A six-year-old child with a hearing disability was prevented from having his hearing aids delivered to him after being taken into custody with his mother and his five-year-old brother during an immigration check-in with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in San Francisco on March 3.
The child’s mother appeared for the appointment as required as part of her ongoing immigration proceedings and had her two children with her. Immigration authorities detained them, transferred them to another location within the United States, and then initiated deportation procedures to Colombia.
Expedited transfers can undermine access to effective legal remedies. Moving detainees far from their lawyers immediately after arrest can make it extremely difficult to seek judicial review or file emergency legal challenges before removal takes place.
According to reports from the family’s legal representative, immigration authorities did not allow the waiting relatives to deliver the child’s hearing aids during the detention and deportation process.
For children with hearing disabilities, hearing aids are not simply medical devices, they are often their primary means of communicating with the world. Being suddenly deprived of them can leave a child unable to hear his mother’s voice, understand what is happening, communicate and interact with others, and receive information and explanations during stressful or unfamiliar situations. Research shows that cutting children with hearing disabilities off from their means of communication can cause intense confusion, fear, anxiety, and a profound sense of isolation.
This case comes on the heels of another alarming incident involving migrants with disabilities in US immigration custody. On February 19, US Border Patrol agents released a nearly blind Rohingya refugee by dropping him off, alone, at a closed coffee shop at night in sub-freezing weather. This was several miles from his home, and his family and lawyer apparently were not notified that he was being released. He apparently never returned home, and his body was found five days later.
These cases raise serious concerns about whether US immigration authorities are meeting their obligations to ensure accessibility and reasonable accommodations for people with disabilities at every stage of immigration enforcement. Authorities should in any case prioritize community-based alternatives to detention for migrants with disabilities rather than placing them in custodial settings that often fail to meet their basic accessibility needs.
