Mayor and Immigrant Activists Call on Biden Administration to Rescind Racist Trump-Era Border Policy
The continued invocation of Title 42 has contributed to the increase in unaccompanied children arriving at the border, some of whom are now housed at a temporary facility at the Long Beach Convention Center.
18 minute readLast week, the first busloads of migrant children arrived at the Long Beach Convention Center, where they will remain until they are released to sponsors in the U.S.
Before the children stepped foot inside the building, officials from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and Mayor Robert Garcia led a walkthrough of the temporary intake center with select media and community group representatives. A pool photographer was on site to take photographs of the Convention Center, now transformed into a rather clinical-looking daycare center.
Photos show a soccer net and chairs arranged in a group setting. Cots are adorned with towels and a stuffed animal. Children’s books in English were placed on cots awaiting the unaccompanied migrants, who officials say will include girls under 17 and boys under 12.
These photos clearly show how HHS facilities provide better conditions than the ones run by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), where children wrapped in mylar blankets slept on the ground behind chain-link cages.
Immigrant advocates say the transfer of migrant children from CBP processing centers to more suitable HHS facilities, where they will have access to mental health care and medical services, is a step in the right direction. However, they also point out that these facilities are only a band-aid solution to a border regime that continues to separate migrant families and a foreign policy that perpetuates conditions that increase the number of migrants fleeing Central America to desperately seek asylum in the U.S.
THE HARVEST OF EMPIRE
It’s often reported that these children, many of whom are asylum seekers, are fleeing poverty, gangs, state violence, and natural disasters in their home countries—and that’s where the narrative usually begins and ends in our public discourse. But it’s important to note that these conditions didn’t spring up in a vacuum.
Elected officials and the press often fail to mention the uncomfortable history of U.S. imperialism that has played a role in destabilizing these countries: most recently, the Obama Administration’s backing of a military coup that overthrew a democratically elected government in Honduras. History is littered with similar meddling in the region by the U.S. such as the American-backed coup in Guatemala in 1954, U.S. involvement in the Salvadoran Civil War in the ‘80s, Reagan’s “secret war” that funneled millions of dollars to the brutal Contras in Nicaragua, and the training of death squads in Honduras in the ‘90s—to name just a few. These intrusions led to genocide in Guatemala, massacres in El Salvador and torture in Honduras.
And since the creation of the Central American Free Trade Agreement in 2005, between the U.S. and six countries in the Central American region, economic opportunities for youth remain low and the livelihoods of small farmers have been destroyed. As a result, the U.S. has seen a large rise in the number of asylum seekers from those countries as millions were displaced by violence and thousands more fled the subsequent economic fallout.
Specifically, the number of unaccompanied minors has steadily trended upwards for the last 10 years, reaching record levels since President Joe Biden took office. In March, Border Patrol apprehended 18,656 unaccompanied minors at the U.S.-Mexico border, according to CBP figures.
Bureaucratic barriers put in place by the Trump Administration meant that migrant children picked up at the border would spend weeks languishing at remote surge facilities. This created a bottleneck that critics say Biden was unprepared to deal with.
In the first few months of Biden’s administration, unaccompanied children detained at the border were spending over the 72-hour legal limit—sometimes weeks—in CBP facilities, where conditions were in some cases worse than in jail. In early April, court-appointed monitors found one temporary CBP facility in Donna, Texas to be an “unsafe environment” with “severe overcrowding.”
The federal government’s effort to speed up the transfer of children from CBP custody to the care of HHS is what prompted the use of the Pomona Fairplex and convention centers in Long Beach and San Diego as emergency intake sites. And it seems to be working.
Since late March, there’s been an 84% drop of children in Border Patrol custody.
And in recent weeks, more unaccompanied children are leaving Border Patrol custody than those who are being detained, according to internal figures from CBP.
“The progress we have seen over the last few weeks are initial steps to improve conditions and the process addressing children at our border,” said Rep. Nanette Barragán, whose district encompasses part of North Long Beach, during a meeting on Tuesday of the Border Security, Facilitation, and Operation House Congressional Subcommittee, which she chairs.
