A group of bipartisan House and Senate lawmakers want to create a new immigration court that would only handle legal matters for children and teenagers rather than lumping them into the general court system that is burgeoning with more than 2 million pending cases.
Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) and Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) joined Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Rep. Maria Salazar (R-FL) in introducing a bill on Wednesday that they said would make it easier for unaccompanied minors who enter the country illegally and without the company of a parent to obtain documents to work once they are in the U.S. and speed up the legal process of deciding their asylum and removal proceedings.
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“It will not allow any more or less people into the country, the law will still be the same. It just provides proper due process and justice that we stand for so much. And so I’m thrilled to be able to push this through,” Goldman, a member of the House Homeland Security Committee, said.
Bennet, who was part of the Gang of Eight effort to pass comprehensive immigration reform, said he backed the Immigration Court Efficiency and Children’s Court Act because it would improve due process for children and teenagers by creating a separate court within the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review. Court employees would receive special training on what children in these types of situations have gone through and how to best help them through the court process.
“This legislation will ensure kids fleeing violence and persecution are able to understand and participate in immigration court proceedings and are treated with the dignity, respect, and care they deserve,” Bennet said. “This bipartisan, pragmatic legislation demonstrates that we can find common ground.”
The immigration court system has fewer than 700 judges nationwide and more than 2 million pending cases. It has come under a greater strain since President Joe Biden took office in 2021, as more than 6 million people have been apprehended for illegally entering the country.
Murkowski said she chose to support the bill because the border surge has added a large number of new cases to the court backlog and lengthened wait times, including for children.
“Unfortunately, these failures especially impact unaccompanied children, who are sometimes required to face a judge at their removal proceeding alone,” Murkowski said.
The government’s response to the more than 300,000 children who have come across the border alone since Biden took office has been a concern for lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, particularly this year after the New York Times reported in February that the Biden administration’s Department of Health and Human Services had lost track of more than 85,000 children it released to adults within the country who had agreed to sponsor them.
Sponsors can be family members or unrelated adults and are supposed to ensure children are enrolled in and attend school, as well as all legal proceedings to determine if the child will be allowed to remain in the country permanently.
The New York Times report listed instances in which immigrant children had been released by HHS and pushed into illegal jobs instead of enrolling in school, including instances of 12-year-old roofers in Florida and Tennessee; underage slaughterhouse workers in Delaware, Mississippi, and North Carolina; children sawing planks of wood during overnight shifts in South Dakota; operating milking machines in Vermont; and building lava rock walls around homes in Hawaii.
“In Los Angeles, children stitch ‘Made in America’ tags into J. Crew shirts. They bake dinner rolls sold at Walmart and Target, process milk used in Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and help debone chicken sold at Whole Foods,” the report stated. “As recently as the fall, middle-schoolers made Fruit of the Loom socks in Alabama. In Michigan, children make auto parts used by Ford and General Motors.”
Another New York Times report published in April offered more details about the thousands of immigrant children who have been forced into indentured servitude and child labor under Biden, including how “as migrant children were put to work, [the] U.S. ignored warnings.”
Immigrant advocacy group Kids in Need of Defense helped lawmakers craft the bill and told reporters during a press call Wednesday morning that the bill had the potential to prevent child trafficking and help children, but did not explain how it would prevent the continuation of abuse and trafficking of children or who children are released to in the first place.
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“We have all been seeing and reading a lot about children ending up in exploitative labor situations, right? And this happens when kids don’t understand their rights and when they can’t take advantage of their rights and they don’t have anyone looking out for them, and advising them, or working to protect them. So when children are able to go through the immigration court process, to secure a work permit and legal status, they are going to be protected,” Jennifer Podkul, KIND’s vice president for policy and advocacy, said.
“Those are protective measures for them so that they can find age-appropriate, safe, dignified work with a work permit that is a protective measure to make sure that they’re going to not be vulnerable to exploitation or somebody trying to take advantage of them,” Podkul said.
