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The TRUTH About Motherhood

Tag: immigration

  • The Cruel Reality: ICE Targeting Immigrant Children for Deportation Under the Guise of “Welfare”

    The Cruel Reality: ICE Targeting Immigrant Children for Deportation Under the Guise of “Welfare”

    Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

    As the daughter of an immigrant and a mom, watching Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents conduct so-called “welfare checks” on unaccompanied immigrant children makes my blood boil. What’s presented as concern for child safety is revealed through internal documents to be something far more sinister: a coordinated effort to deport vulnerable children and criminalize the family members legally caring for them. ICE targeting immigrant children is wrong on every level. They’re children; regardless of color or race, it’s our responsibility to care for children.

    The Truth Behind ICE’s “Welfare Checks”

    Recent reports have confirmed that ICE is actively seeking out unaccompanied immigrant children in nationwide operations. While the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) claims these visits are benevolent “welfare checks” meant to “ensure that they are safe and not being exploited,” an internal ICE document obtained by the National Immigration Project tells a different story.

    The document explicitly shows that ICE officials are gathering intelligence to determine whether these children are “flight risks” or “threats to public safety.” Evaluating deportation possibilities, and looking for ways to pursue criminal cases against both the children and their sponsors. This isn’t protection—it’s persecution.

    Michelle Méndez, director of legal resources and training for the National Immigration Project, called it what it is: “backdoor family separation.” The government is weaponizing these children’s vulnerability to target entire immigrant communities.

    ICE targeting immigrant children for deportation is fucking bullshit. People are not “illegal,” especially in a country stolen from the indigenous and built on the backs of brown and black people.

    Let’s be crystal clear about what’s happening: this administration is deliberately traumatizing children who have already endured unimaginable hardships. Many of these kids fled violence, poverty, and persecution, traveling thousands of dangerous miles alone in search of safety. They’ve been processed through our immigration system. Placed with vetted sponsors (often family members), and are working through their legal cases as required by our laws.

    Now, ICE agents are showing up at their homes, terrifying them with threats of deportation or criminal charges. A 16-year-old girl in Washington state was so frightened during one of these “welfare checks” that she desperately messaged her legal representative, afraid her life would be “flipped upside down.” This isn’t protecting children—it’s traumatizing them.

    Systemic Attacks on Vulnerable Communities

    These operations don’t exist in isolation. They’re part of a broader pattern of attacks on immigrant communities:

    1. Legal services for unaccompanied minors have been slashed, despite court intervention
    2. The Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) has resumed sharing sensitive data about children and their sponsors with ICE
    3. The current acting director of ORR is Angie Salazar, a former ICE agent
    4. Children with alleged “gang ties” are being targeted using flimsy evidence under the rarely-used 1798 Alien Enemies Act

    The concept of “backdoor family separation” is just a way to use immigrant people’s love for their children to threaten them. No Latino is ever leaving their child behind. These are human beings, and the U.S. government is treating them like property, completely dehumanizing these parents and their children in order for fellow Americans to condone this mass deportation of brown people. It’s a crime against humanity. Americans, we need to do what’s right even when its hard.

    The Human Impact

    For families caring for these children, these operations create an atmosphere of constant fear. Sponsors who went through extensive background checks and vetting processes to legally care for these children now face potential arrest and deportation for doing exactly what the government asked them to do. WTF? It feels like a trap and serves as a threat to others; stand down or you too might get illegally deported.

    Shaina Aber, executive director of the Acacia Center for Justice, expressed her distress: “The amount of trauma that this administration seems willing to put kids through is really upsetting.”

    Samuel Smith, director of immigrant legal aid at Manzanita House, described the terrified 16-year-old girl who contacted him during an ICE visit: “Both the text messages sent and the tone of communication when talking on the phone, was of a child who was incredibly scared. She had no idea what was going on and was worried that her life would be flipped upside down.”

    A Personal Perspective

    As someone who grew up watching my immigrant parent navigate this country’s complicated and often hostile systems, I understand the constant fear that comes with being seen as “other.” The worry that a knock on the door might mean your family being torn apart. The vigilance required to survive in a system designed to exclude you. In this political climate, even when you’ve done everything right and are here with proper paperwork, you still carry with you that feeling of being vulnerable and scared.

    These children have done nothing wrong. They are following the legal processes established by our own government. Their sponsors—often family members who simply want to provide a safe home—are being criminalized for acts of love.

    There’s a particular cruelty in targeting children. They are the most vulnerable and the least able to advocate for themselves. They’re the most likely to suffer lasting trauma from these experiences. ICE is deliberately exploiting this vulnerability.

    What This Really Means

    Let’s be honest about what’s happening here ICE is targeting immigrant children. This isn’t about protecting children. If it were, we’d be investing in their legal representation and their education. We’d care about their mental health services, and their successful integration into communities.

