WASHINGTON – Marissa Moore stood in a marble corridor of the Dirksen Senate building Thursday with her fifth-grade classmates from Mount Rainier Elementary, hundreds of paper dolls cascading from their arms.
As they waited to enter a hearing room, they chattered on about how they could help the hundreds of undocumented kids held by the Immigration and Naturalization Service every day because they arrive in the United States without an adult guardian — the very kids their colorful chain of dolls represented.
“It’s really terrible that every year, there are people — and kids — who don’t have homes and get thrown in jail just for coming to America,” Marissa said.
More than 4,000 kids who cross U.S. borders every year wind up in INS detention for more than 72 hours, and often are sent to foster and group homes. Many are victims of abuse, abandonment or torture, and some even have been used as decoys in human- and drug-smuggling rings.
The Unaccompanied Alien Child Protection Act would provide official oversight of these children’s cases by assigning child welfare professionals as their guardians and making sure that kids who seek asylum here are never sent to juvenile detention centers during their wait. As many as 1,000 kids a year are now sent to such centers, advocates say.
One Honduran teen had the cavernous hearing room in tears with his testimony about conditions at a California detention center, where he was harassed and where he was twice hit by pepper spray so powerful he feared he would go blind.
Ten-year-old Daniel Cardenas of Mount Rainier said it must be particularly scary for kids who arrive in this country to be locked up with criminal youths, especially if they do not speak English and do not understand what is happening to them.
“It’s bad conditions for kids,” Daniel said. “What if they’re good kids and they get thrown in with bad kids in juvenile jails and they make them do something bad? The thing is that they’re not criminals.”
Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., said the immigration system needs to incorporate more social services to help kids who arrive here illegally.
“My central concern is that there are too many children who are falling through the cracks,” he said. “We have no system to ensure that we are going to treat these children as children first and newcomers second.”
Kennedy and others applauded the Mount Rainier students when they hoisted the chain of paper dolls over their heads while standing in the back of the hearing room. He invited them forward to sit inside the dais during the first panel of speakers.
“We don’t have this kind of inspiration everyday,” Kennedy said.
The students’ teacher, Deborah Suess, said the project grew out of Mount Rainier’s commitment to promoting international understanding and peace. She worked the legislation into a social studies lesson about westward immigration.
“This was a really concrete way for us to continue our mission of peace for children worldwide,” Suess said.
Marissa said the senators should remember America’s promise as they consider the immigration bill.
“They should remember the Statute of Liberty,” she said. “Bring me your tired, your weary, your huddled masses.”