Gather your things, they told him, and he felt the familiar trembling
return to his gut. "I thought they would take me away again, put me in
some other place," said Alfredo Lopez Sanchez, 17.
The slight Guatemalan teen nervously pondered what the Immigration
and Naturalization Service intended to do with him this time. Then a
paralegal arrived at the Boystown youth shelter in southwest Miami-Dade
County and broke the news. After 18 months in detention and 11 transfers
between shelters, jail and a hotel, the boy who had fled chronic abuse
in his Guatemalan home was to be freed.
Alfredo is just one of about 5,000 unaccompanied children who pass
through or linger in INS custody each year. They include victims of
human trafficking operations, runaways and abandoned children. For two
decades, advocates have been battling what they consider the prolonged
detention and harsh treatment of some of the most vulnerable members of
society. Now they anxiously await big changes written into the Homeland
Security Act, which could prove a turning point in the struggle.
Under the new law, custody of children will shift from INS to the
Office of Refugee Resettlement in the Department of Health and Human
Services, separate from the immigration enforcement authorities seeking
to deport them.
Advocates are hopeful that with its experience resettling thousands
of traumatized children, the refugee office will be more sensitive to
the conditions of children's detention, quicker to release them to
sponsors and more likely to let them assert abandonment and abuse in
juvenile court, as Alfredo did.
"Believe me I've got my fingers crossed," said Carlos Holguin, chief
counsel for the Los Angeles Center for Human Rights and Constitutional
Law.
That group's suit against the INS 17 years ago led to the 1997 Flores
federal court settlement in which INS agreed to certain standards in its
treatment of children. INS has repeatedly pledged to improve its record
with kids, and maintains that is has largely complied with the Flores
agreement.
Advocates disagree and say the agency continues to violate standards
in hundreds, perhaps thousands of cases, as they believe it did in
Alfredo's.
On the car ride to the Lake Worth home Alfredo now shares with the
woman who for months interpreted legal proceedings in his Maya-Mam
language, Alfredo glimpsed an INS-contracted budget hotel from the
window. He spent last Christmas there, confined to his room.
"They didn't do anything," he said. "When they brought food, I
couldn't even eat it. Everything, it just felt bad."
Alfredo has been eating Guatemalan-style corn tortillas and Copan
chile with nearly every meal since arriving in Lake Worth. At Sonia
Cabrera-Lopez's cozy home, he sleeps under a colorfully striped spread,
hand-woven by his new custodian's grandmother in a Guatemalan town not
far from his. Alfredo spent this Christmas as a special guest at her
parents' family dinner.
"I'm happy," Alfredo said, flashing a dimpled smile.
It is quite a change for the shy teen who says he often wished for
his own death in INS detention and as victim and witness to his father's
brutal attacks. He once watched his father knock his mother to the
ground, killing the baby strapped to her back, court records show.
At 16, he fled to the United States where he planned to seek out a
cousin, but was arrested in the Texas desert after a paid smuggler
abandoned him there. Here, Alfredo was diagnosed with post-traumatic
stress disorder, and found himself shuttled between facilities and
states.
The INS juvenile program is a national one that bases transfers on
available beds and the appropriate facility. Critics, who charge that
INS overuses juvenile jails and too often overlooks the best interests
of children, are optimistic about the pending transfer of children's
custody to the Office of Refugee Resettlement.
This momentous shift was incorporated into the Homeland Security Act
with a big push from leading advocate Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Ca., key
Senate backers including Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., and a bipartisan group
of supporters. The change will eliminate what advocates consider the
conflict of interest at the heart of current problems.
"The INS is acting as the jailer, the prosecutor and the parent all
at the same time," said Wendy Young, of the New York-based Women's
Commission for Refugee Women and Children. "To expect them to provide
daily care of the children, as well as their deportation, leads to a
really schizophrenic program."
