Governmental bodies, of course, purport to have the best interests of those children at heart. But parents – the most important advocates a child can have – are often excluded from court proceedings if they are involved in immigration disputes. These are the proceedings in which parental rights and the child’s future are decided: at least 5000 children nationwide are in foster care because their parents have been detained or deported.

In recent sessions of Congress, lawmakers introduced a bill called the Humane Enforcement and Legal Protections (HELP) for Separated Children Act. The bill ensures a number of crucial protections for children of immigrants that find themselves embroiled in legal actions.

The bill would:

• Allow parents, soon after their initial detainment, to make phone calls to arrange for someone to take care of their children;
• Require Immigration and Customs Enforcement to consider the children’s best interest when making decisions on the detention, release, or transfer of immigrant parents (this moves the law in line with child custody proceedings in divorces, in which the child’s best interest is always held paramount);
• Allow children to visit or at least call their parents during their detainment;
• Ensure that parents are allowed to participate in their children’s family court hearings;
• Ensure that if parents are required to leave the country, their departure can be coordinated with their children.

The legislation did not pass when it was introduced in previous sessions as a stand-alone bill. However, U.S. Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) succeeded in adding the bill as an amendment to an immigration reform measure that appears to have quite a bit of momentum behind it. That bill was recently passed by the Senate Judiciary Committee on a 13-5 vote. It would provide most undocumented immigrants in the United States a pathway to citizenship, reform border security, and implement new worker visa rules. And thanks to Sen. Franken, it includes vital protections for vulnerable children who are adversely affected through no fault of their own.

Franken introduced a second amendment that the committee also voted to add to the bill. It would reassign the responsibility to provide lawyers and other advocates to unaccompanied children. That responsibility currently lies with Health and Human Services, but Franken’s amendment would put it in the hands of the Justice Department, which Franken says is better equipped to handle it. According to a press release from the Senator’s office, “as recently as 2012, half of the unaccompanied children who arrived in the country were forced to represent themselves in immigration court.”

Joshua Law is a divorce attorney and Brandon family law lawyer with the Osenton Law Offices, P.A. To learn more, visit http://www.brandonlawoffice.com/

Napolitano testified at a recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, where she stated that a comprehensive bill now with Congress earmarks additional funds to better secure the nation’s borders, establishes employer verification for employee identities, and launches newly designed systems which will track residents when they leave the U.S. Napolitano believes the new bill will help streamline the route for the 11 million undocumented immigrants to become legal citizens. While critics argue that the proposal will only reward people who have broken the law, Napolitano countered that in order to better protect the country, it makes sense to have everyone be accounted for – even illegal immigrants. If people know they will be able to interact with law enforcement officers without the automatic assumption that they will be deported, it will increase their ability to report crimes and come forward if and when they witness anything of concern.

The secretary’s support for legislation included testimony that meeting the drafted border security goals would be the first step in the path to citizenship. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., authored the bill, and stated that he was also looking at amending the bill to require more stringent background checks for those immigrants flagged as “higher risk,” including immigrants who come to the U.S. requesting asylum. Napolitano has stated that the current U.S. asylum has a number of stringent safeguards which have been put in place over the past four years, including extensive interviewing and vetting, a comprehensive database system, fingerprinting and an additional vetting system when green card legibility is granted.

Critics of the bill stated that it may not better secure U.S. borders and do much to change the number of undocumented immigrants who come to the U.S. every year. Iowa Republican Senator Chuck Grassley expressed concern that the bill’s border security provisions would not actually do much, as millions of immigrants now in the U.S. illegally would be granted provisional legal status, without further investigation. Critics pointed out that immigration services and the FBI failed to properly check Boston bombings suspects Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, brother who first came to the US a decade ago. It is now suspected that Tamerlan Tsarnaev traveled to and from Russia, but a spelling error on his passport kept him from being flagged for further investigation. Napolitano countered that the new system would include electronic scanning, which would eliminate that sort of error from happening again.

A. Banerjee is a Houston immigration attorney in Texas. Before selecting an lawyer, contact the Law Offices of Annie Banerjee by visiting their website at http://www.visatous.com.

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