But immigrant advocates across the nation, including here in Long Beach, say there’s still a long way to go to create a just immigration system.
“These types of facilities are a band-aid solution to a bigger problem,” said Gaby Hernandez, executive director of the Long Beach Immigrant Rights Coalition (LBIRC), during a recent protest outside City Hall.
The LBIRC is one in a chorus of advocacy groups calling for the Biden Administration to revoke an element of Trump’s border regime that continues to artificially increase the number of children arriving at the border without an adult.
TITLE 42: A RACIST POLICY
If you were at all paying attention to Long Beach Twitter this week, you may have noticed activists tweeting at Mayor Garcia on Wednesday asking him to urge the Biden Administration to end Title 42, a border policy originally put in place by the previous administration.
At the onset of the pandemic, the Trump Administration activated Title 42, an obscure public health law from 1944 that permits the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to prohibit individuals from entering the country when there is a “serious danger of the introduction of [a communicable] disease into the United States.” But critics say the law was meant to provide quarantine authority and to apply to all travelers—not only asylum seekers or irregular migrants.
“There’s no evidence that asylum seekers or other migrants pose more of a threat to public health safety than other travelers and yet the United States misuses this public health authority to block access to asylum,” said Ariana Sawyer, a U.S. border researcher for Human Rights Watch. “The ultimate goal was to destroy the asylum system.”
The emergency power had never before been used to regulate immigration to the U.S. until Trump, who used Title 42 as a blunt instrument to summarily expel and deny asylum seekers due process and the right to seek asylum, a right that they would normally have under the law. Instead, it gave Border Patrol unilateral authority to decide who could seek asylum, a power that resulted in extreme consequences.
According to data compiled by the Los Angeles Times, under Title 42, the number of migrants allowed to seek asylum cratered.
Although Title 42 was nominally invoked to limit the spread of COVID-19, former CDC scientists have since come forward to say that the decision had no public health justification and that the Trump Administration pressured the CDC to issue the sweeping order for political reasons.
Even the United Nations has condemned the policy, saying it violated international law.
In November 2020, a federal judge overseeing a case brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) challenging the invocation of Title 42 found that the expulsion of unaccompanied migrant children without due process was illegal and ordered it to end.
Despite Biden’s campaign promises to end “cruelty” at the border, Biden officials have used the same public health defense of Title 42 in court that was put forth by the Trump Administration, continuing the racist stereotype of associating disease with migrants, one that has a long history in the U.S., California, and in the LA area itself.
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In January, a federal appeals court lifted the preliminary injunction, once again allowing border authorities to expel unaccompanied migrant children. But days later, Biden officials announced that unaccompanied minors would be exempt from Title 42. However, the decision has created a whole new problem.
BIDEN TIME
Allowing children to seek asylum but not adults has created a situation where asylum-seeking families are having to make the unthinkable decision to send their children across the border alone, according to a report by the Haitian Bridge Alliance, Human Rights First, Al Otro Lado, and various other migrant advocacy groups. This is known as “self-separation.”
“The number of unaccompanied children crossing at the border has been rapidly rising under the Biden administration driven by its policy of expelling parents and adults to danger, forcing children to attempt to reach safety alone,” the report states. It goes on to point out that this has led to an increase in the number of children held alone in influx facilities and shelters, like the one in Long Beach.
The report goes on to say that CBP also separates children from non-parental family members, such as aunts, uncles, and grandparents, with whom they travelled to the border. Those adults are then expelled to Mexico or their country of origin, where they often face extremely high rates of kidnapping, rape, and assault.
According to the Immigrant Defenders Law Center in Los Angeles, around 16% of the unaccompanied children interviewed by the organization between December and March 24 traveled with family members who were expelled under Title 42. Earlier this month, a Border Patrol official told CNN that more than 400 unaccompanied children taken into custody in South Texas had previously tried to enter the U.S. with their families.
