Washington, D.C. – Legal advocates and child protection experts expressed deep concern over anticipated large-scale returns of unaccompanied children from Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) custody and the end of temporary protected status for Honduras. Kids in Need of Defense (KIND) conducted a fact-finding trip last week to assess the conditions and viability of safe returns of children to Honduras and presented their findings on the country’s lack of readiness to receive large numbers of unaccompanied children returned from the United States under the false pretense of family reunification.
A recording of the briefing can be found here. KIND also released a new fact sheet detailing their work with unaccompanied children facing potential deportation to Guatemala and Honduras, aimed at safeguarding their due process rights and ensuring their safety.
KIND found a system in Honduras that is woefully ill-prepared to accept any forced, mass return of unaccompanied children from the United States. In meetings with partners and experts in Honduras, KIND learned that families are not calling for the children to return from the United States. Importantly, KIND found that some of these children may return without anyone to receive them or sufficient support services to ensure their successful reintegration back into their communities.
“When Laura and I arrived, we were really walking into a moment of what felt like a crisis. Everyone was very anxious,” said Jennifer Podkul, chief of global advocacy at KIND. “There was a universal response from governmental actors, non-governmental actors, and international organizations, who were all on high alert and working furiously to figure out how they could safely receive over 400 children from the United States. It was a uniform response of: we want to make sure that they’re safe and have a safe and dignified return – and we do not have what we need in order to do that.”
“In visiting adult reception centers in Honduras, our team saw firsthand the unprecedented resumption of ‘zero tolerance’ family separation in the United States,” said Laura Just, senior director of protection and legal pathways at KIND. “What we are seeing now is family separation happening in a new way. Parents who have lived in the United States for more than a decade are being deported, leaving children, including U.S. citizens, without caregivers. There is no tracking system, only anecdotes, and psychologists described parents crying, distraught, and desperate, not knowing where their children are or how to reunite with them.”
Please reach out if you’d like to speak with KIND further about their findings and the dangers of forcefully returning children to the region without the proper safeguards and support, and why the administration must halt all attempts to send these children back into chaos.
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Media Contact: Megan McKenna, mmckenna@supportkind.org, 202-631-9990