Attorneys: Children as young as 3 are appearing at deportation hearings without parents

An undocumented child from Central America.
(Image credit: John Moore/Getty Images)

Attorneys in California, Texas, and Washington, D.C., say that immigrant children, some as young as three, are being ordered to attend court hearings without their parents for their own deportation proceedings, The Texas Tribune reports.

While this is not a brand new practice for unaccompanied minors, under the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" approach to immigration, families entering the U.S. are separated at the border, leaving more kids without their parents when deportation proceedings start. There are more than 2,000 undocumented children who were recently separated from their parents living at different facilities and foster homes across the United States. George Tzamaras, spokesman for the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said it's impossible to know how many kids have attended deportation hearings by themselves. "There have been reports of kids younger than three years old and others as old as 17," he said.

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Catherine Garcia, The Week US

Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.