In the News

I Worked at a Child Migrant Center. What I Was Told to Do Was So Inhumane That I Quit.

Antar Davidson, Mother Jones (June 20, 2018)

Antar Davidson is a former employee at Southwest Key, a nonprofit chain of migrant shelters, who recently made headlines for talking about the cruel conditions at the facilities. Davidson started working at a Tucson, Arizona, center in February, two months before President Trump’s zero-tolerance policy was instituted. He quit his job earlier this month, after a supervisor ordered him to separate hugging siblings who believed their parents had died. Here Davidson tells Mother Jones, in his own words, about helping migrant children through martial arts, the changes since Trump’s zero-tolerance policy, and why he ultimately could not stay at his job.

How to Volunteer to Help Immigrant Children Separated from Family

Social Work Blog, NASW (June 19, 2018)

National Association of Social Workers (NASW) Board Member Guadalupe G. Lara, LMSW, an expert on social work and immigration, is encouraging social workers to advocate for these children and “to speak to some of the facts because there’s a lot of misinformation on the other side.”

Family separations at the border alarm child-welfare experts

David Crary, Tampa Bay Times (June 19, 2018)

Child welfare has always been a challenging profession; state and local agencies across America make difficult decisions every day to separate children from their parents. But those agencies have ways of minimizing the trauma that aren’t being employed by the Trump administration in separating immigrant families at the Mexican border…

Fact-Checking the Trump Administration’s Case for Child Separation at the Border

Linda Qiu, New York Times (June 19,2018)

The president, the attorney general and the secretary of homeland security have used lots of figures and interpretations of recent history to explain recent policy changes. Not all of it has been accurate.

She says federal officials took her daughter while she breastfed the child in a detention center

Ed Lavandera, Jason Morris and Darran Simon, CNN (June 12, 2018)

An undocumented immigrant from Honduras sobbed as she told an attorney how federal authorities took her daughter while she breastfed the child in a detention center, where she was awaiting prosecution for entering the country illegally.

Inspectors find 150 health violations at child immigration shelters in Texas

Clark Mindock, Independent (June 12, 2018)

A recent study by state regulators has found 150 instances of health violations in more than a dozen shelters in Texas where immigrant unaccompanied children are housed after they are detained for trying to enter the United States illegally — or after they are separated from their families.

How Child Separation Is Normally Done

Josh Michtom, Slate.com (June 8, 2018)

Aside from the few standout cases that make the news, we seldom hear about child-removal proceedings, which take place behind closed doors and affect almost exclusively the very poorest among us. But it’s worth looking at how the system works to understand just how extraordinary the government’s current actions have been in these cases.

US immigration officials can now deport hosts of migrant children