An INS deportation officer once told a federal judge in Miami that he
would not consider future requests that Alfredo be released to a sponsor
because he believed the teen had an undocumented relative in the United
States, court records show.
Alfredo's lawyers waited 10 months for INS to let him present his
case in juvenile court. When the agency at last consented, attorneys say
it marked the first time the agency agreed to let a juvenile judge
consider a refugee child's case in South Florida.
Last month, Circuit Judge Cindy S. Lederman ruled Alfredo was
abandoned and neglected and determined it is in his best interest to
remain in the United States. Now he is eligible for a visa advocates say
many can never seek because INS rarely permits abused and abandoned
children to go to juvenile court before deporting them.
Half a dozen pro-bono attorneys and extended staff fought to win
Alfredo's release, some even traveling to Guatemala to find his mother,
who is mentally ill, and arrange for her testimony via telephone. The
coordinating agency, the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center, recently
released a report profiling the experiences of child clients, and
problems that many advocacy groups consider chronic.
The story of Fega, who was smuggled from Nigeria, showed how a
7-year-old girl who understands no English can wind up representing
herself in court.
Alfredo's story illustrated the claim that INS uses children as bait
to get to undocumented relatives, as well as the unnecessary use of
handcuffs and shackles during transfers. In the cases of several Haitian
teens, the report depicted INS' alleged overuse of juvenile jails, and
the agency's sometimes inexplicable resistance to release minors to a
willing relative or sponsor, in one boy's case, his mother.
The INS does not discuss individual cases, but disputes many of the
general complaints. The agency says it has made major improvements since
the Flores settlement and again after a critical report from the Justice
Department's own inspector general last year. These include the creation
of the Office of Juvenile Affairs this past spring, which has
centralized and standardized decision-making on children's issues and
shifted responsibility out of the INS' detention branch.
"Dealing with unaccompanied alien children is very difficult and INS
does its best to ensure that children are kept safe and well cared for
while in its custody," said John Pogash, acting juvenile affairs
director.
Pogash said that INS provides education and appropriate services to
children, most of whom are released within two weeks, although the
average detention can run up to 34 days.
At the small dining table in his new home, Alfredo discussed his
18-month detention in the Spanish that he learned from other detained
kids. But when he tried to describe the recurring sensation that at
times overwhelmed him, he turned to his custodian to interpret his
native tongue.
"You just feel like your heart is being squeezed, it hurts so much. I
just wanted to die," he said. "Especially when they put me in the jail.
My stomach was hurting and my heart was hurting. I just couldn't
breathe, it was so much pain."
For two weeks Alfredo was held at the Monroe County Jail after INS
labeled him a flight risk. Alfredo says he never planned to flee and
recalls shivering and crying in his dark cell. His attorneys say INS
never substantiated the charge against a boy who hardly understood
Spanish or English.
Later, while Alfredo was confined at the INS-contracted hotel, an
attorney who knew of the teen's fondness for drawing brought him an art
set. Locked in a room all day, with no schooling or recreation, Alfredo
was not allowed to receive it, his attorneys say. It was not until
another transfer landed him in a Pennsylvania facility, 1,200 miles from
his legal team and interpreter, that Alfredo got the set.
"I don't know, maybe they thought I would write all over the walls,"
said Alfredo.
Many of the detailed and precise landscapes Alfredo drew at the
shelters feature grounded or soaring eagles. In one, a wildcat bares its
fangs, poised to attack a young hunter boy who has stopped to sleep in
the woods.
Alfredo continues to draw. He recently sat at his own desk in his own
room and drew a colorful house atop a long flight of steps, far above a
small boat banked next to a stormy sea.
Now that he is free, He said he is happy to have slept a night with
no nightmares, neither of Guatemala, nor of life in detention. But the
wakeful nightmare of the past year and a half has not yet left him
completely.
"I still feel like I'm there, like I'm still locked in," he said. "I
feel it in my stomach. I can't get it out."