Biden has so far refused to revoke Title 42. The White House has said that they’re keeping the policy in place to buy time while they shore up staffing and resources at the southern border to deal with the bottleneck of migrants created by Trump’s complete undermining of the asylum system. During his address to Congress on Wednesday, Biden stated support for immigration reform, but also added, “Let’s at least pass what we agree on,” and, “let’s argue over it, let’s debate it, but let’s act.” It is unclear how much he will cede to Republican demands to further restrict immigration.
Mayor Garcia echoed the calls to rescind Title 42 in full while testifying at Tuesday’s Border Security, Facilitation, and Operation House Congressional Subcommittee hearing.
“We should be looking into rescinding Title 42 and should be restoring access to asylum at our borders,” Garcia said, though the recommendation was left out of the official written testimony he submitted to the subcommittee.
After the Twitter storm on Wednesday morning led by the LBIRC, Garcia reiterated his stance against Title 42 on Twitter.
FEARS OF INCREASED LAW ENFORCEMENT PRESENCE
It’s within this context that Long Beach’s Convention Center has become a temporary intake site for unaccompanied migrant children moved from Border Patrol to HHS custody while they wait to be reunified with sponsors in the U.S.
Officials said the facility will have a full-size clinic, mental health care, and social workers. Most children are expected to be in custody for a maximum of 10 days. The average time an unaccompanied minor remained in HHS custody before being released last month was 37 days, down from an average of 102 days last year.
The transformation of the Convention Center into an intake center for unaccompanied migrant children has brought national attention to the city, which is set to profit from the venture.
Steve Goodling, president and CEO of the Long Beach Convention and Visitors Bureau, told the Long Beach Post that the contract could “generate the economic equivalent of about 10 conventions” for an area that has suffered from a drop in revenue since the pandemic.
One estimate put the “financial boon” at up to $40 million, in part counting what family members coming to meet with the children at the facility could contribute to the local economy. That doesn’t include the over $35 million that the federal government will be ponying up to use the Convention Center through Aug. 2.
But not all of the attention has been welcome.
Immigrant advocates have cautioned that the migrant intake facility will increase the presence of law enforcement, and specifically federal immigration authorities, around the Convention Center, potentially creating a perilous situation for the undocumented community.
“We do not want to see cars in downtown that are going to scare people away,” said Hernandez of LBIRC. “We don’t want to see any [Border Patrol] cars, any type of immigration cars here. We don’t want ICE presence in Long Beach.”
On April 6, when the City Council voted to approve the contract with the federal government for use of the Convention Center, they also temporarily suspended the Long Beach Values Act in and around the site. The Values Act prohibits the city from cooperating with federal immigration officials.
In that same City Council meeting, Long Beach police Chief Robert Luna stated that he didn’t expect U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to be involved in securing the facility.
But already police vehicles marked with insignia from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security—the parent agency of ICE—have been spotted around the Convention Center.
The contract states that the city “shall not be responsible for the security, safely, or well being of any individual who enters the Licensed Area for any reason.” It’s unclear exactly how much of the area surrounding the Convention Center will be policed to federal law enforcement because a map showing the perimeter of the licenced area is redacted in the contract made public by the city. The contract estimated that the LBPD would be reimbursed $53,445 for “direct fees” and an additional “Protest Minimum Estimate” of $7,528.
The issue of surveillance by federal immigration authorities was recently raised in Long Beach when the ACLU last week accused the LBPD of violating state law by sharing license plate data with Border Patrol and ICE.
WEEK OF ACTION
The LBIRC is concluding their week of action around the migrant intake center on Saturday with a May Day Car Caravan, along with a group of other organizations.
You can RSVP at this link.
The organization has various demands, including that children are reunited with sponsors in the U.S. within five to seven days and that the city does not promote the facility as a replicable model and instead lobbies the federal government to rescind Title 42.
kevin@forthe.org
@reporterkflores
