Amid shifting deportation procedures, lawyer sheds light on 'most vulnerable' deportees

NINA MOINI: We are winding down a summer of headlines on the Trump administration's stepped up immigration enforcement and focus on migrant deportations. Leondra Hanson is an associate professor of legal studies at Hamline University. And she just published an essay shedding light on and raising concern about the recent federal treatment of migrant children in the United States. She's here now on the line to tell us more about her look into how the immigration process is quickly changing. Professor Hanson, thanks for joining me today.

LEONDRA HANSON: Thank you so much for having me, Nina.

NINA MOINI: I wondered about your essay. It was called "The Most Vulnerable Deportees" for the site, The Preamble. Tell me why you decided you wanted to write this essay. What made you want to do that?

LEONDRA HANSON: It really has been kind of a long process. I originally became interested in the issue when I read a book that I assigned to one of my classes. And the book is called Tell Me How It Ends-- An Essay in 40 Questions by Valeria Luiselli. It's a 2017 book, but it's just basically the author talking about her experience translating the intake questionnaire to unaccompanied minors in immigration court. It's really compelling and interesting.

And I assign it just as a way to think about the nuance when you're doing interviews of clients, that there's maybe more there than just what's on the page of question and answer. So I thought that was interesting. And I had been following for a while the lack of representation for kids in immigration court. There has been kind of a long-standing issue of unaccompanied minors also not having attorneys. So you have kids, often very young, five and six years old, appearing in court alone. And that's been an issue that's been in the news and covered for a while.

And then this year, earlier this year, the Trump administration pulled some significant funding to legal service providers who were providing some of that, what we did have in terms of support for legal services. And so I had started writing about that issue, the cancelation of the funds and how important it is for kids to have representation when they appear in immigration court. It's hard to imagine being there, even as an adult who speaks English, much less as a child.

So I really was interested in that and working on that. And then a related thing happened in the middle of prepping that piece, and that was the Labor Day event where the Guatemalan kids, who I talk about in the article, were loaded up in the middle of the night on Labor Day weekend to be deported without any hearing. And so really, the hook between those two things is, we have unaccompanied minors with limited legal support being the focus of administrative policy. And that seems new. And I was curious about it. I wanted to know more.

NINA MOINI: It's so hard, even as a reporter, sometimes as a journalist, to even get access to children, to even speak to them because things are private, and they don't have as many, obviously, ways to get their own perspectives out. And that's what makes them, like you mentioned here, the most vulnerable deportees.

And so my understanding of the reporting that's out there on what happened with those temporary shelters at the end of August is that those children were sort of sitting by, waiting to see if the courts would say, you have to go, or you have to stay. And it looks like, for now, they ended up staying in Texas. But what was particularly concerning about that process to you?

LEONDRA HANSON: I think what was concerning to me was the speed and-- I hate to use the word sneaky, but almost the speed and under-the-radar approach to doing it. So there's not that many kids that were on the list, maybe a couple hundred kids on the list. But 76 of them end up on a plane in the night. And only because the shelters and some of the kids who had lawyers got word to their lawyers that, hey, they're sending us back to Guatemala, where they're putting these kids on a plane, was anybody able to do anything about it.

And so the court-- both the attorneys and the bench, the bar and the bench, the lawyers and the courts both had to act really quickly to say, this doesn't seem appropriate to the legal process that we have. And had they not acted that quickly, we would have had another situation like the one with the El Salvador plane that left after the judge had said, you can't go. So this was handled quickly.

But the judge issued that emergency order that said, you can't send these kids. Send them back to the shelters. So they were back in the shelters, waiting. There was another update last week. Another judge, in a slightly more permanent way, said the same thing. Judge Kelly said, no, these kids are required to have a hearing before you send them. Or we think that they may be required to have a hearing. So they need to stay here for now until we resolve all the issues of this case. So now that's two judges saying, hey, this isn't the right process. Let's slow our roll here a little bit.

NINA MOINI: And it's hard to imagine all the instances that would lead for children to be unaccompanied, being sent oftentimes on their own, their parents perhaps hoping that they're going to be in a better situation or some being victims of trafficking. There are just so many different instances of how these children could end up on their own in this country.

