DHS cites safety, guardianship concerns; Vargas says 8-year-old Haitian boy is unaccounted for

His uncle and cousins had cared for him after his father’s deportation

Relatives of an 8-year-old Haitian boy taken into ICE custody in California have been unable to locate him, Rep. Juan Vargas, a California Democratic congressman, said Monday, adding that he was working to reunite the third-grader with loved ones. Video obtained by NBC News shows three armed officials leading the boy away on Nov. 4 after his family said he had been summoned to what they described as a routine immigration appointment in San Diego. The boy attends Fay elementary school.

Vargas told NBC’s San Diego affiliate KNSD: “Targeting a child, taking them away from their community and classmates, and forcing them into detention is despicable. It is inhumane.” He said the boy’s whereabouts were unknown when he spoke to the network.

A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said ICE took the child into custody “out of an abundance of caution and to ensure the child’s safety.” The spokesperson said the boy’s uncle could not prove legal guardianship and that federal anti-trafficking laws obliged officials to take the boy into care as an “unaccompanied alien child.”

DHS separately denied the allegation that ICE took the third-grader into custody to place him in detention. It said: “Allegations that ICE took a third grader into custody to be placed in detention are false, and any suggestion otherwise is a depraved attempt to smear our ICE law enforcement officers and undermine the work of President Trump and [DHS] Secretary [Markwayne] Mullin to protect children.” The statement said the boy lacked legal immigration status and came to the United States with his father, who was later deported to Mexico by Customs and Border Protection.

The Haitian Bridge Alliance, an immigration advocacy group, said the boy, who attends Fay elementary school, was in the care of his uncle and cousins after his father was deported last year. Guerline Jozef, the group’s executive director, told NBC that she learned of the custody after the uncle took the boy to the appointment. Jozef said the child was later transferred to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, a government agency under the direction of the Department of Health and Human Services.

Jozef said the father’s abrupt deportation left no opportunity to transfer formal legal guardianship to the boy’s relatives in the United States. “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,” she said. “I’m sure he is fearful, he is traumatized.”

Community leaders, including the board and superintendent of the San Diego Unified School District, wrote to ICE to express concern about the Trump administration’s decision to revoke Temporary Protected Status safeguards for Haitians in the United States and its impact on families. Cody Petterson, a school-district trustee, said, “ICE understands that this is absolutely not where this child should be.”

Petterson added: “For us, it’s a very clear case in which there’s no question that the best place for this child is with their caregiver, their uncle, and one of the worst places they could possibly be is in a cage somewhere with nobody they know, not understanding the process, and not understanding what’s about to happen to them.”

Jozef said the Haitian community was living “under a cloud of terror” and that the loss of Temporary Protected Status protections was “incredibly painful” for families that had built lives in the United States. “The moment they kidnap or take a person within the community, we don’t know if we will ever hear from them again,” she said.

In an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes on Sunday, President Donald Trump said the mass-deportation policy he pursued during his second presidency had been “too tough” for many people and had contributed to Republican Party losses in the Nov. 3 midterm elections. Trump said aggressive immigration enforcement had “both helped and hurt” and suggested a softer approach for his remaining two years in office.

When Vargas spoke to NBC, the boy’s whereabouts remained unknown. DHS acknowledged taking him into custody but rejected the allegation that ICE had placed him in detention, while Jozef said the child had been transferred to the Office of Refugee Resettlement.