Madam Chairwoman, subcommittee members, and members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, thank you for this opportunity to testify before you today about the impact of immigration enforcement on America’s children.

 

The National Council of La Raza (NCLR) – the largest national Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization in the United States – is a private, nonprofit, nonpartisan, tax-exempt organization established in 1968 to reduce poverty and discrimination and improve opportunities for Hispanic Americans. NCLR has a long history in the immigration debate; our work on this issue is focused on ensuring that we have an immigration system that functions in the best interest of the nation. Immigration to the United States should be orderly and legal, promote economic growth, sustain our families, and be implemented in a way consistent with our best values in the United States. As you know, the country is far from achieving that goal. My organization, our Affiliates, and our many coalition partners are dedicated to an effort to reform U.S. immigration laws in a way that promotes order, fairness, and above all legality.  Until a major immigration reform is enacted, the country will continue to cope with challenges resulting from the presence of roughly 12 million undocumented immigrants in our workforce and in our communities. 

 

I am particularly grateful that the committee is taking up one of these challenges, one that has reached crisis proportions in many communities around the country. There is substantial, growing evidence that the use of workplace raids as an immigration enforcement strategy is causing great harm to children, schools, child care centers, and communities well beyond the immigrant population.  Madam Chairwoman, let me be clear:  NCLR believes that the United States can and should enforce its immigration laws. As with any set of laws, the nation should enforce them wisely and well. This requires an examination of the costs and benefits of particular enforcement strategies to ensure that the priorities and tactics we choose do not undercut other important laws, values, and goals. The work of this committee is absolutely critical to inspiring a reasonable conversation on immigration enforcement, and I sincerely appreciate the committee’s attention to the impact of workplace raids on America’s children.

 

II. Consequences of Immigration Enforcement for Children 

 

 

There has been a significant increase in interior immigration enforcement operations by the Department of Homeland Security in the last year and a half. In 2007, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), more than 4,900 arrests were made in connection with worksite enforcement investigations, representing a 45-fold increase in criminal worksite arrests compared to fiscal year 2001.[1]  This year, ICE has stepped up its enforcement actions by raiding individual homes as well as worksites; in April ICE conducted a five-state sweep of Pilgrim’s Pride poultry plants last month, and just last week it raided Agriprocessors, Inc., a kosher meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa, a raid which ICE has called the largest in history.

 

The impact of immigrant enforcement raids on children is often disregarded and poorly understood. For these reasons, NCLR commissioned the Urban Institute to conduct a study of three communities where large-scale worksite raids occurred in 2007. We had a strong interest in moving beyond the anecdotal accounts reported by the media to documenting the challenges that children face as a result of immigration enforcement actions. NCLR believes that the impact on children and communities must be considered when making decisions about immigration enforcement – or any law enforcement – strategy. We believe strongly that such a debate should be based on facts and empirical evidence as much as possible, which is why we invested in a thorough report. I request that the report be included in the official record of this hearing.

 

NCLR released this report, Paying the Price: The Impact of Immigration Raids on America’s Children, in October 2007. The findings confirmed the inevitability of hardship to children resulting from an immigration raid.  There are approximately five million children in the U.S. with an undocumented immigrant parent, the vast majority of whom are U.S. citizens and under the age of ten.  The Urban Institute researchers found that, for every two immigrants detained as a result of worksite raids, approximately one child is left behind.  Further, the study shed light on the fact that many children slipped through the cracks as a direct result of ICE’s enforcement protocols. For example, ICE did not provide detained immigrants with access to telephones. This meant that parents were unable to notify family members and coordinate alternative child care arrangements, forcing some children to stay with landlords or babysitters indefinitely or, worse still, home alone. ICE also failed to consider hardship to children when making custody determinations. Some children experienced the loss of both parents who had been placed in detention locally or in detention facilities out of state, which made it virtually impossible for these children to visit them. 

 

There were also accounts of ICE detaining nursing mothers, resulting in infants being forcibly weaned from breast milk. In a 2006 raid in New Bedford, Massachusetts, an eight-month-old infant was taken to the emergency room to be treated for dehydration after her mother was detained.  The infant’s pediatrician appealed to ICE officials to release the child’s mother, citing medical reasons for which the child needed to continue breastfeeding.  NCLR and our sister organizations in the Latino community wrote to the Department of Homeland Security after this incident to raise concerns; we received a response stating that the incident never occurred, despite extensive evidence, including video footage of the child and interviews with the emergency room physician who treated her. 

