What’s the Fate of the Unaccompanied Belizean Girl?
Lliani Arthurs
While the country has been documenting unaccompanied minors since 2016, it is primarily collecting data on Central Americans ending up in Belize. Those cases came to a halt in 2020 with the closure of land borders during to the COVID-19 pandemic. But while this is the first known case of an unaccompanied Belizean minor, we asked Human Services Director Lliani Arthurs what happens now with the child.
Lliani Arthurs, Director, Department of Human Services
“I can speak from our experience with Central American migrants coming to Belize. These children are often identified through the Immigration Department especially at our border points; our social workers would then respond to do that initial gathering of data in terms of demographic information in terms of nationality, age and all of that and whether there are any family [members] in Belize. We would then make contact with their embassy in order to notify them that these children were handed over to us and to request for them to do the necessary background checks in their country of origin in terms of what were the situations that caused these children to leave their country and travel unaccompanied to Belize. So in this particular case, it would be the similar procedure that we would hope that the U.S. would then contact us to confirm that they have the children over there and work with us, for us to feedback on the situation in Belize and then we come up with a plan. So that’s what we normally do with the embassy is establish what are the risk factors, what will be the plan for this child? Is it in this child’s best interest to return to their country of origin and where that is determined, we also engage with I.O.M., the International Organization of Migration. They’ve been very helpful in helping us to finance a lot of these voluntary returns and so we work together with them in order to safely repatriate these children back to their countries of origin.”
The director says this case is a huge red flag in terms of the potential for other parents to think that sending their child alone to the US border is okay. However, she stresses this is not what is best for children.
