WASHINGTON –Mothers and children fleeing violence and murder in Central America should be treated as refugees and not held in prison-like detention centers, protesters said recently as they laid out Mother’s Day cards to first lady Michelle Obama in front of the White House.
The advocates, including Central American women, their kids and lawmakers from Maryland and elsewhere, said women and children seeking asylum from the violence in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras should not be imprisoned while their applications are processed. Seven percent of the United States 41.3 million immigrants come from these three countries according to the Migration Policy Institute.
In the last two years, unaccompanied children come to the United States seeking refuge, said Maryland state Delegate Ana Sol Gutierrez. Families also are crossing the border into the U.S. illegally to flee the Central American violence, she said.
“The fact that we are putting these children and their mothers into a category that is an illegal alien category, an invader, a terrorist, I think is absolutely incorrect and inhumane. That is what we’re eager to see changed,” said Gutierrez, a Democrat who represents a Maryland suburban area.
The families are detained in centers, mainly in Texas, for weeks or months. The Karnes County Residential Center recently received a child care license and others offer education for children, but refugee advocates say the facilities still feel like jail, which is especially harmful to the children.
Yoselin Medina, 23, is a formerly detained mother from Honduras. Speaking in Spanish, she said the conditions in the detention camp were “bad, very bad, especially when they were in the freezer. (according to a translation). It’s a place that’s very cold and they treat them bad and the only thing they gave them was bread with ham all day and night.”
Lindsay Harris, an American Immigration Council legal fellow, said the facility in Dilley, Texas, has been likened to the Japanese internment camps of World War II by some of the refugees.
“Most of them go through the process and pass the interview to show that they will establish eligibility for asylum or there’s a significant possibility that they will. Close to 90 percent of them pass that interview,” said Harris. “We question what’s the point of detaining them even for just two or three weeks and sometimes much longer if they’re only going to be released to go through the immigration court process anyway.”
The protesters left Mother’s Day cards for Obama and second lady Jill Biden. They hope the two women will pressure President Barack Obama and Immigration and Customs Enforcement to end family detention.
Earlier this year, Secretary of State John Kerry announced plans to expand U.S. refugee admissions specifically to help “vulnerable families and individuals from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, and offer them a safe and legal alternative to the dangerous journey that many are tempted to begin, making them at that instant easy prey for human smugglers who have no interest but their own profits.”