 

In addition, the report found evidence of increased economic hardship, social stigma, fear, isolation, family separation, disruptions in schooling, and negative emotional and mental health consequences for children. Across the three communities examined in the report, teachers, caregivers, and mental health professionals consistently described children with symptoms of depression and other psychological disturbances such as sleep disturbance, loss of appetite, fearfulness, mood swings, and feelings of abandonment by their parent(s). 

 

Beyond the negative consequences to children’s well-being resulting from worksite raids, the report provides evidence that our nation’s social institutions – such as school and child welfare agencies – that are tasked with protecting and nurturing children are playing the role of first responders in the aftermath of a raid. For example, school officials interviewed for our report discussed steps they undertook on the day of the raid to ensure the well-being of children, such as instructing bus drivers to release children only at homes where there was an adult present, asking teachers to stay late to help care for children, and coordinating mental health services. In the days following the raid, school personnel visited homes and attended community gatherings reminding parents that schools were a safe place for children and urging their return to school. A school leader in Grand Island, Nebraska made a poignant statement regarding how the raid served as a diversion from the school’s primary mission of ensuring that no child is left behind. 

 

Today, nearly every time there is a significant immigration enforcement operation, NCLR receives reports from the community similar to those noted above.  There is a similar pattern with each raid:  school systems and child care centers must scramble to find relatives or caregivers for children whose parents have abruptly disappeared. These institutions, along with community organizations, must grapple for days or weeks with an emergency situation in which families struggle to find the location of detainees, who are often unable to access legal services. Even since the implementation of ICE guidelines in response to these many problems, there are always cases of children left behind and nearly always cases of nursing mothers separated from their infants for long periods. Moreover, school systems and child care centers report enormous long-term challenges in meeting the needs of children whose families have been forcibly and suddenly separated in this way.   

 

 

There is also growing alarm in our community about ICE’s engagement in intimidation and enforcement tactics near our public schools and Head Start programs. For example, NCLR has several Affiliates who operate Head Start programs that serve the children of migrant farmworkers. Last spring, many of these programs began reporting the following incidents (see Attachment 1 – MSHS Enforcement Chart):

 

·         ICE agents parking near migrant Head Start centers during drop-off and pickup times

·         ICE agents and local law enforcement following school buses carrying children under the age of five, beginning as early as 4:00 a.m.; in some instances, ICE followed school buses for the entire route, as long as two hours

·         ICE agents and local law enforcement following migrant Head Start staff to and from the center during lunch breaks

 

These actions on the part of ICE are having a chilling effect on the participation of migrant children in Head Start. Quite simply, the presence of ICE around Head Start centers is causing fearful parents to keep their children away from the program. In fact, the low rates of attendance registered by these programs has even garnered the attention of U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Head Start, which monitors Head Start enrollment and sanctions programs for failing to meet their enrollment targets. During the reauthorization of the Head Start Act, NCLR worked closely with this committee to ensure that migrant children benefit from greater access to Head Start. We were proud of this committee’s bipartisan work to prioritize the expansion of migrant Head Start and its commitment to ensuring that migrant children exit the fields and enter classrooms where they can learn and grow. It is deplorable that the laudable goals of this committee have been virtually undone by the current immigration enforcement strategy of this Administration. 

 

We are also aware of instances in which ICE has actually entered private homes and school buildings to remove children. For example, in October 2007, a Honduran immigrant mother, who was in her Ohio home breastfeeding her nine-month-old infant when ICE agents entered her home, was taken into custody while ICE agents went to her children’s school to remove her children.[2] In another account, an NCLR Affiliate, HELP-New Mexico, Inc., contacted NCLR in September 2007 to report that ICE agents and local police entered their preschool program, located inside the Sunrise Elementary School in Chaparral, New Mexico, to remove children whose parents had been detained in a local sweep of Hispanic businesses and homes.[3]  One child, Virginia Ana Rodriguez, was released to her father, who was in the custody of four fully armed Otero County police officers at the time. The officers initially brought the father into the main office of Sunrise Elementary until the principal asked them to accompany her into the conference room so as not to alarm other students and staff. These same agents also entered the local middle and high schools to remove children of detained immigrants. 

