This was a news story that shocked the community days earlier.
Around two dozen children, without their parents, walking handcuffed under the watch of ICE agents.
In an unprecedented event and as a continuation of Donald Trump’s barbaric policy, the defenseless children have become the new targets of ICE agents..
In a scene that an immigrants-rights group spokesman described as “barbaric,” some two dozen children with their hands chained were videotaped shuffling single file in the parking garage of the 300 North Los Angeles Federal Building late Friday, July 11, apparently in federal custody.
Jorge-Mario Cabrera, communications director for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights Los Angeles, said in an interview Saturday that its attorneys had confirmed details posted with the video describing when and where it was recorded.
The attorneys contacted the children and planned to represent them, Cabrera said, adding the children were not accompanied by their parents and were from Ventura County.
Attorneys for the Rapid Response Network, which CHIRLA created, described the children as “safe,” Cabrera said — though that was of little consolation to him.
“It looks barbaric,” Cabrera said, reacting to the video posted on the social media website Reddit. “These are children, for God’s sake. These are not hardened criminals and I think the Trump administration should be ashamed. We’re in unusual times and under the current circumstances, nothing surprises me anymore, yet it enrages me.”
A far cry from the “bad, hard criminals” Donald Trump said his undocumented immigrants crackdown would focus on, record-breaking numbers of deportation orders have been issued to young immigrant children under the Trump administration.
More kids aged 11 or under — 8,317 — received a removal order from an immigration court in April than any other month in over 35 years of data collection, according to court data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC).
Since Trump’s inauguration in January, judges have ordered removals for over 53,000 immigrant minors.
Those children are predominantly elementary school age or younger. Some 15,000 children were aged under four years old, and 20,000 of them were children aged four to eleven.
Teenagers are also experiencing climbing deportations, with 17,000 seeing a court-ordered removal, although that’s lower than their all-time peak in 2020 under the first Trump administration.
Some of these children being deported are unaccompanied minors, who do not have a legal guardian in the US; though the exact number is unclear, since immigration authorities stopped recording this data years ago.
Children, including toddlers, are required to show up at immigration hearings to be questioned by a judge – and many, unsurprisingly, do not understand what is happening nor the gravity of their situation.
In one case a young child from Haiti had his immigration court hearing remotely in front of a screen. The child, who had a learning disability, was fidgeting and running around the room. Finally, he pointed at the judge on the screen and asked – “Who’s that?”
In other cases, children are being arrested by ICE with their families, but held in detention and deported separately.
“A six year old child was picked up [by ICE] with his father, separated from his dad, and parked in custody for four months before being deported,” a lawyer familiar with children’s immigration cases told the Independent. The child was unable to receive legal assistance, as he was deported while federal legal funding had been cut.
The deportation outcome rate for immigrant children under age 11 is higher than in any other age group, latest figures show, and has jumped significantly since Trump came into office.
