Wearing a white button-down shirt and pants, a Haitian boy showed up for a routine immigration appointment in downtown San Diego. Moments later, the well-dressed 8-year-old was taken away by three immigration officers.
Since Monday, his relatives have not known exactly where he is being held, a California lawmaker said.
The scene was captured on video obtained Friday by NBC San Diego. The video was recorded Wednesday by a volunteer observer of immigration proceedings at the ICE field office.
The San Diego Unified School District and members of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, an immigrant rights group, said the boy had been separated from his cousins and uncle, who cared for him after his father was deported last year.
Guerline Jozef, executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, said in a statement Monday that even though the uncle followed all the rules, “the child was taken into custody and then transferred to the Office of Refugee Resettlement,” which cares for children considered unaccompanied minors.
The boy, whose name has not been publicly identified, is a third-grade student at Fay Elementary School. It was stripped of its immigration protections this summer after a Supreme Court ruling allowed President Donald Trump to end temporary protected status for Haitians, according to a letter from school district officials sent Friday to the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the Office of Refugee Resettlement.
Temporary Protected Status, better known as TPS, is a humanitarian designation that protected hundreds of thousands of Haitians from deportation following Haiti’s devastating earthquake in 2010. The protections were renewed several times over the years as the Caribbean country fell deeper into crisis. Currently, the majority of the country’s capital is controlled by gangs following the assassination of the president in 2021.
After TPS ended, the San Diego child received a letter summoning him to meet with ICE agents last week, school district officials said in their letter. His uncle complied and took him to the appointment “because he did not want to break the law,” the letter, obtained Monday by NBC News, added.
A DHS spokesperson told NBC San Diego that “a man claiming to be the child’s uncle took him to an ICE check-in.” ICE agents said they could not confirm that the man was related to the boy and that “the alleged uncle was unable to establish legal guardianship of the minor.”
As a result, they determined the boy was an unaccompanied minor, the DHS spokesperson said. “Out of an abundance of caution and to ensure the safety of the child, ICE determined it was best to remove the child from the home,” the spokesperson said.
The Office of Refugee Resettlement told NBC News on Monday that it “does not comment on specific cases” in accordance with its own privacy policies to protect children in its custody.
The third grader is among 1,640 children considered unaccompanied minors who are in the care of HHS, according to agency data. Immigration authorities have detained more than 8,000 children in the past year, according to data from the Deportation Data Project.
The office of Rep. Juan Vargas, Democrat of California, said the boy’s family does not know where he is being held and is helping them get the information they need to find him.
“Targeting a child, removing him from his community and his classmates, and forcing him to be detained is despicable. It is inhumane,” Vargas told NBC San Diego in a statement Friday. “Furthermore, TPS protections must be restored to all those who have had them unjustly ripped away. »
DHS deemed allegations that the boy was “taken into custody” “false.”
DHS also said the child was “illegally brought into the United States” at an unspecified time by “a man who claimed to be his father,” who was returned to Mexico by Customs and Border Patrol, not ICE.
Jozef said, “His father was already taken from him and deported, now this administration has deprived him of the stability, family and community that every child deserves. »
James Canning, a spokesman for the school district, told NBC News in a statement Monday that educators at the boys’ school noted “a general sense of concern about the safety and well-being of the student.”
School district officials said they were sending additional crisis counselors to Fay Elementary School this week “because the child’s third-grade classmates expressed concern and fear for their friend.”
Canning said no one at DHS or HHS has yet responded to the school district’s letter asking them to reconsider how immigration enforcement policies affect students.
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