All migrant children must be released from US detention because of coronavirus. Some parents fear that could mean separation

WASHINGTON ― She lost her first child while pregnant in her native Haiti when armed men raped and beat her for speaking out against the country’s human rights abuses.

She thought she would find safety in Santiago, Chile, where she fled to join her husband. But their second child barely survived after she was forced to give birth to him on a city street when hospital workers denied her medical care because she is Haitian.

The racism and violence sent them fleeing to the United States, but they’re still not safe. The couple is fighting deportation from inside a Pennsylvania detention center, and now a judge’s ruling and the Trump administration’s hard-line immigration approach is forcing the couple and dozens of other immigrants to make a cruel choice.

A federal judge has ordered the release of immigrant children in the nation’s three family detention centers by Friday because of the coronavirus outbreak and possible violations of public health practices at the facilities. But immigration officials aren’t expected to allow their parents to leave with them.

So the parents must decide: abandon their asylum claims and face imminent deportation with their children to countries where their lives are in danger or allow their children to be released to a sponsor or relative here and risk separation if the parents are later deported.

“The thought of being separated from my child is literally killing me,” the woman said, her voice shaking with emotion on a phone call from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Berks County Family Residential Center this week. She asked that her name be withheld out of concern for her safety.

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