The Los Angeles Times reported this week that "[m]ore than 1,300 minors — including several dozen 14 or younger — were held for days in immigration detention facilities for adults over a four-year period when the Obama administration ramped up deportations, according to a new report by an advocacy group [the National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC)]."
The reference to the administration's "ramped up" deportations is disturbing because there is little doubt that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has routinely cooked the books and manipulated its statistical reporting system to make the numbers look much more significant than they are — see here and here — in my view, a part of its strategy to make the case that its version of immigration reform (mostly amnesty) should move forward because all is quiet on the immigration enforcement front.
Still, the notion of minors in adult detention facilities is, as a general proposition, disturbing, so I took a look at the NIJC "fact sheet" to see for myself what was being reported. Two things struck me immediately:
First, instead of using a value-neutral term such as "minor" or even "juvenile", which is a more accepted phrase usually used in professional and academic environments, NIJC has chosen to use the emotionally laden word "children" to describe these individuals.
Second, they have buried on page 3, between two other charts, a singularly informative graph showing that 919 of the 1,362 minors were 17 years old. That's 67 percent of the total. Another 406 were either 15 or 16. Cumulatively, that's 97 percent of the total.
Let's be clear: The sad truth is that in today's world, many 15- to17-year-olds are hardened criminals. A Department of Justice Office of Justice Programs fact sheet tells us, for example, that "person offenses" committed by juveniles in general increased 119 percent between 1985 and 2008 — and that is just those who were handled by juvenile courts, not those treated as adults due to the severity of the crime. In the same OJP report, we find that, demographically, the overwhelming majority of these juvenile offenders were male; and, shockingly, that 60 percent were age 15 or younger.
I do not know the individual circumstances of the population presented by NIJC — I suspect neither do they, since the statistical abstract they have presented was obtained only as the result of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. I and many others have commented before, with some frequency, on the objectionable opacity of Homeland Security under this administration.
But the issue raised by NIJC is significant. Let DHS come forward with all of the facts instead of its usual knee-jerk reaction. They can do this without compromising the personal information of the individuals in this dataset. Were they juveniles who, before being picked up by federal immigration officers, had substantial criminal histories? If so, then it might in fact have been a tender mercy to the other, more innocent minors in less structured settings, such as halfway houses or group homes, to keep this population separated in more appropriate and security facilities.
And if not, then let DHS explain exactly what its procedures are. It was, after all, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano's friend and personal representative, Dora Schriro, who wrote the detention rules under which the department is allegedly operating.