See Video: ‘Butterfly Effect’ Kids Urge Feds To Release Migrants

SAN FRANCISCO — The coronavirus pandemic has increased the urgency to release migrant children and families from federal custody, say two Bay-area girls behind a youth movement that started after the Trump administration declared an influx of asylum-seekers pouring across the U.S.-Mexico border a national security threat.

Lily Ellis, 11, and Kaia Marbin, 12, founded the youth activist group “The Butterfly Effect: Migration is Beautiful” last year in response to increasing numbers of children detained at the border — 76,020 in 2019, an increase of 52 percent over the year prior.

Their goal then was to build empathy and support for those children — infants, toddlers, kids and teens, all separated from their parents and families — who walked thousands of miles across unforgiving terrain to reach the border and fulfill a hope for a better life.

Lily and Kaia’s movement quickly took hold. Kids around the Bay area have created more than 55,000 butterflies from paper and want to create 76,020 — one for each child detained in 2019.

Now, Lily, Kaia and their supporters are joining with a group known as MomsRising.org in calling on the U.S. government to release kids and their families held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody to minimize the risks to their health posed by the pandemic.

They specifically called on the governors in six states — California, Louisiana, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Texas and Washington to join them in demanding that ICE release immigrant children, families and asylum-seekers to protect their health.

Several children speak in a new video published on Facebook that urges supporters of migrant children to contact their congressional representatives and “keep the conversation going.”

“We want you to know that you do have friends in America and you do have people that love and care about you,” one of the kids says.

In response to outrage over Trump administration family separation policies last year, Kaia and Lily founded the organization to give U.S. kids a vehicle to tell their peers in countries without the same stability and security that they're welcome in the United States.

“We want [migrant youth] to know that there are people in this country who don’t like them, but there are so people in this country who are welcoming to them,” Kaia, who is from Alameda, told Remezcla last year. “Not everybody here is saying, ‘Go away.’ ”

Lily, who lives in El Cerrito, said in the same interview that she and Kaia decided to call their project “The Butterfly Effect” because “they fly free and they’re allowed to be themselves, however they want to be.”

“Monarchs migrate between Mexico and California, which is where a lot of the migrants are coming from, and each butterfly is different and beautiful in their own way, just like the kids and the families in the detention centers,” she said. “They’re still all beautiful, and they’re still all human.”

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Since that time, other kids have flocked to the movement from states across the country and countries around the globe. They’ve visited Congress and handed out paper butterflies. They planned to travel to the border and meet with the children held in detention.

Children aren’t just vulnerable to the health effects of the pandemic. Their chances of staying in the United States long enough to get a fair asylum hearing are also jeopardized.

The Trump administration has moved some 972 migrants to hotels under a mostly unregulated detention system that can result in swift expulsion without the safeguards that typically protect the most vulnerable among them, The New York Times reported.

Expulsions differ from deportations in that they occur quickly after a migrant is discovered by immigration agents. But the coronavirus caused delays in flights, so the Trump administration turned to a rarely used provision in immigration law and turned their detention and supervision over to MVM Inc., a private corporation known for transportation and security, to detain the children and families in hotels, The Times reported.

So far, more than 100,000 migrants, including children and families, have already been expelled from the United States. Advocacy groups are challenging the shadowy program, saying it not only offers children few protections but also violates U.S. asylum laws by sending them back to life-threatening situations in the countries they fled.

The children, some as young as a year old, are being put in hotels under the supervision of transportation workers who aren’t licensed to provide child care, according to The Times. ICE says they’re getting adequate care and most be deported quickly to protect the United States from the spread of the coronavirus.

In many cases, the hotels may offer better accommodations than the cold, concrete Border Patrol holding cells, but they aren’t subject to the same policies designed to prevent abuse or providing access to phones, healthy food, and medical and mental health care. In many cases, the report said, parents and their attorneys are unable to find their children or monitor their well-being.

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