Word that Pittsburgh-area shelters had been swept into a nationwide push to deport migrant children to Guatemala sent attorneys and caseworkers racing through the weekend to block removals.
ICE, immigration and local response
Reporting on the reach and impact of immigration enforcement in Pittsburgh and across Southwestern Pennsylvania.
Attorneys at Jewish Family and Community Services [JFCS], a nonprofit that provides legal aid to refugees, learned late Friday that the Trump administration planned to deport as many as 700 children to Guatemala from across the United States, including up to 10 from the Pittsburgh area.
The U.S. government had worked out an agreement with Guatemala to remove minors without court orders, which resettlement lawyers say is unlawful. Attorneys and staff at JFCS, with support from the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, worked frantically through an evolving situation until a federal judge ruled Sunday that no planes bound for Guatemala could leave the ground, according to JFCS Chief Operations Officer Dana Gold.
The local children are boys and girls ages 15 to 17, and some have zero family in Guatemala, said Vic Walczak, legal director of ACLU-PA. All of the children are in some form of the immigration process, and none has a final order of removal, he added.
All of the children are fearful and do not wish to return to Guatemala, according to Walczak and Gold.
“We don’t know what they’ve run from, but we do know with broad brush strokes what their stories are,” Gold said. “Their stories are that they have no parents … that they’ve been trafficked or abused in ways no human being should experience.”
ACLU-PA was prepared to file a temporary restraining order Sunday afternoon to halt deportations of the migrant children sheltering in the Pittsburgh region. The organization pulled that filing at the last minute after a judge in Washington, D.C. confirmed that a ruling she passed earlier that morning temporarily barring the child deportations applied nationwide, Walczak said.
The initial order resulted from a complaint filed by the National Immigration Law Center early Sunday morning following reports throughout the night of children being roused, picked up and loaded onto planes in Texas and other parts of the country.
As a class-action suit, it extends protections to all of the Guatemalan children intended for deportation across the country.
“This is an extraordinary end run around the child protection principles enshrined in our law,” said Shaina Aber, executive director of the Acacia Center for Justice, which provides funds to JFCS.
“Kids are supposed to see a judge before a kid is removed from the country in order for the judge to assess whether the child is acting from their own free will and to ensure they are not returned to a dangerous situation.”
ICE, the Office of Refugee Resettlement and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment Sunday afternoon.
During a hearing Sunday, Drew Ensign, the Justice Department lawyer representing the Trump administration, said the Guatemalan government had requested all the children be returned there.
Guatemalan Foreign Affairs Minister Carlos Martínez said Friday that the government is willing to receive hundreds of Guatemalan minors who arrived unaccompanied to the United States and are being held in U.S. facilities. Guatemala Immigration Institute Director Danilo Rivera said the repatriations would be done at Guatemala’s expense and would be a form of voluntary return.
‘Chaotic,’ ‘frenzied’ and ‘stressful’
A number of the local children are housed at the Holy Family Institute, a Catholic nonprofit that provides shelter to migrant youth through a contract with the Office of Refugee Resettlement. The Holy Family Institute did not immediately respond to a request for comment Sunday afternoon.
ICE was at Holy Family Saturday and Sunday mornings for routine deportations unrelated to the operation concerning Guatemalan youth, Walczak said. Federal agents also visited the shelter in early August, seeking to speak with child migrants there, according to local immigrant rights advocates.
Late Friday, the Guatemalan children had been removed from court calendars, according to both national and local resettlement workers.
Walczak said he became aware of the situation at 8 p.m. Friday and immediately began making calls, coordinating with the local attorneys representing kids housed at Holy Family until 1 a.m. Saturday.
On Saturday morning, attorneys with JFCS headed to the Holy Family Institute to make contact with their clients, preemptively gathering declarations and statements under oath to be used if a temporary restraining order became necessary.
By 6:30 a.m. Sunday, advocates in Pittsburgh believed a temporary restraining order would be needed, said Walczak, who woke to reports of Guatemalan children being bused to idling planes in Texas and reports of others picked up around the country.
After the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement [ORR] sent letters to providers early Sunday stating that the shelters must comply with its orders or face civil and criminal charges, Walczak said the ACLU-PA feared the government would violate the newly inked D.C. court order (before it was upheld in the early afternoon) and began to prepare a filing on behalf of the children at Holy Family.
The 36-hour period was “chaotic,” “frenzied” and “stressful,” he said, but not out of the norm under the second Trump administration.
Following an afternoon hearing that confirmed the U.S. judge’s order applied to all states, ACLU-PA shelved its own filing, Walczak said.
He said the ACLU is carefully watching for any move made by ICE locally.
“The work isn’t done at all,” Gold said after the Sunday ruling. “The work continues. It’s just like whack-a-mole, you just don’t know what’s going to happen next … but it is our assumption that they’re going to keep trying through whatever process or means necessary.”
U.S. Rep Chris Deluzio, D-Aspinwall, said in a statement that his office remains in contact with attorneys representing the migrant children.
“There are a lot of laws that have to be followed to protect the safety and due process rights of these vulnerable kids,” he said. “I am monitoring the situation closely and any attempts to break the law or violate the rights of these kids in our community.”
Walczak said the Trump administration is “clearly violating” anti-child trafficking law designed to protect children from harm. For the government to evade due process, he said, “violates not only the letter of the law, but clearly violates the spirit,” pointing to a 15-year-old sheltered in Pittsburgh with no family in Guatemala. “Sending her back in that situation to nobody is gonna expose her to potential child trafficking like nothing else.
“It’s a horrifying thought that the government is ready, willing and able to play with children’s lives in this way.”
Jamie Wiggan is deputy editor at Pittsburgh’s Public Source and can be reached at jamie@publicsource.org.
Quinn Glabicki is the environment and climate reporter at Pittsburgh’s Public Source. He can be reached at quinn@publicsource.org and on Instagram @quinnglabicki.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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