By Joseph Dits, South Bend Tribune
It's hard to say how many unaccompanied children crossed the U.S. border and now are staying in the Michiana area, though local immigration attorneys suggest it might be just a handful here or there.
Case in point: A coalition of people in South Bend started meeting three weeks ago to seek a way to help the kids, but they couldn't find a clear way to reach them.
So, the newly dubbed Coalition for the Care of Refugee Children decided to reach out to the immigrant children held in Chicago. The group connected with the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago, which is working with the children there and aims to collect teddy bears for them.
A stuffed animal may not seem like much, but it's a start, said member Nanci Flores, of the nonprofit La Casa de Amistad.
Federal agencies have released 245 of the children from their custody to their families or other sponsors in Indiana, along with 92 in Michigan, between Jan. 1 and July 7, according to the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement. They are among several states that pale in comparison with the 2,205 children who went to Maryland, the 3,347 who went to New York and other high numbers that went to certain southern states.
And that's because the children are mostly going to areas with larger settlements of people from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, from where most of the immigrant children are coming.
Indianapolis and the Fort Wayne area have some of the largest settlements in Indiana, but Elkhart also has a cluster, said Lisa Koop, an attorney who splits her time among Chicago, South Bend and Goshen, as associate legal director with the National Immigrant Justice Center.
Still, the numbers are fluid, since there's no way to tell which of those families or sponsors have since moved to another state, said Koop, who works with a lot of the immigrant kids.
Indiana Gov. Mike Pence wrote to President Barack Obama last week complaining that he only recently had learned of the 245 kids in Indiana. Saying that school districts that would have to absorb the kids, Pence called on the feds to provide more timely information about how many unaccompanied minors there are in the state, along with where they are and the legal status of their sponsors.
Eight Republican members of Congress from Indiana followed up with a letter to back up Pence's request for "transparency."
Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, who like Pence is Republican, too, had a different tone, saying he didn't foresee the number of children to have an economic impact on the state.
Roughly 500 children seized at the border are held in shelters and homes in Chicago and its suburbs, a federal hub for immigration enforcement, Koop said.
About 60 percent of the children released from federal custody are going to their parents, Koop cited from national statistics, and 80 percent overall go to some kind of family member. The other 20 percent go to a friend of the family or another sponsor, she said.
Some politicians suggest the best route for the children is to return them to families in Central America. If that happens, Elkhart attorney Rose Rivera said, "Essentially we make them orphans."
Some youths may not know how to even find their families, let alone have the money to seek them out, said Rivera, with the Center for Legal Justice. Once in Latin America, she added, "It's hard for me to imagine them not risking that trip again."