Honduran boy, 14, wins U.S. asylum but remains in jail

A boy who made his way alone across the U.S. border last year to escape extreme domestic abuse in Honduras has been locked up in a Northern California juvenile hall for nearly a year, even though he has no criminal record and has been granted asylum.

The boy, 14, should be in foster care rather than in jail, lawyers working to free him argue. In custody, they say, he receives little treatment for the severe trauma he has suffered, a condition that’s been made worse by his indefinite detention. During his 11 months in jail, much of it spent alone in his cell, he has repeatedly tried to harm himself and has lashed out at times, causing staff in the facility to douse him with pepper spray or bind his wrists and ankles.

The boy, who is being detained at the Yolo County Juvenile Detention Facility in Woodland, is not being named by The Chronicle because of his age, mental health condition and the jeopardy he faces as an asylee with an uncertain future. In a petition challenging his detention as unlawful that is expected to be filed in the coming weeks in U.S. District Court, the teen will be referred to only by his initials, G.E.

Officials involved with the Honduran boy’s case, including the federal Administration for Children and Families and its Office of Refugee Resettlement, declined to comment, citing confidentiality protections for minors.

Beth Gabor, Yolo County’s public information officer, said the county’s contract with the federal government prohibits local officials from discussing specific cases, but said in an email: “All children placed with the county by ORR, including the child that is the subject of this inquiry, are provided services in close coordination with ORR.”

Gabor added that federal law requires the refugee agency “to continue to detain a child even after he or she is granted asylum,” until a safe placement that takes into consideration “all of his or her social, behavioral and mental health needs” can be located.

Since President Trump took office promising to build “a great, great wall” on the southern border, attorneys representing the most vulnerable of immigrants living in the U.S. without authorization — children entering the country alone — remain on heightened alert. Directives issued in the first month of the new administration signal a greater push for deportation and detention, but given the haphazard rollout, consequences for youths like G.E. are unknown.

Cecilia Candia, a staff attorney with San Francisco’s Legal Services for Children who visits the teen weekly, is building the case for G.E.’s release. She said the boy, who was ecstatic about being granted asylum in January after being assured it would mean his imminent release, is now in despair after seeing his new legal status get him nowhere.

“On the outside, myself and others have been working really hard, but he doesn’t see any results, so it’s really difficult,” Candia said. “He’s feeling really hopeless.”

G.E. was 13 when he was apprehended in March 2016 trying to enter the country alone at a Texas border crossing. His asylum case documented severe abuse by parents and caregivers in Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital.

The refugee resettlement office determined that the boy had no identifiable relatives in the United States and placed him for a month in one of the agency’s shelters. But his repeated attempts to harm himself and run away led to placement in the locked facility in Woodland. Last April, Legal Services for Children screened him and found he was eligible to apply for asylum.

Candia and a social worker from her agency spent a month visiting with the boy to build trust before even beginning to obtain the facts of his case.

“Because he was so traumatized it took months to get a basic idea of what had happened in his life,” Candia said. “He was unable to talk about it. He would shut down and start crying, he’d turn to the wall and stop talking about it.”

According to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, 155,000 children have crossed the nation’s southern border alone in the last three years, the majority of them fleeing violent gangs, poverty and domestic abuse in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Nearly a fifth of the unaccompanied children who arrived last year were age 12 or younger, according to the Office of Refugee Resettlement.

The agency, which handles unaccompanied minors’ care and custody, looks for “the least-restrictive settings” for those youths, and 98 percent are placed within a network of 100 shelters in 11 states. Typically, they are released to relatives within about a month. A small fraction of the children, those who are found to have a criminal history or who pose a flight risk or a danger to themselves or others, are placed in locked facilities.

In Northern California, unaccompanied minors are housed at two shelters in Solano and Contra Costa counties, and 30 beds are reserved for them in the Yolo County juvenile hall. That facility is the only locked setting for unaccompanied minors in the state.

Holly Cooper, co-director of the Immigration Law Clinic at UC Davis, says unaccompanied minors have few legal remedies, and, like G.E., can find themselves indefinitely detained. But she said G.E.’s case is particularly disturbing because he remains locked up despite facing no criminal charges and no pending deportation order.

“We don’t believe that his confinement is constitutionally or legally justified,” she said.

On Jan. 10, G.E.’s asylum case was approved by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, granting him legal immigration status and rights that can lead to permanent residency and eventual citizenship. His advocates assumed that meant he would be let go and placed in foster care, either locally or through the federal system. Instead, he remains jailed with no prospect for release.

A Feb. 20 memo from Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly singles out “unaccompanied alien children,” suggesting that their parents often exploit the country’s goodwill and encourage human smuggling. In a departure from past immigration enforcement practices, under the new directive, parents living in the U.S. illegally who step up to retrieve the children will be subject to criminal prosecution and deportation.

Cases like G.E.’s, where there are no relatives or sponsors to take him in, also remain subject to heightened scrutiny. A Jan. 31 memo sent to all immigration court judges points to the possibility of fast-track proceedings that could frustrate legal challenges to detention and deportation, immigrant rights attorneys say.

“Like the Muslim ban, the policies are rolled out so quickly and seemingly with so little thought about the ripple effects, that it’s unclear to us exactly how this will affect unaccompanied minors,” said Lindsay Toczylowski, executive director of Immigrant Defenders Law Center in Los Angeles, a nonprofit representing more than 500 unaccompanied minors each year. “But our suspicion is that all these policies are putting an absolute emphasis on deportation, detention and enforcement that we believe will have a negative impact on our clients.”

Against this backdrop, a growing number of advocates have joined the case for the Honduran boy’s immediate release, among them a ranking state foster care official and immigration attorney Cooper of UC Davis and her law students.

They say they have been impressed by G.E., who is initially shy during visits, but loosens up over card games and magic tricks. He has spent so much time alone in a cell that he has written 80 pages of an autobiography and has powered through the Spanish-language versions of “Harry Potter” and the “Twilight” book series.

“I’ve talked with the youth, and my impression is it must be really hard to be a young boy coming of age in a locked facility, in a foreign country, when you’ve had to flee your country for your life,” said Rochelle Trochtenberg, ombudsperson for the California Department of Social Services. “I’m going to do everything in my power to get him out and to make sure that he’s in a loving stable home that he deserves given the trauma he’s been through.”

Trochtenberg said staff in the Yolo juvenile hall don’t have the necessary training and expertise to provide the care the teen needs. “This is a child who should be in foster care — the challenge is who’s going to take responsibility to make sure he’s going to be cared for and loved.”

To be sure, Candia said, her client’s behaviors related to his trauma have made his housing more challenging for his current caretakers.

“He has behavioral issues in this jail which are directly related to his mental health,” Candia said. “He’s hypervigilant, he reacts very strongly to perceived threats, he’s always in that fight-or-flight response.”

In September, the county arranged for a psychologist who did not speak Spanish to evaluate G.E., she said, but her client declined to meet with the mental health professional. Candia said that nonetheless, the psychologist recommended in a brief letter that the boy be sent to a “locked-down psychiatric facility.”

That conclusion, which his lawyers dispute, together with the juvenile hall staff’s input, has made the foster care system reluctant to take him on, Candia said.

But the teen’s advocates say in an appropriate foster home, with access to therapy and mental health services, G.E. could thrive.

“I tell him I do have hope that you’re going to get out,” she said, “and I’m not going to stop fighting until you do.”

Karen de Sá is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: kdesa@sfchronicle.com