Thread by @TexasTribune

Thousands of migrant children have been expelled from the U.S. since March under an emergency health order from the Trump administration.

Some have been sent back to danger in their home countries.

Some can't be found at all.

With @propublica: bit.ly/39XP53w

2/ Children are usually entitled to special protections under the law, including the right to have their asylum claims adjudicated by a judge.

3/ But the administration’s emergency order, issued in March and credited to risks related to COVID-19, granted federal agents sweeping powers to almost immediately return anyone at the border, including infants as young as 8 months.

4/ One teenage girl who arrived at the border with a baby told federal agents she feared returning to Guatemala.

The man who she said raped her had threatened to make her “disappear.”

5/ Advocates say the girl then vanished and was held in a hotel with her baby for days with almost no outside contact before federal officers expelled them from the country.

6/ These children aren’t being deported — deportation requires a formal hearing in immigration court.

They are being removed from the country without ever formally entering the U.S. immigration system.

7/ Rather than being placed in federally regulated shelters, where they would have access to legal counsel and social workers, many have been moved into a clandestine network of hotels under the custody of a contractor not licensed to care for children.

8/ The children aren't even granted the primary registration number by which @DHSGov tracks all immigrants in its care, making it “virtually impossible” to find them in the system, according to Efrén C. Olivares, a lawyer with @TXCivilRights.

9/ Between April and June, @CBP officials encountered 3,379 unaccompanied minors at or between ports of entry. Of those, 162 were sent to federal shelters for immigrant children run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the agency tasked with their care.

10/ Of the thousands of unaccompanied minors expelled under the health order, advocacy organizations said that they have only found about three dozen after months of searching across the United States, Mexico and Central America.

11/ CBP would not say whether the remaining minors had been expelled or explain what had happened to them.

12/ ICE and CBP spokespeople said litigation around the policy meant they couldn't answer most questions about the expulsion program, but the government has argued it has the authority to carry it out under the emergency order issued due to COVID-19.

13/13 “The government is getting away with a complete end run around all of the protections for children that Congress has painstakingly enacted,” said Lee Gelernt, an @ACLU attorney fighting the program in court.

Read more: bit.ly/39XP53w