Reunite an 8-Year-Old Boy With His Family: End ICE Child Institutionalization

I am writing to urge you to act for an 8-year-old Haitian boy who was taken into federal custody alone on November 4 after reporting to an ICE check-in in San Diego with his uncle, Edmard Volmy. The boy had lived with Mr. Volmy's family since 2019 and had been in their care since his father was deported in 2025. The family provided a notarized letter naming Mr. Volmy as caregiver, yet ICE insisted on a court guardianship order and placed the child with the Office of Refugee Resettlement. I ask that you press the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services to return this boy to his uncle and family, where he was thriving in third grade at the school he has attended since preschool. Video of the boy being escorted from an interview room, with his arms held in front of his body, has raised serious questions about restraints. A child who poses no threat should not be handled this way. I also request a full accounting of the restraint policies applied in this case and a written statement of his current whereabouts. Remember Jesus' words: Whatever you do to the least of these, you do to me. The broader practice troubles me deeply. Separating children from their caregivers and placing them in institutions has a painful history in this country. During slavery, families were routinely divided at auction, and children were sold away from their parents with no legal recourse. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their families and sent to boarding schools such as the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, where many were stripped of their language and culture. We remember these episodes as some of the most damaging chapters in our history, and we should not repeat them. Today, children detained alone are held in shelters far from the homes, schools, and relatives who could care for them. Advocates report that parents are being deported without their children, and the full scale of the problem remains unclear because agencies release limited data. Congress has a duty to demand transparency and to set firm limits on separating children from caregivers who can prove they are family. I ask that you conduct oversight hearing into ICE practices of family separations. Support legislation requiring DHS to accept notarized caregiver authorizations, to notify relatives within a set period after a child is taken into custody, and to publish regular data on children separated during enforcement actions.