safety and her son’s life. She left their home and community and set off on the perilous journey to the north. Such is the fear that was engendered in her when she left Honduras that Amparo still prefers to endure the hardships of incarceration in the US rather than be deported, despite the evident harm it is doing to her child.

“This is a very sad, very painful time [for] my son,” she told the Guardian. “I knew I couldn’t trust my own government in Honduras, that they wouldn’t protect us. But we came here to the United States of America thinking that this was the home of human rights, that we would find protection here. I never dreamed we would be treated this way,” Amparo said.

Last Christmas, officials at Berks brought in a Santa to entertain Said and his fellow detained children and allowed presents donated by local charities to be handed out to them. The same will be laid on this year, but Amparo is scathing of what she sees as cosmetic rejoicing.

“We are not criminals or delinquents to spend so much time in a prison. My son doesn’t want to be here, the only present he wants is to get out. Every day he watches the visitors arrive in their cars and he shouts at them through the window: ‘Take me away! Take me with you!’”

Studies have revealed the damage caused by prolonged incarceration to children. A report by Human Rights First in October 2015 pointed out that harm can set in within the first two weeks of lockup, let alone years. Among the well-documented symptoms are PTSD, depression and suicidal thoughts – all of which have been recorded by psychologists examining the Berks children.

The families held at the center have all been issued expedited deportation orders, but those are on hold pending a legal challenge brought by the ACLU against the terms of their removal. ACLU lawyers are expected to appeal to the US supreme court within the month.

The Obama administration says it cannot release the families because of the stay on deportations in the case. But immigration rights groups argue there is nothing preventing Ice from releasing the mothers and children, as they are legally obliged to do, pending resolution of the challenge.

They point out that the government is in breach of a federal court ruling, Flores v Lynch, which gives immigrant children detained with their mothers equal rights to those detained alone. That puts Ice under an obligation to release the children into the care of outside relatives or groups without any delay.

Ice declined to answer Guardian questions about why so many mothers and children were facing a second Christmas in detention despite the Flores ruling, citing ongoing litigation. But a spokesman insisted that the Berks center “operates in an open environment and includes play rooms, social workers, resident field trips, educational services, and access to legal counsel. Comprehensive medical care is provided from the moment the families arrive and throughout their entire stay at the facility.”

That is not how lawyers acting for the families see it. “What it boils down to is that the government is saying that two-year-old Said is subject to indefinite mandatory detention,” said CarolAnne Donohoe, an immigration attorney who has represented many Berks families.

“To see these kids grow up in detention is heartbreaking. One little girl bites her nails to the quick. A lot of the kids sense their mothers are upset so they start acting like the parent, the strong one. We have several kids evaluated by a child trauma specialist that have been found to have PTSD, and several of them have had suicidal ideation, as young as six years old.”

At a time when much of the national focus is on the incoming Trump administration and the president-elect’s threat to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, Donohoe puts the responsibility for Berks squarely on the shoulders of Barack Obama. “We’ve been asking for two and a half years why Obama and his administration are so recalcitrant in detaining children. It is 100% his administration that put family detention on steroids and it is 100% within his power to end it.”

The palpable anger and frustration felt towards the Obama administration is intensified now with the victory of Donald Trump and his threats to round up and deport millions of undocumented immigrants such as Amparo and her son. “Obama has paved the way for everything Trump is now threatening,” Donohoe said. “Everything is in place for President Trump.”

It is into this uncertain world that the children of Berks detention center and their mothers now go. One of the cards drawn up by the children and published by the Guardian is written in sketchy English by a nine-year-old girl. “I want free and stay whith my father I not want anything else,” she writes. Then she changes her mind. “I want a iPad and doll sing Frozen.”

Even in detention, a child can hope.