Wow! Check out this story from Seattle—first, because it gives us a few clues about Unaccompanied Alien Minors, not all from Central America and Mexico, who know how to game the system, and secondly because here we see that the Office of Refugee Resettlement is trying to ferret out frauds among the ‘children’ only to be thwarted by a judge.
Gosh, does this mean the Somali, who could be an adult, will be sent back to hang out in high school?
Sure looks like he was returned to foster care (and presumably high school) according to another article at The Seattle Times.
Message to all young men from around the world who want to break into America, get rid of your passports and any other identification before you arrive at the border and then lie, lie, lie!
From the Seattle Globalist:
A judge affirmed a ruling this week that federal immigration officials unlawfully used a dental exam to determine that a teenaged Somali asylum seeker was an adult, and wrongly detained him in the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma.
The teenager, identified in court documents by his initials B.I.C., had entered the United States in August 2015 and applied for asylum as a minor. He was issued a special immigrant juvenile visa and sent to live with a foster mother in Portland. However, in December the Office of Refugee Resettlement said that based on a dental bone scan, they no longer believed that he was a minor.
The teenager had traveled through South and Central America in order to reach the United States, and had destroyed his identification documents so he would not get sent back to Somalia, according to the court filings, so he had no documentation for his age. [So, he committed fraud by destroying his ID papers!—ed]
With the dental bone scan as the only piece of evidence that he was an adult, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested the teenager from his high school near Portland and took him to the Northwest Detention Center in December.
He was released after two months, after the Northwest Immigrants Rights Project filed a suit seeking the teenager’s release. Chief Magistrate Judge James Donahue ruled that using a bone density scan as the sole piece of evidence of someone’s age violates federal law and that the teenager should be freed.
Donahue’s recommendation was adopted this week by U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman, who also threw out ORR’s determination that he was an adult when he was first taken into custody.
According to The Seattle Times story he will be released from foster care when he turns 18 (whenever that is, or was), but what next? Does he just disappear into the American Somali community? Or, will the Northwest Immigrants Rights Project take responsibility for him? (surely not!) Or, better still, maybe the good judge will take him in!