Every year, thousands of children enter the U.S. illegally, and, though some come with their parents, most come alone. They come to escape persecution, make money for their families, or to start a better life.
If the INS gets a hold of these children, they are immediately detained, often without being informed of their rights, given the opportunity to contact family members, or offered the appropriate legal counsel. They are held undocumented in detention centers that also house convicted juvenile offenders, placing these often non-English-speaking children in a very vulnerable situation.
The conditions of these centers were found to be in violation of international law, the U.S. statutory provisions, INS regulations, and the terms of court orders binding the INS according to the Human Rights Watch report “Slipping Through the Cracks.”
The Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) was given responsibility over the children last March, but without government support for foster and adoption programs, the ORR might inevitably end up with conditions comparable to the INS.
As far as protecting our own citizens’ rights, the U.S. is one of the only six countries in the world, putting us in such companies as China and Saudi Arabia, to execute offenders for crimes committed as juveniles. The U.S. has executed 19 children since 1990, nine of these from Texas and nine since the year 2000.
One of the most recent cases involved a seventeen-year-old black man named Gerald Lee Mitchell who had an IQ of 75 and possibly an organic brain disorder and was suffering from temporal lobe seizures and a severe history of drug use, at the time he murdered a white man in a robbery. He was tried in front of an all-white jury, sentenced to death despite his rehabilitation, good conduct, remorseful thought, and religious acquisition during his 15 years in prison, and killed on October 22, 2001.
Nanon Williams was sentenced to death for a murder committed when he was 17. New evidence shows the state of Texas produced false ballistic evidence, evidence that went undisputed by an unprepared defense lawyer, that would easily reverse the decision against Mr. Williams. Nanon Williams is still on death row; his case continues to be investigated.
American corporations like Wal-Mart run sweatshops in foreign countries. According to the International Labor Organization, 250 million children between the ages of five and fourteen work in developing countries, and many of these children are handed over to employers by parents for a small advance payment (usually about $20).
Children are still being abducted by armies in the Democratic Republic of Congo and other countries and forced to fight and kill some of their own countrymen. Others are forced to roam the streets of their hometowns with no protection from the violence of drug cartels or crooked police. Still others are kept in grossly substandard orphanages, are subject to physical and sexual abuse, and are denied any chance at a normal nurturing childhood.
What can I do?
Online letters and petitions are available online at Amnesty International (amnesty.org) and Human Rights Watch (www.hrw.org) for all of the aforementioned human rights crises. Letters should be sent to representatives at the national level calling for more support of the ORR in its attempts to nurture unaccompanied immigrant children, as well as support for a ban on child executions in the U.S.