STATEMENT: Our Work to Undo the Harm of the Trump Administration Begins Now
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Washington, D.C., November 11, 2020—On the occasion of Joe Biden’s and Kamala Harris’s election to be the next President and Vice President of the United States of America, Young Center Executive Director Maria Woltjen issued the following statement:
Voting in record-breaking numbers, Americans have chosen a new administration. Together, we now face the hard work of ending policies that harm children and—as importantly—building a new system centered on the needs and rights of children.
Today, in collaboration with sixteen other children’s and human rights organizations, the Young Center announced ten priorities for undoing the harm inflicted on immigrant children under the current administration. We look forward to working with the Biden-Harris administration to implement these priorities. But we will also begin our work to build an entirely new system for immigrant children. Through our latest initiative “Reimagining Children’s Immigration Proceedings: A Roadmap for an Entirely New System Centered around Children,” we are advocating for a fundamentally different process for welcoming children at the border, one that prioritizes children’s best interests, needs, and rights.
Beginning in January of 2017, the current administration vowed to obliterate protections for unaccompanied immigrant children. The last four years have seen a relentless attack on immigrant children through family separation, accelerated deportations, expanded ICE raids, decimating the asylum and refugee protection systems, attacks on the rights of DACA-recipients and TPS-holders, and efforts to prevent immigrant families from accessing housing and other basic necessities. We hope that a new administration will prioritize protecting the rights and safety of everyone in our communities, including immigrant families and children.
Finally, in March and under the cover of COVID, the administration closed the border to any person seeking protection, including children, despite zero evidence that this policy would protect public health. Since then, the government has turned away thousands of children who came to our borders seeking safety after traveling hundreds, if not thousands, of miles on their own. Today, DHS continues to return children to their abusers, traffickers, and persecutors. In addition to effectively ending asylum at the border, the administration has trapped tens of thousands, including families and children, in Mexico while they wait for a court date in the United States, under the Remain in Mexico policy. When a Young Center team visited one encampment in January, we saw abhorrent conditions, families without food and clean water, children deprived of the rights to safety and education, and no means to prepare for court hearings that are a matter of life and death.
As we move forward, America needs to undertake both endeavors—undoing the harm of the current administration and reimagining systems for immigrant children. We hope you’ll join us in this fight.
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The Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights is a non-profit organization that protects and advances the rights and best interests of immigrant children and advocates for an immigration system that treats children as children first. For press inquiries, please contact Noorjahan Akbar at media@theyoungcenter.org or 202-725-7184.