 

In the immediate weeks following this incident, school officials at the Gadsden School District documented that approximately 200 students were absent and a small number returned to school during the remainder of the school year. The HELP-New Mexico preschool program also registered lower rates of enrollment in the ensuing weeks, and has yet to fully reach enrollment targets consistent with previous school years. A preschool teacher reports the challenges they now face in enrolling children in the program because parents remain afraid of the possibility that ICE agents will return to the center. Clearly, our current approach to immigration enforcement is instilling fear among our children and families and undermining our important social policy goals for children, and the programs designed to meet these goals.

 

 

 

Many of the problems that are documented in the NCLR/Urban Institute report have also been the subject of media attention, litigation, and congressional inquiries. As a result of this pressure, during 2007, ICE developed and released three policy memoranda that consider children in the conduct of immigration enforcement actions. While these memoranda represent an improvement in ICE sensitivity to these important considerations, experience with immigration raids since the development of these policies suggests that they have significant limitations.  The scope and the limitations of these guidelines are discussed as follows: 

 

 (1) Guidelines for Identifying Humanitarian Concerns Among Administrative Arrestees for Worksite Enforcement Actions, November 16, 2007.  Following the New Bedford, Massachusetts raid in March 2007, Senators Edward Kennedy and John Kerry and Congressman William Delahunt worked with ICE to develop guidelines for quickly identifying persons arrested who are sole caregivers or who should be released from custody for other humanitarian reasons.  The guidelines apply to larger worksite raids that result in the arrest and/or detention of more than 150 immigrants.  The guidelines stipulate that ICE will:

·         Develop a comprehensive plan for quickly identifying humanitarian issues among detainees.

·         Coordinate with federal health and/or state and local social services, including allowing these entities to serve as intermediaries to help screen and assess humanitarian issues among detainees.

·         Facilitate communication among detainees and their family members by providing access to telephones; ICE is also expected to coordinate with nongovernmental agencies (NGOs) and make information on detainees and ICE personnel available to these entities in real time, so that they can help to screen for humanitarian concerns.

 

(2) Memorandum Outlining Prosecutorial Discretion for Nursing Mothers, November 7, 2007.   In response to mounting accounts of infants forcibly weaned from breast milk as a result of enforcement actions, ICE released guidelines highlighting the importance of discretion when making arrests and custody determinations of nursing mothers. These guidelines call for the following:

·         Nursing mothers should be released on an Order of Recognizance or Order of Supervision, and the Alternative to Detention programs should be considered as an additional enforcement tool.

·         In situations where ICE determines that nursing mothers should remain in custody, field personnel should consider placement in Berks or Hutto Family detention facilities.

 

(3) Memorandum Regarding Juveniles Encountered During Fugitive Operations, August 24, 2007. In March 2006, ICE agents raided a home in San Rafael, California and apprehended Kebin Reyes, a six-year-old U.S. citizen. ICE agents kept Kebin in detention for ten hours alongside his father, who repeatedly pleaded for access to a telephone to make alternative care arrangements for Kebin. The ACLU filed a lawsuit that led to the development of a memorandum concerning the treatment of minor children encountered during enforcement actions.[4]  The memo stipulates the following:

·         ICE should not take into custody a legal permanent resident or U.S. citizen minor child.

·         ICE should coordinate the transfer of a minor child to the nearest child welfare authority or local law enforcement agency.  If these options are not feasible, ICE should document the parent’s request for the transfer of the child to a third party.

·         To the greatest extent possible, ICE should coordinate with child welfare authorities prior to an enforcement operation. 

 

In general, ICE appears to have made attempts to adjust its enforcement policies to consider humanitarian issues, including hardship to children. There is even some evidence to suggest that ICE has adhered to its stated objective of promptly releasing nursing mothers. For example, recent large raids in Van Nuys, California and Postville, Iowa demonstrate that ICE has released nursing mothers with electronic monitoring devices. However, there is also anecdotal evidence that the release of these mothers can be significantly delayed and the conditions of their detention inappropriate. NCLR has learned that one nursing mother detained last week in Postville was not provided sufficient access to food over a nearly 24-hour period before she was released to care for her infant. 

 

However, the positive impact of ICE’s guidance memoranda is severely limited with respect to providing any real assurances that children will be comprehensively and systematically protected in immigration enforcement activities. For example:

 

·         The policy guidelines noted above are nonbinding, as they are not regulations and are not codified. 

·         There is no mechanism for holding ICE accountable for compliance with its own stated policies.

