The Obama administration is "openly stepping up efforts" to detain and deport Central American refugees who came to the U.S. in 2014 in order to escape violence at home. The idea is to intimidate people out of coming here, but Alicia A. Caldwell has the latest details on exactly who Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is going after, people like 19-year-old Wildin David Guillen Acosta.
He said he came to the United States from Honduras by bus, car and on foot after a gang member threatened to kill him.
“I wouldn’t go out at night. He’d call me and say, ‘I’m going to kill you, I’m going to kill you,’ ” Acosta said in Spanish. “I told my mother and she told me to come to the United States.”
Acosta, speaking from an immigration jail in rural Georgia, said he was afraid to go home.
“I’m scared. I don’t want to go back. There’s a lot of violence, a lot of death,” Acosta said. “They’ll kill you for a telephone. How is this possible?”
How is this possible? This young man is a refugee, plain and simple. He fled Honduras for his life. And unfortunately, he's not alone. More than 800 people who arrived as unaccompanied minors have already been deported since October. Meanwhile, the immigration group America's Voice has been sending out action alerts about teens detained by ICE who face deportation.
These kids aren't being picked up because they're committing crimes, they're routinely being targeted by ICE on their way to school. In fact, teachers at one school in North Carolina put together a video campaign urging ICE to release Acosta.
Here’s one of his teachers: