Mexican Children Denied Human Dignity
The Department of Homeland Security and its Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency want the world to know that the United States is serious about enforcement of immigration laws.
With the increasingly large number of immigrant arrests and detentions, workplace raids, and news of other immigration crackdowns splashed across the front pages on a daily basis, it seems as though they have made their point.
We get it. Illegal immigrants living in the United States also get it. The adults and children who have been deported to Mexico definitely get it.
There have been reports indicating that many immigrants are now leaving the country voluntarily due to increased immigration law enforcement efforts and the poor economy. They feel, or so it would seem, that it's just not worth it to stay anymore.
New America Media recently published an article reporting the findings of a group that studies immigration for Mexico's opposition party PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party).
The report released by the group presented some shocking numbers. According to the study, the United States has deported at least 90,000 children to Mexico from January to July 2008. During that same time period, approximately 300,000 adults were deported to Mexico.
More troubling than the number of children that have been deported is that approximately 13,500 of these children have allegedly been abandoned at the U.S.-Mexico border. These children now are homeless and apparently live in camps at the border. They are aided by religious and nonprofit groups. However, they are not provided with any government protection.
Is ICE really so determined to rid the United States of illegal immigrants that literally, anything (and perhaps anyone) goes? It seems so.
If the results of the study are accurate, immigration officials in the United States are creating a band of child gypsies at the border. Rather than delivering them to safety in their home country, the children are being dropped off at the "curb" like bags of garbage.
Also horrifying is that the study found that for every three adults that are deported to Mexico, a Mexican child is left abandoned and without parents in the United States.
So in addition to treating immigrant children like trash, immigration officials are also orphaning large numbers of them in the United States. If the numbers are accurate, that means approximately 100,000 immigrant children have been left behind in the United States this year. It can only be expected that if and when these children are discovered, they too are dumped across the border.
For the love of humanity, don't children – no matter what their legal status in the country – deserve better?
U.S. immigrant rights groups have not yet confirmed these statistics, but say that the findings of the study are entirely possible.
