Wearing a pressed button-down white shirt and slacks, a Haitian boy showed up at a routine immigration appointment in downtown San Diego. Moments later, the neatly dressed 8-year-old was being led away by three immigration officers.
As of Monday, his loved ones do not know exactly where he is being held, a California lawmaker said.
The scene was captured on a video NBC San Diego obtained Friday. The video was recorded Wednesday by a volunteer observer of immigration proceedings at ICE’s field office.
The San Diego Unified School District and members of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, an immigrants rights advocacy group, said the boy was separated from his cousins and uncle, who has been taking care of him after his father was deported last year.
Guerline Jozef, executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, said in a statement Monday that even though the uncle followed all the rules, “the child was taken into custody and subsequently transferred to the Office of Refugee Resettlement,” which takes custody of children deemed to be unaccompanied minors.
The boy, who has not been identified by name publicly, is a third grader at Fay Elementary School. He was stripped of his immigration protections this summer after a Supreme Court decision allowed President Donald Trump to end Temporary Protected Status for Haitians, according to a letter school district officials sent Friday to the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the Office of Refugee Resettlement.
Temporary Protected Status, better known as TPS, is a humanitarian designation that shielded hundreds of thousands of Haitians from deportation following Haiti’s 2010 devastating earthquake. The protections were renewed multiple times over the years as the Caribbean country sank deeper into crisis. Currently, a majority of the country’s capital is controlled by gangs after the president was assassinated in 2021.
After TPS was terminated, the child in San Diego received a letter summoning him to meet with ICE officers last week, school district officials said in their letter. His uncle complied and took him to the appointment “because he did not want to break the law,” added the letter, which NBC News obtained Monday.
A DHS spokesperson told NBC San Diego that “a man claiming to be the child’s uncle took him to an ICE check-in.” ICE officers said that they could not confirm the man was related to the boy and that “the alleged uncle could not establish legal guardianship of the minor.”
As a result, they determined the boy to be an unaccompanied minor, the DHS spokesperson said. “Out of an abundance of caution and to ensure the child’s safety, ICE determined it was best to remove the child from the household,” the spokesperson said.
The Office of Refugee Resettlement told NBC News on Monday that it “does not comment on specific cases” in accordance with its own privacy policies to protect the children in its custody.
The third grader is among the 1,640 children considered unaccompanied minors who are under HHS care, according to the agency’s data. Immigration authorities have taken more than 8,000 children into custody over the past year, according to data from the Deportation Data Project.
The office of Rep. Juan Vargas, D-Calif., said that the boy’s family does not know where he is being held and that he is helping them obtain the information they need to find him.
“Targeting a child, taking them away from their community and classmates, and forcing them into detention is despicable. It is inhumane,” Vargas told NBC San Diego in a statement Friday. “Additionally, TPS protections must be restored for all who’ve had them unfairly ripped away.”
DHS has deemed allegations claiming the boy was “placed in detention” as “false.”
DHS also said the child was “illegally brought into the United States” at an unspecified time by “a man who alleged to be his father,” who was removed to Mexico by Customs and Border Patrol, not ICE.
Jozef said, “His father has already been taken from him and deported, now this administration has stripped him of the stability, family, and community every child deserves.”
James Canning, a spokesperson for the school district, told NBC News in a statement on Monday that educators at the boy’s school have pointed to “a general sense of concern for the student’s safety and wellbeing.”
School district officials said they are sending additional crisis counselors to Fay Elementary School this week “because the child’s fellow third grade students have expressed concern and fear for their friend.”
Canning said no one at DHS or HHS has yet responded to the school district’s letter asking them to reconsider how immigration enforcement policies are affecting students.