·         The humanitarian guidelines for worksite raids only apply to larger raids of more than 150 people.  Thus, it is unclear whether or not ICE will attempt to apply these guidelines in raids yielding less than 150 detainees. 

·         The guidelines noted above fail to address the undue burden placed on schools, early childhood centers, child welfare agencies, churches, and community-based organizations that are left to play the role of first responder in the aftermath of a raid. 

·         The guidelines fall short of accounting for all of the situations and scenarios in which children could potentially be harmed in an enforcement action.  Simply put, the guidelines do not stipulate that all children, regardless of any type of enforcement action of any size, will have their best interests taken into account.

 

Unfortunately, there is substantial evidence that ICE does not consistently follow its own guidelines. For example, Immigration and Naturalization Services (ICE’s predecessor) policy guidance dating back to 1993 strongly discourages immigration enforcement actions near schools.[5] The policy states that agents are to “attempt to avoid apprehension of and to tightly control investigative operations on the premises of schools, places of workshop, funerals, or other religious ceremonies.” In 2004, the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection of the Department of Homeland Security reaffirmed the 1993 guidance. However, as noted above, there are mounting stories of ICE presence near schools and Head Start centers, providing clear evidence that ICE does not uphold the guidelines and is actively conducting enforcement operations in violation of them.

 

Even if ICE were to execute all of its existing policy guidance perfectly and expand its scope to include all children who are affected by immigration raids, there would still be a profound dissonance between the goal of enforcing our nation’s immigration laws and the equally important goal of protecting America’s children and supporting the institutions that are charged with meeting their needs. Even if the federal government were to use great care and attention when removing parents from their workplaces, homes, families, and communities – which is far from the case now – our current enforcement strategy relies heavily on raids which undeniably and inevitably has an impact on American children and creates difficult challenges for schools, child care centers, and the child welfare system in meeting their needs. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Almost immediately, as the raid was taking place, the local Catholic Parish – St. Bridget’s – became a focal point for community activity. NCLR spoke with individuals at the church who described the scene as being chaotic. About 150 children (most of whom are U.S. citizens) spent the night there, and the church provided food to more than 400 children throughout the first 24 hours following the raid. More than 24 hours after the raid there were at least 150 people still at the church, where they attempted to match up every child with a relative. The burden of ensuring that children are matched up with relatives and other caregivers has fallen squarely on the shoulders of the church, school, and community.

 

As this testimony was being prepared, there were still families seeking sanctuary in the church. Families have been afraid to go to their homes because of the continued ICE presence in Postville. The church was still feeding hundreds of children and families nearly five days after the raid. Children are being escorted on buses from the church to school and back. Church and school officials report that access to counselors and mental health professionals for children has emerged as one of many pressing unmet needs.  In short, the disruption to the larger community in Postville, to its school system, churches, and community service infrastructure, has only just begun. As NCLR and the Urban Institute documented in the Paying the Price report, the impact of a major raid like this one is deep, long-lasting, and destructive.

 

 

 

Madam Chairwoman, I want to be as clear as I can be that NCLR is not calling for a halt to immigration enforcement. We recognize that the nation can and should control its borders, and that it is reasonable to conduct interior enforcement activities.  But it is also true that every enforcement agency must establish priorities and parameters for its work, and it is reasonable – indeed, essential – for these parameters to include consideration of other important policy and law enforcement goals. 

 

It is vitally important to the well-being of America’s children and all communities that the federal government engage in a conversation that results in good judgments about how to enforce our immigration laws without undercutting other important goals, such as child protection, education, and worker protection. In the Postville raid, immigration enforcement clearly trumped an important labor law investigation in a way that may have lasting implications for the workers – including children – in the meatpacking industry. To place children in detention while their exploitative employer regroups and reopens within a day is a clear indication that our enforcement priorities need examination.  

 

In Postville, as in other raids which preceded it, school systems, child care centers, and the social service infrastructure have been left with a huge challenge of meeting the needs of children whose parents literally disappeared from one day to the next. The New York Times has estimated that some 13,000 American children have had at least one parent removed from the country;[8] surely this merits a conversation about whether workplace raids are causing more harm than good. NCLR believes that this committee has an important role to play in such a conversation.

 

While NCLR is glad to see that ICE has responded to these concerns, there is clear evidence that the workplace raids conducted over the last two years, as well as the ICE presence near Head Start centers and schools, are undercutting a variety of important priorities under the jurisdiction of this committee. It is also very clear that even ICE’s carefully constructed guidance to avoid these problems will be insufficient to address this larger challenge. This problem is really a collision between very important policy goals. I don’t believe we can regulate our way out of this dilemma with guidance or other tweaks. We need to make policy choices, and all of the implications of these choices should be on the table.

