The New Stasi? The Shadowy World of Immigrant Youth Detention

An estimated 13,000 young people are being held at immigrant youth detention centers around the U.S., trapped in a shadowy world that evokes the penal practices of Communist-era authoritarian governments like East Germany, according to attorneys and youth advocates.

The advocates, representing some of the leading U.S. groups working with immigrants, painted a stark and chilling portrait of the detention system for undocumented youth at a conference at John Jay College last week. They warned the abuses will increase as the Trump Administration continues to step up its immigration crackdown.

“It’s become another world,” said Paige Austin, staff attorney for the New York Civil Liberties Union. “It’s unbelievable that this system exists in the United States.”

Lewis Cohen, senior director of communications for the National Center for Youth Law, said that government-funded centers are now holding immigrant youths for months and even years.

“The government is gearing up for mass incarceration of children, children who don’t have protection of the U.S. juvenile justice system,” Cohen said.

The deep poverty and gang violence tearing through Central America sent some 60,000 unaccompanied minors into the U.S. in 2014 and similar numbers the two following years, said Angie Junck, supervising attorney and director of immigrant defense programs at the Immigrant Legal Resource Center.