Politics

A Year on, Children Caught on Border Struggle to Stay, Adapt

Published

9 years ago

July 6, 2015

In this Monday, June 8, 2015 photo, 1-year-old Joshua Tinoco watches as his mother, Dunia Bueso, a 18-year-old Honduran who won the right to seek permanent residency under a U.S. program for abused and abandoned children, fills a bottle with baby formula at their relative’s home in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

Amy Taxin, ASSOCIATED PRESS

LOS ANGELES (AP) — At 1-year-old, a wide-eyed, restless Joshua Tinoco faces the prospect of deportation to his native Honduras, one of tens of thousands of children who arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border last year.

While his teenage mother has been allowed to stay in the U.S. and seek a green card under a federal program for abused, abandoned and neglected children, Joshua has been classified as an enforcement priority by immigration prosecutors, his lawyer said.

“I fought so much for him to be here with me and now they yank him from my hands,” said Dunia Bueso, the boy’s now-18-year-old mother. “How is the child going to go there alone, and with no one to take care of him?”

Today, like Joshua, many of the children who arrived from Central America still have cases churning through the immigration courts and don’t know what the outcome will be. Those fleeing gang violence and domestic strife have applied for asylum or the government’s program for abandoned children and are waiting for an answer.

Those who have won the right to stay in the country still face challenges in reuniting with family they haven’t seen in years, attending school in a foreign language and coping with the trauma they fled or debts owed to relatives or the smugglers who brought them.

More than 57,000 unaccompanied children from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras arrived on the border in the last fiscal year, and since then another 18,000, government statistics show. Immigration courts have fast-tracked the cases in a bid to stem a growing backlog.

It’s difficult, however, to know how many are winning; so far, roughly 6,200 of the children who arrived since July have been issued deportation orders, mostly for failing to attend court, but as many asylum applications were filed by children between October and March.

Immigrant advocates fear too many children are hard-pressed to find lawyers and say many are bona fide asylum seekers fleeing gang violence and rape. But border enforcement supporters doubt those handed deportation orders will be sent home as the Obama administration would face political backlash from putting children on a plane, especially when their family is here.

“Once the kids were let into the United States, the game was up,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which wants more limits on immigration.

Bueso and Joshua were both treated as unaccompanied children because she was a minor when they arrived at the border. Bueso can’t believe the United States would make her send her son somewhere no one will care for him; Joshua’s father is not involved in his life, she said, and her grandmother is ill.

While busing through Mexico with her infant son was difficult, Bueso said things are looking up now that she can stay. She is living with her uncle in a Los Angeles neighborhood lined with liquor stores and bail bond businesses, where she is attending school for the first time since she was 10.

While obtaining legal status is a huge relief for many of the children, it doesn’t solve all of their problems, especially those still running from memories of violence.

Elsewhere in Los Angeles, another teen relishes her newfound safety from the drug traffickers who abducted her on her way home from school in Guatemala at age 16, held her for weeks in the forest and repeatedly raped her until a ransom secured her release. She now has asylum, but sleeps no more than two hours at a time each night due to near constant nightmares, making it difficult to focus in school.

“I remember something, and my dreams kill me,” she said. The Associated Press does not name sexual assault victims.

Children reuniting with family they haven’t seen in years may have a hard time adjusting, as well as those staying with distant relatives or family friends who expect them to pay their way. Some teens strike out on their own or may wind up in a youth shelter.

In Southern California, Marvin Velasco, now 15, was kicked out of a family friend’s home after the man didn’t want to feed him. The Guatemalan teen, who arrived on the border last fall after his parents had sent him to work selling clothes instead of school, sought help from a local church, and a woman there took him in.

In Central Florida, many teens have jobs picking oranges and berries in the fields to cover living costs or pay off smugglers, and few attend school, said Kira Romero-Craft, director of the children’s legal program at Americans for Immigrant Justice, a nonprofit immigration law firm.

The U.S. government agency that screens sponsors before releasing children to their custody doesn’t track how often family relationships break down. But officials recently started a hotline for kids to call if they run into trouble or have nowhere to stay.

Immigration lawyers say they expect more rulings on children’s deportation cases to start coming this summer and fall. Whether that will translate into more children returning to their countries remains unknown.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials said they reach out to children with deportation orders whose cases are considered a priority and encourage them to follow the court’s instructions, but that only works if they can find them.

So far this fiscal year, the agency has sent 1,325 unaccompanied children back to their countries, mostly boys in their mid-late teens, government statistics show. Most were in the government’s custody since arriving here or asked to go home, officials said, adding that younger children usually traveled with a teen parent or elder sibling.

