Most refugee children are detained or deported

NEW YORK — The VIP treatment lavished on 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez contrasts starkly with the way most youngsters who reach the United States without parents or paperwork are handled.

Most are rapidly deported. Others spend bewildering weeks in detention.

As Elian's Cuban-American hosts took him to Walt Disney World last month, a lawyer in Portland, Ore., was fighting for the release of a 15-year-old Chinese girl held in a juvenile jail for seven months. At one hearing, said lawyer Mark Potter, the girl couldn't wipe away tears because her hands were chained to her waist.

"Her only crime was that her parents put her on a boat so she could get a better life over here," Potter said.

At facilities across the United States, scores of other young, unaccompanied aliens are held at detention centers, sometimes for months and often without an attorney to help resolve their fate. Human rights and immigrant rights groups are pressing the Immigration and Naturalization Service to halt the practice and use other housing options.

"The INS is genuinely trying to find alternatives to detention. But it's painfully slow," said Ralston Deffenbaugh, a former human rights lawyer who is president of the Baltimore-based Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service.

"It's still shocking that kids under 18 who are not criminals, who don't pose a danger to anybody, are being held behind bars. There's no reason we ought to be doing that."

The INS, which handles more than 4,000 unaccompanied minors a year, says the vast majority are promptly sent back to their families. The agency insists there are sound reasons for detaining others.

"The only juveniles kept in detention are those who pose some threat to themselves and others, or juveniles who are at risk," INS spokesman Russ Bergeron said Thursday.