Commentators are outraged at this story that appeared yesterday in the Boston Globe, about instances where the US is allowing certain immigrant parents to stay — but deporting their children.
In moves that underscore how completely dysfunctional the US immigration system is, the US has for years granted temporary protected status to certain immigrants whose countries were unsafe to return to. But immigrants with TPS weren’t allowed to bring their children to the US, even though their children were still living in those too-dangerous countries. When the child migrant surge began in 2011, it brought many of these left-behind children from dangerous countries like El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras to the US to reunite with their parents. But inexplicably, the US is now deporting some of the children who make it here, even though they have parents in the US, and even though there’s evidence that deported children have been killed.
What’s happening is outrageous on multiple fronts, considering that the US is separating parents from children and deporting minors back into dangerous environments. Read the full Boston Globe article for more; an excerpt follows below:
When powerful earthquakes rocked El Salvador in 2001, the US government told Carlos Ramos it was unsafe to go home. Officials gave him and thousands of other immigrants work permits, and a reason to stay in America by renewing those permits year after year.
Now the same federal agency that gave Ramos permission to stay is planning to deport his teenage son.
The boy, also named Carlos, was caught crossing the southern border after fleeing gang violence in El Salvador in 2012, too late to apply for the same permit that federal officials granted to his parents. He is the only family member here without permission, but immigration officials have repeatedly refused to halt his deportation.
“It’s a death sentence,” his father said.
In the chaotic aftermath of last summer’s border crisis, when thousands of minors from crime-ridden Central American nations streamed into the United States, lawyers are discovering a bizarre irony in the immigration system: the Obama administration is deporting the children of adults it has allowed to remain in the United States.
“There’s no angle you could look at this situation from and have it make any sense,” said the Ramos family’s lawyer, Kira Gagarin of Framingham.