More than 95 percent of children who arrived on the border last fiscal year were released to family or other sponsors, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

So were Joshua and his mother, who were flown to California after a few weeks at a Texas shelter and released to the custody of an uncle. In June, the boy’s lawyer asked an immigration judge to put his case on hold, especially since Bueso can seek a green card for him in a few years.

For now, Bueso and her uncle must keep going to immigration court hearings to determine the boy’s fate. Joshua, who refused to sit still during his last court appearance, has been allowed to stay home.
Copyright 2015 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Activism

‘Jim Crow Was and Remains Real in Alameda County (and) It Is What We Are Challenging and Trying to Fix Every Day,’ Says D.A. Pamela Price

“The legacy of Jim Crow is not just a legacy in Alameda County. It’s real. It is what is happening and how (the system is) operating, and that is what we are challenging and trying to fix every day,” said D.A. Price, speaking to the Oakland Post by telephone for over an hour last Saturday. “Racial disparities in this county have never been effectively eliminated, and we are applying and training our lawyers on the (state’s) Racial Justice Act, and we’re implementing it in Alameda County every day,” she said.

Published

3 hours ago

November 2, 2024

Oakland Post

Exclusive interview with County D.A. Price days before recall election. Photo by Ken Epstein.

By Ken Epstein

Part One

Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price gave an exclusive in-depth interview, speaking with the Oakland Post about the continuing legacy of Jim Crow injustice that she is working to overturn and her major achievements, including:

restoring and expanding services for victims of crime,
finding funding for an alternative to incarceration and/or prosecution for substance use and mental health-related misdemeanors and
aggressively prosecuting corporations for toxic pollution and consumer violations.

“Racial disparities in this county have never been effectively eliminated, and we are applying and training our lawyers on the (state’s) Racial Justice Act, and we’re implementing it in Alameda County every day,” she said.

Passed by the State Legislature, this law “is an extremely helpful tool for us to address the racial disparities that continue to exist in our system,” she said.

(The law addresses) “the racial disparities that we find in our juvenile justice system, where 86% of all felony juvenile arrests in the county are Black or Brown children.

“We trained the entire workforce on the Racial Justice Act. We are creating a data system that will allow us to look at the trends and to clearly identify where racism has infected the process. We know that where law enforcement is still engaging in racial profiling and unfair targeting and arresting, we’re trying to make sure we’re catching that.”

Many people do not know much about the magnitude of Alameda County District Attorney’s job. Her office is a sprawling organization with 10 offices serving 1.6 million people living in 14 cities and six unincorporated areas, with a budget this year of about $104 million.

Asked about her major achievements since she took office last year, she is especially proud of the expanded and renewed victims’ services division in the DA’s Office, she said.

“We have expanded and reorganized the entire claims division so that we are now expediting as much as possible the benefits that victims are entitled to. Under my predecessor, they were having to wait anywhere, sometimes as long as a year, to 400 days to get benefits.

“Claims had been denied that should not have been denied. So, we’re helping people file appeals on claims that were denied under her tenure,” D.A. Price said.

“Under my predecessor, (the victims’ service office) was staffed by people who were not trained to provide trauma-informed services to victims, and yet they were the only people that the victims were in contact with. We immediately stopped that practice,” she continued.

“We had to expand the advocate workforce to include people who speak Hmong, the indigenous language of so many people in this county who are victims of crime.”

More African Americans advocates were hired because they represent the largest percentage of crime victims and we hired a transgender advocate and advocates who speak Cantonese and Mandarin. “The predominantly Chinese American community in Oakland was not being served by advocates who speak the language,” said D Price

“We reduced the lag time from the delivery of benefits to victims from 300 to 400 days down to less than 60 days.”

She increased victim advocacy by 38%, providing critical support to over 22,500 victims, a key component of community safety.

Other major achievements:

She recently filed 12 felony charges against a man accused of multiple armed robberies, demonstrating her seriousness about prosecuting violent crimes
In October, a jury delivered a guilty verdict in the double murder trial of former Alameda County Sheriff’s Deputy Devin Williams, showing DA Price’s commitment to holding law enforcement accountable.
She recently charged a man and woman in unincorporated San Leandro with murder, felony unlawful firearm activity, and felony carrying a loaded firearm in public.
A. Price’s office was awarded a $6 million grant by the state for its CARES Navigation Center diversion program. In partnership with the UnCuffed Project at a Seventh Day Adventist Church in Oakland, the program provides resources and referrals for services to residents as an alternative to incarceration and/or prosecution for substance use and mental health-related misdemeanors.

“This is the largest grant investment in the history of the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office,” said D.A. Price.

