Change didn’t come in time for Liam Tadeo and his family, but hundreds of thousands of children, regardless of their immigration status, can still be protected.
Five-year-old Liam Tadeo and his dad, Victor Martinez Nieto, planned to spend the last day of summer before kindergarten playing soccer. Instead, on Sunday, Aug. 16, on the way to Liam’s game, ICE agents pulled them over, arrested them and sent both father and son to a family detention center in Dilley, Texas.
Victor begged ICE to release Liam to his mom, but according to their attorney, Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch, ICE ignored the request. (ICE did not respond to a request for comment.)
It became clear that if Victor—who does not have legal status in the United States—chose to fight his detention or deportation, he risked losing Liam. DHS would likely treat Liam as an “unaccompanied minor” and send him to the Office of Refugee Resettlement for placement in a shelter or foster care, despite the presence of his mother and other family members ready and able to care for him.
The family decided to accept the deportation order, despite the wrenching consequences of taking Liam from his family and his home. At least, this way, he will be with his dad in Mexico.
ICE deported Liam and Victor Aug. 28.
According to Lincoln-Goldfinch, Liam wasn’t able to say goodbye to his mother.
Such cruelty has become the norm in Trump’s immigration regime, but it is carried out quietly and with brutal efficiency. ICE arrested more than 46,000 people in July alone; for the first time, arrests of people without a criminal record surpassed the number of individuals arrested based (however tangentially) on a past criminal arrest or conviction.
I’ve been on the frontlines for decades. Nothing that I’ve seen is nearly as awful as what is happening now.
Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch, attorney for Liam Tadeo, 5, and father Victor Martinez Nieto
The number of arrests in cities like Austin and El Paso tripled compared to the prior six months. Arrests in Florida quadrupled.
In Texas, where the state has gone all-in on in supporting immigration enforcement actions, the expanded capacity to arrest immigrants arises from joint operations between ICE and local law enforcement. In many parts of Texas, local police and sheriff’s departments patrol the streets with ICE agents, increasingly using traffic stops as the vehicle for immigration arrests.
This strategy virtually ensures that more people without any criminal record are encountered and detained, because random stops cast a wider net, indiscriminately stopping people based on racial profiling or geographic location.
Lincoln-Goldfinch works with numerous families whose lives have been torn apart by such arrests. She said that the ICE agents who pulled Victor over immediately asked his immigration status—dropping all pretense that their intervention had anything to do with a legitimate traffic stop. “I’ve been on the frontlines for decades. Nothing that I’ve seen is nearly as awful as what is happening now. “
Everything about these new ICE tactics seems designed to ignore basic expectations of due process and of the duty of care the government owes children.
For example, agents handcuffed Victor with his arms behind his back in front of Liam, making it impossible for him to hold or comfort his terrified son.
… The children being detained now are living in the U.S. with their families. They are going to school, they have friends, they have pets, they have lives. [Then they are] whisked to jail as if they were criminals.
Lincoln-Goldfinch
In her practice, Lincoln-Goldfinch has worked with multiple families where children were arrested along with parents. She has also spoken to a 9-year-old left in the back of a car after ICE arrested their parent; a 16-year-old left standing on the side of the road with his dad’s pickup truck; and children left with a neighbor after their mother was arrested. That mother was quickly deported and is struggling to reunite with her children.
Lincoln-Goldfinch explained that children placed in foster care may be permanently cut off from their parents, as the parents may be disqualified from reunification by their immigration arrests or their detention. Others may be deported so quickly that navigating the U.S. legal system from abroad becomes a major barrier to reunification.
While family separation during the first Trump administration was a needlessly cruel and harmful immigration policy, the current practice of arresting children and turning them into unaccompanied minors by cutting them off from their parents is even more vicious, Lincoln-Goldfinch says. “The big difference that people need to grasp is that the children who are being detained now are living in the U.S. with their families. They are going to school, they have friends, they have pets, they have lives. [Then they are] whisked to jail as if they were criminals.”
In other words, these children are settled in their homes and communities, only to be “ripped from their lives and their families,” she said.
Fwd.us, an organization advocating for criminal justice and immigration reform, recently highlighted Liam’s story as more evidence of the administration’s single-minded focus on deportation at any cost.
According to Todd Schulte, president of Fwd.us, arresting parents and children during traffic stops is part of a much broader agenda to make life unbearable for immigrants. It involves the threat of rapid deportation, the disregard for due process and making the legal application process so difficult that even non-citizens who are eligible for immigration status will simply give up and go home.
“Their overall goal is to have as few immigrants as possible, to make life more difficult for immigrants and to marginalize them,” Schulte said.
This strategy extends even to individuals and families trying desperately to comply with the rapid-fire changes in Trump’s immigration policies. Schulte points to the case of a Venezuelan family arrested by ICE during their interview for the self-deportation program DHS promotes. Rather than fulfill its promise to assist them in leaving the country, DHS incarcerated the family, including the father, the mother, who was 7 months pregnant, and their 7-year-old son. According to Schulte, she has not received proper medical care while in detention at Dilley.
Long before Donald Trump oozed down an escalator to announce his first campaign for president, the federal government had recognized that immigration enforcement is not one size fits all. The difficulty of providing adequate care in custody for vulnerable groups like pregnant women and children led to specific policies limiting the circumstances under which they could be detained. The Trump administration has revoked many of those policies, ignored laws, such as those that safeguard unaccompanied minors, and adopted indifference and cruelty as the abiding theme of its immigration agenda.
Thus far, Congress has done nothing to reign in these behaviors, and in fact, Shulte and Lincoln Goldfinch both argue that the extraordinary increase in funds given to DHS through the reconciliation process has empowered DHS to ignore its responsibilities to exercise good judgment and discretion.
Schulte explains that there is every incentive to create terror. Why show any restraint when ICE has more money than the military budgets of some countries, he asks. Why emphasize accountability when private prison companies can be used to circumvent many oversight provisions that are limited to federal detention centers?
And, frankly, why worry about the consequences in an administration that is promoting hatred and fear? For example, in response to the explosion of non-criminal arrests, one DHS spokesperson told CBS news, “Many of the individuals that are counted as ‘non-criminals’ are actually terrorists, human rights abusers, gangsters and more; they just don’t have a rap sheet in the U.S.”
Of that list, where does Liam Tadeo fall?
Lincoln-Goldfinch thinks Liam’s case only captured public attention because someone happened to record it—but many arrests take place far from busy intersections or off the main roads.
“What happened to Liam is happening to other children every day, but we don’t have recordings. That is intentional—they don’t want us to know.”
For Shulte, Fwd.us’ efforts to educate the public and advocate for kids like Liam is part of making sure people know what is happening. Because when they know, he says, they get angry and demand change. As Ms. authors Julie Kashen and Gayle Goldin wrote: Caring about what happens to each other and standing up for each other is the strongest form of resistance.
Change didn’t come in time for Liam and his family, but hundreds of thousands of children, regardless of their immigration status, can still be protected. Restoring a fair and just system demands political courage, public outrage and major policy reform. But it begins by exposing the subtle, despicable tactics that turn children like Liam Tadeo into pawns of immigration policy.
