Benjamin Adelberg | Cronkite News
WASHINGTON – A child's only change of clothes. A birth certificate. Important contact details to keep family friends and distant relatives in touch. Even a stack of bills.
All were missing in migrant detention facilities along the southern border, according to a recent Government Accountability Office report, confirming long-standing claims by immigration advocacy groups.
The GAO study found that when migrants file formal complaints with agencies such as Customs and Border Protection or the Border Patrol, by the time the investigation is completed, the migrants' belongings are often discarded.
“As the number of encounters with foreign nationals attempting to enter the United States without valid travel documents increases, so does the amount of personal property that must be collected, stored, transferred or returned,” the report states.
DHS officials did not respond to questions about the GAO's findings, instead referring them to responses contained in the report: “The Department of Homeland Security prioritizes the safe, expedited, and efficient processing of immigrants and remains committed to processing the personal property of each detainee in our custody in a safe, efficient, and transparent manner.”
Immigrant advocates say the focus on processing individuals too often results in the confiscation of what few possessions people bring across the border.
“We've been working on this for a long time, and we still haven't found a single reason why they wouldn't take away their birth certificates and give them back,” said Noah Schrum, a border policy strategist for the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona. “It just doesn't make sense.”
The ACLU Arizona chapter frequently partners with Kino Border Initiative, a group that provides humanitarian and legal assistance to migrants. KBI operates in Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Mexico. The group says it spoke to more than 9,200 migrants last year and files complaints on their behalf with government agencies twice a month.
In one instance, the KBI said a woman told the organization that a Border Patrol agent ordered her to “take everything that has no value out of your bag and throw it here, including your Mexican money. It's worthless. You can only take American money.”
The woman said she handed over 300 pesos (about $17.70) but the agent tore it up and threw it away, according to the KBI, which translated her statement from Spanish. She said the agent did the same to others in her group.
The KBI report also included a statement from another woman who said she had been attacked and threatened by the same cartel that had kidnapped her stepdaughter and killed her son several years earlier, and then traveled to the U.S.-Mexico border and met with Customs and Border Protection agents.
According to the KBI, agents threatened to destroy evidence she had brought with her to support her asylum claim, telling her they would “ripped up” her documents if she took them.
According to the KBI, CBP officers destroyed many of her belongings, including evidence supporting her asylum claim.
“The process of replacing that is not going to be easy, especially for people who have just arrived in a country that is mostly foreign,” Schramm said.
GAO obtained and analyzed 215 personal property complaint reports from multiple DHS offices between October 2022 and March 2023. The complaints were submitted to these offices by immigrants themselves and non-governmental agencies on behalf of immigrants.
Nearly half of the complaints GAO reviewed involved unaccompanied minors, according to the report. In 2023, there were more than 135,000 encounters with unaccompanied minors at the southern border, accounting for 5% of all encounters tallied by CBP.
Schramm said that doesn't necessarily mean minors are disproportionately affected: complaints about minors outnumber those about older migrants because of increased legal assistance and border authorities' efforts to better protect children.
Shrum said many incidents are never reported.
“Only a small percentage (of lost belongings) reach the threshold where people think it's worth filing a complaint,” Schramm said.
Facilities vary in what items and how many can be stored, and in some Border Patrol areas, migrants are asked to put all their belongings into a single plastic bag — anything that doesn't fit is discarded, according to the GAO report.
Border Patrol officials told GAO that in some areas, surplus clothing is being thrown away because it is “a health hazard.”
Lillian Serrano, director of the Southern Border Communities Coalition, recalled a story of a migrant who was forced to throw away his T-shirt.
“Most people would think it's just a T-shirt, but to him it was the last possession he had from his grandfather who passed away,” she said. “Whether it's a T-shirt or a document, that item has significant value. For federal agents like the Border Patrol to just throw it away is a real issue that has a real impact on people's lives.”
Migrants are often removed from overcrowded border facilities without all of their belongings, and sometimes without a chance to even check what they left behind, advocates say.
Schramm said there have been some cases where migrants have been able to return to detention centers and recover lost belongings without filing a complaint with Homeland Security, but in most cases, they are never recovered.
“I can't think of a case where someone has had their property confiscated, filed a complaint and as a result was able to recover the property that was lost,” Schramm said.
“The scope of our report does not include a consideration of whether these complaints have resulted in the return of personal property,” Rebecca Gumbler, director of GAO's homeland security and justice team, said in an email. “As we noted in the report, personal property complaints filed with DHS and CBP agencies rarely result in the return of personal property.”
For the report, GAO surveyed five of nine Border Patrol jurisdictions and four field offices in the Southwest and found that migrants were not given information about how to recover their missing property.
“Officials also told us that many of the complaints were missing information such as where the individual was being held or the date of the incident,” Gambler added.
CBP has about 70 substations and offices in Arizona and the other three border states with Mexico where it processes immigrants.
“We need to remember that people are entering a system that is completely unknown to them, down to the mechanics and the language,” Schramm said.
Facilities did not have uniform procedures or policies regarding what was stored or how migrants could retrieve their belongings.
GAO called on CBP to improve its procedures for handling migrant property and standardize procedures across all facilities.
Schramm called for even stricter rules: “There is no specified list of items from which migrants should never be separated.”