 

In closing, I know that the committee is aware that we are in a highly charged environment on the immigration issue. The longer that our immigration system remains broken and unaddressed by Congress, the longer that these and related problems – and the tensions surrounding immigration itself – will continue. Literally every day, NCLR uncovers new evidence supporting the misguided notion that any immigration enforcement is considered good enforcement, even if it does grave damage to our American citizens and our nation’s most cherished values, and we have tolerated this environment for too long. Last week alone provided three examples of the ways in which ill-considered policy and enforcement judgments do great, if unintended, harm. Last week it became clear through extensive press coverage that the economic stimulus bill denies Americans, including military personnel, access to a new tax credit simply because they have immigrant family members. Just last week The Washington Post documented horrific abuses of immigrants in detention facilities, including denying critical medical care to some seriously ill detainees and injecting dangerous drugs into others. Again last week, NCLR and many others did what we could to support churches and community leaders in crisis in Postville in the aftermath of the ICE raid there. Every week the evidence mounts – evidence that we need to exercise judgment in the application of our laws affecting immigrants to avoid doing harm that we will later regret.

 

I urge the committee in the strongest possible terms to engage the Department of Homeland Security and the other congressional committees of jurisdiction to conduct serious assessments of the costs and benefits of workplace raids. NCLR believes that a thorough examination will inexorably lead to the conclusion that we need to change course in how we enforce our immigration laws. 

 

Thank you for the opportunity to present this testimony today.

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Attachment 1: Chart outlining immigration enforcement near migrant and seasonal head start centers
 
Prepared by the National Migrant and Seasonal Head Start Association
For more information, contact Yvette Sanchez, Executive Director at (202) 223-9889 

DATE	LOCATION	INCIDENT
April 2008	Holley, NY	Local Officers parked near MSHS center Local Officers following staff leaving MSHS center
April 2008	Immokalee FL	MSHS staff intervened on behalf of MSHS children when parents were detained and not released even when they presented proof of having young children to ICE officers and leaving the child without proper care
April 2008	Bybee, TN	ICE officers parked a block from the MSHS center. Families’ fear of being detained and separated from their children has forced parents to make a decision to take their children to the fields. Recently a couple of young parents made the decision to take their child with them and TIED the toddler in the pick up truck with the doors opened and the baby actually hung itself and died.
April 2008	Meter, GA	ICE Officials set up road blocks that block access to the MSHS center.
August 2007	Winnemucca, NV	ICE Officials parked near MSHS center and follow MSHS school transporting children as a result MSHS centers removed signage from buildings and buses
June – October 2007	Hinton, OK	ICE officials questioning MSHS staff checking into hotels. MSHS staff was there to provide training and technical assistance to the local MSHS center.
May – November 2007	Semmes AL	ICE officers parked outside MSHS centers. Families were so fearful and chose not to register children for MSHS that the center did not open.
September 2007	Chaparral, New Mexico	Sheriffs, with ICE close behind, were doing raids of homes and businesses, without warrants, finding excuses to get people to open their doors, pulling over Latinos for traffic stops.  When they determined that folks spoke Spanish, they called ICE over to ask for papers.  They detained the undocumented folks, asked them about their kids, and then took them to the migrant HS center, operated by HELP New Mexico Inc., to retrieve them.  That center had seven kids removed from Head Start y by their parents, with 3 – 4 armed sheriffs standing behind each parent.  The also went to local schools with detained parents to remove children.
September 2007	Alamo, TN	Since 2006 Alamo parents were afraid to attend parent and Policy Council meetings because immigration enforcement agents were reputed to be pulling over Latino families at road blocks on the highway leading to the center.
September 2007	Summer City, TN	ICE officials parking outside of MSHS centers and other social service providers (WIC, food stamps, Medicaid) has forced parents to make decision about enrolling their families and children in these federal funded programs.
April 2006	Immokalee and Nocatee, FL	ICE Officials parked near MSHS center and follow MSHS school transporting children. Within a couple of weeks, there is an employment raid where the majority of MSHS parents were working. Parents were detained and the MSHS staff worked to get information to the parents regarding their rights while the MSHS centers remained open beyond regular business hours to care for children.