Since last November, federal agents and the local police departments deputized to help them have been knocking on doors across the country looking for children who once crossed the border alone. The government calls these visits safety checks. Child advocates call them something else: a pipeline into deportation proceedings for the very families who took these kids in.
The effort, which the Department of Homeland Security calls the UAC Safety Verification Initiative, pairs armed federal agents with local police trained under the decades-old 287(g) program to visit the homes and schools of children who arrived unaccompanied, along with the relatives raising them. A uniformed knock at a child's door "is a serious threat of enforcement," not a wellness visit, says Mary Miller Flowers, who directs policy and legislative affairs at the Young Center for Immigrant Children's Rights. The children being sought overwhelmingly trace back to Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Mexico, meaning the fallout is landing hardest on Latino households already raising nieces, nephews and younger siblings across the United States.