She explained that the program now has a mobile unit. “We have washers and dryers. We have a living room. We have a television. It’s a place where people can decompress, get themselves stabilized,” she said.

The project has “the ability to refer people to housing, to more long-term mental health services, to social services, and to assist them in other ways.”

Her office joined in a $49 million statewide settlement with Kaiser Health Plan and Hospitals, resolving allegations that the healthcare provider unlawfully disposed of hazardous waste, medical waste, and protected health information. The settlement, which involved the state and a half dozen counties, resulted in Alameda County receiving $7 million for its residents.
DA Price charged a former trucking company employee for embezzling over $4.3 million, showing her commitment to tackling white-collar crime.
For the first time, Alameda County won a criminal grand jury indictment of a major corporation with two corporate officers that have been sources of pollution. “They had a record of settlements and pollution in this community, and they had a fire that constituted a grave danger,” she said.

Attorney Walter Riley contributed to this article.

See Part Two

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Activism

‘Criminal Justice Reform Is the Signature Civil Rights Issue of Our Time,’ says D.A. Pamela Price

Speaking about the destructive impact of mass incarceration, Price asked people to consider “how many children have incarcerated parents, where the practice has always been to isolate and eliminate connections between people who are incarcerated and their children and their families and the community. So, when we bring people home, they have no more connection.”

Published

3 hours ago

November 2, 2024

Oakland Post

“People have no idea what the vision is for the next district attorney, or where the office will go if I am, in fact, recalled, she continued. “I'm just running against a billionaire,” who does not show his face in public, she said. Courtesy photo.

“As long as our criminal justice system is stuck in the mentality and practices of the 1950s, our country is not going to move forward,” she said.

By Ken Epstein

Part Two

District Attorney Pamela Price, facing a recall that began before she took office in January 2023, explained in an exclusive interview with the Oakland Post how she came to dedicate her life to transforming a deeply flawed criminal justice system into one that provides equal justice and public safety for all and ends mass incarceration for African Americans and other working-class people.

She summarized her life experiences as someone who was “traumatized and radicalized” by Dr. King’s murder, joining the Civil Rights Movement full force, getting arrested when she was 13 years old in a civil rights demonstration, being tracked into the juvenile justice and the foster care systems, and making it as a foster kid from the streets of Cincinnati to Yale College.”

“I understand a lot of things about struggle, about sacrifice, about trauma and fortunately survived all of that, and as a survivor learned some important lessons, and I brought all of that with me into the law and have been able to become a civil rights attorney in Alameda County,” she said.

“That’s been the joy of my life; I’ve lived every lawyer’s dream,” she said.

“Years ago, when I first decided to run for district attorney, I realized that mass incarceration was so destabilizing to our communities,” she said.

She saw that the “criminal justice system has so many impacts on our community, the safety of our community, the stability of our community, the growth of our community, the direction of our community.”

“As long as our criminal justice system is stuck in the mentality and the practices of the 1950s … our society is going to be mired in discord, and we will not have social justice, racial justice, economic justice, none of the things that actually make our communities worth living in.”

It is crucial to address the needs of “young people in the juvenile justice system when they are more likely and able to be rehabilitated and redirected,” she said. Young people are much more able to be rehabilitated before the age of 18, really before the age of 26, and before they end up in an adult prison.

D.A. Price’s predecessor, Nancy O’ Malley, joined the D.A.’s office in 1984, where she remained for 39 years. She was promoted to a leadership position after just six years in the office during the era of mass incarceration when there was an explosion of prison construction in California.

“Prosecutors like my predecessor were the ones who filled (those prisons) up. She became a leader in the office around 1990. And what is very important for the public to know is that prior to becoming the district attorney in 2009, she was the chief assistant district attorney for 10 years under Tom Orloff.

“O’Malley worked very closely, hand-in-hand with him for the period of time that included the illegal conduct or the unconstitutional exclusion of Jewish people and Black people from death penalty juries.”

Commenting on the recall campaign against her, she said that had not a handful of multimillionaires and billionaires “put millions of dollars into this, we would not be having this recall. It is not a grassroots movement. It’s a platinum movement.”

“People have no idea what the vision is for the next district attorney, or where the office will go if I am, in fact, recalled, she continued. “I’m just running against a billionaire,” who does not show his face in public, she said.

If they successfully paint Oakland as a failed city, then hedge fund billionaires and real estate developers can come in and buy up the property cheap, she said.

Though D.A. Price has been bombarded by a massive tsunami of lies, slanders, and misrepresentation, she remains strong and positive because she is a woman of faith, she said.

“I’ve been saved and guided by (a) higher power since I was 13 years old. So, I’m not a new person to faith, and I’m grounded in that,” she said.