    Instead, this administration has cut legal services and appointed former ICE officials to lead the agency responsible for these children’s care. The intent is clear: to use fear as a deterrent. They want to make examples of these children. Advancing a political agenda that views certain immigrants as inherently undesirable.

    As Americans, we must ask ourselves: Is this who we want to be? A nation that terrorizes children? That separates families? That punishes acts of love and compassion?

    For the daughter of an immigrant watching this unfold, the answer is a resounding “hell no”. We must be and do better than this. These children deserve better than this. Our shared humanity demands it.

  • U.S. Immigration Policy has Obama Refusing Sanctuary and Sending Children to be Slaughtered

    U.S. Immigration Policy has Obama Refusing Sanctuary and Sending Children to be Slaughtered

    Immigration laws are very important to me. I am a Mexican-American Latina, first generation born in the United States. If my dad had not left all of his family and everything he knew behind, my story could be different. Immigration laws could mean life or death for me. I could have been one of the children at the border begging for sanctuary. I could have been one of the mothers begging for mercy for my child’s life, willing to give them up and do anything to save their life.

    You see Central America is nothing like North America. The only thing they share in common is the “America”. Living in the United States compared to living in a third world country is the difference between living in a mansion in the country and living on the streets in the middle of a war zone. If you have never been to Central  America, or been and never actually ventured outside of your touristy/ trendy hotel paradise, you have no idea of what the rest of the country looks like. It is very different than what you are seeing. Those kids at the airport or on the street who jump on your taxi trying to sell you chicles or wash your windshield, they are not doing this for some extra cash…this is survival. This is how they eat. It may be mildly annoying to you to be asked but it is humiliating to them to beg for your scraps but they do it to avoid doing something worse like being drug mules.

    Recently, a group of 22 migrants, mostly women and children from Honduras and Guatemala, were taken into custody after crossing the Rio Grande near McAllen on June 18. The gangs that control much of the area’s human smuggling often tell women and children that they will be permitted to stay upon turning themselves in.

    The United States is preparing to send 45,000 children back to Central American countries controlled by drug cartels that routinely torture, rape and kill children who refuse to work for them. So routinely, so often are children menaced that their families sent them away, alone, across thousands of miles on just the slimmest of hopes that they might be safe. U.S. law doesn’t allow them sanctuary.

    These children have walked through some of the most hostile, hot, barren, dangerous country in the world with no one to care for them. Poor families scraped together all their money by doing God knows what and paid thousands of dollars because they are terrified of what might happen to their children if they stay in their home country and then entrusted those children to criminals ( Coyotes) praying they might arrive in America and be safe.

    I have been to Mexico, not Cabos San Lucas, Alcapulco or Puerto Vallarta, but nearer to Mexico City; the state of Michoacan in Western Mexico. Never heard of it? Well, it is the front line for the drug cartel in Mexico, its overlords are the Knight’s Templar drug cartel. I won’t get into too many specifics because it’s dangerous to speak of these things but I will say this, I know what these children are running from. I’ve heard the stories. I know why these parents are sacrificing themselves and separation from the most precious thing in their life; they are doing it out of pure selfless love for their children. They are risking life and limb to get their children to the United States because the alternative is death. They are risking all of this under some false pretense that the people of the U.S. are compassionate and kind. They are mistaken. Our borders are more important than their children.

    This is not the first time that the United States has closed its borders to refugees in need. In 1939, a German trans-Atlantic liner carrying 938 Jewish refugees was refused entrance into our country and forced to return to a soon to be Nazi overrun Europe. We didn’t care then and we don’t care now. Our lack of compassion may have lead directly to death for some of those passengers.

    And now President Obama is promising the American people to send these children back to Central America. We live in an America that demands he do so because our right to close our borders and keep the “dirty, job stealing Mexicans” out is more important to us than granting sanctuary to small children whose lives will surely be in peril if they return. The people demanding that the borders be shut are probably some of the same people who are buying the drugs that are putting these children’s lives at risk.

    We’ve heard their stories now. Stories of children who are publicly stripped naked and gang raped by drug syndicates to scare their parents. Stories of children maimed in order to convince their father to sell his property or join their cartel. Stories of children murdered to prove a point. By sending these children back, we are sending the message that we think these children are as disposable as the cartel thinks they are. I implore you, as human beings, to consider that this is about more than our borders. It is about children whose lives are at risk and I don’t mean by first world standards. These children have nothing and by turning them away, be assured we are sending them to be slaughtered like animals in the street.

    So you tell me, is it safe to send these children back? Doesn’t sanctuary for children at risk of being murdered trump closing our borders and immigration reform?

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