What's your understanding, from your perspective, of what is supposed to happen when there is a child who is on their own wanting due process to try to stay in the country? What's supposed to happen there? And then where's the gap? Is it resources? You mentioned funding.

LEONDRA HANSON: Yeah, I mean, I think there are a number of gaps, and it's not a brand new problem. Before I comment on that, I think to your point, reading some of the attached affidavits to the court's order-- so some of the statements of the children, both about how they got here and how they felt when they thought they had to be returned-- was one of-- it's a really heartbreaking reading. I actually encourage folks to read primary sources because you get a much better vision. And that's one of those things where if you actually go read the testimony of these kids, their paths have been absolutely heart wrenching that have ended up here.

But the process is supposed to be-- and it's a little bit-- immigration law is tricky. And I'm a general legal educator. So I'm looking at the big process issues and what can we learn from this and how do we dig down. So I want to be careful not to say anything inaccurate about immigration process.

But the process is supposed to be that unaccompanied minors, which are kids who are coming from other countries without a parent or guardian, sometimes very young-- I think we saw some evidence of kids even as young as three years old-- show up in the United States. And then, statutorily, bipartisan law has said, we want to offer extra protection to these kids since the kind of mid to early 2000s. And so they're supposed to be put in shelters by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, ORR, where they're supposed to get a hearing.

Whether they're entitled to an attorney is somewhat questionable. They're not constitutionally required to have legal counsel. But again, statutorily, we've said we want to make counsel available to these kids as much as possible. That's a promise we've made that we've been so-so about delivering. It's going to be even harder to deliver if we pull the funding from the legal service providers who do it. And then they should have a hearing.

And not everyone gets to stay after their hearing. The hearing should be to decide if there's some immigration law that allows them to be here in the country or if they should be removed in some way. But they should have that hearing. Is it safer here for them? Is there someone that they can be with? Is there an immigration policy that allows them to stay? They're much more likely to be able to participate in those hearings if they understand what it is that they're about.

So sometimes I hear these stories about there's a five-year-old in court, and they're asking the five-year-old, do you understand why you're here today? And those kinds of examples are far too common. And it's almost silly to think that the kids could answer that.

NINA MOINI: What are you hoping comes next to try? As you mentioned, this is throughout administrations that these children, it seems, haven't gotten all the resources that would be most helpful for them when you talk about giving somebody due process. I don't know if there are even enough attorneys or enough resources out there to help with these cases.

It seems like everyone's working really hard right now who's an immigration attorney, just from what I'm anecdotally hearing from different immigration attorneys that we talk to here on the show. But have you thought-- after publishing this essay, have you gotten any reaction from anyone? Or what would it take to make a dent in this issue?

LEONDRA HANSON: Well, I think it's difficult because that's the question that we want to be answering. That's the question that we've been trying to answer. And what is concerning to me is that we're not in a place to answer it if the priority or the focus is on limiting it further. We have this already low bar. And now, what's the reason why we would be in such a rush? It's not cost savings. There were 76 kids on that plane. That's not going to save us money.

It's not really time, because is it that difficult to give these kids a little bit more time to get their hearing? It's not crime. These aren't the worst of the worst. I think the government's argument was that it would be the safety of the children because we would be sending them back to parents who were waiting for them. But the most recent judge said that argument-- I think his words were "crumbled like a house of cards within a week" because there was no evidence that there was anyone waiting on the other side for the kids to get off the plane.

So I think my first thought in terms of urgency is that we should at least stick with what we've already promised. There was already funding authorized for some legal service support. There are already statutes in place that provide extra protections. So if we could start with following the laws that we've already created to protect the kids, that would be a good first step. And then I think, like I said and like the piece says, the job probably doesn't end there either.

NINA MOINI: All right, Professor, thank you very much for coming on and sharing with us. Appreciate your time.

LEONDRA HANSON: Thank you so much. I appreciate it, Nina.

NINA MOINI: That was Leondra Hanson, associate professor of legal studies at Hamline University in St. Paul.