Bureaucratic language is known as lifeless, gray and banal. It’s the bane of the English professor and the lifeblood of satire. So when the Department of Homeland Security’s Advisory Committee on Family Residential Centers issued its recommendations to the government, it was without flourish or style.
Nevertheless, the message the advisory committee issued packed a punch. Its recommendation is to end the policy of detaining immigrant children and families and to stop putting families seeking asylum in removal proceedings.
Human Rights First is among the advocacy organizations hailing the decision. The group calls on Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson to act quickly to accept the recommendations and to place families in community-based programs where they can get medical help, legal assistance and other services.
The group notes that detention of children is especially harmful, exacerbating preexisting conditions that are the result of trauma inflicted on them as they fled violence with their mothers and other family members.
Other groups that have called on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to end immigration detention include the American Bar Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and 178 members of the House of Representatives and 35 members of the U.S. Senate.
For those families facing detention, deportation and a fight to gain residency, the assistance of an experienced Chicago immigration attorney can make an important difference.
