A former counselor and case manager at a Towaoc youth shelter has accused the Immigration and Naturalization Service of separating the families of undocumented Mexican-migrant workers after they were apprehended traveling through Southwest Colorado.

INS Deputy Director Mike Comfort said that the agency does not generally split up families except in extreme cases, and makes sure that family members are always deported together. But according to Jo Lancaster, a former counselor at the Sunrise Youth Center, a Ute Mountain Ute-owned youth shelter. The Durango INS office has been using the Towaoc facility to temporarily house Mexican-immigrant children during the deportation process and those individuals were temporarily separated from parents or guardians that they were traveling with.

Lancaster told the Cortez Journal that the children, a 4-year old girl and a 15-year old girl, informed her and a Ute Mountain language interpreter that they had been separated from their relatives after being apprehended by INS officers stationed in Durango.

"If they tell you that they are not separating families, then they are blatantly lying," said Lancaster, who resigned on May 19 after six years as a case manager and youth counselor for the shelter.

"We ask them these questions and the kids do not know where they are, they do not know where their parents went or if they will ever see them again," she said. "It is obviously very scary for them, especially when the INS marches in like storm troopers stomping around. I am scared that these kids will be sent back by themselves to a country where there is not welfare system to help them stay safe."

Lancaster decided to go public with what she considers misconduct by INS officers after accepting from them a 4-year-old girl from Mexico on April 19. The child, Lillian, was brought in alone by the INS without her father, who was apparently being detained at a jail in Alamosa, according to Lancaster. The girl was later reunited with her mother, Lancaster said.

"They put the parents in jail, and then (brought) the kids here," Lancaster said from her office on her last day of work. "When the INS gets their situation down, then the kids and adults are picked up and supposedly shipped back to Mexico together. They told me that they are criminals. You can’t tell me that this 4-year old is a criminal."

Don Beuchner, the supervisor for the INS operation in Durango, explained that illegal immigrant families may be temporarily separated during the detention process because of a lack of facilities to house the family together and because of the potential for escapes.

"They may be separated for up to a day until we can arrange transportation back to Mexico, then they return together," Beuchner said. "Generally we keep the mother and children together, but not with the father because the likelihood of escape is pretty high."

"We use hotel rooms quite a bit, but we have limited resources," he said, making it difficult to station an officer at the hotel all night. "We are doing the best we can. It’s a hard situation."

By U.S. immigration law, illegal immigrants who are under 18 cannot be housed in a jail, even a juvenile detention center, while awaiting deportation because their crime is considered a misdemeanor status violation of immigration law, not an aggravated crime such as robbery or assault. Youth shelters, including those used by the INS in Durango and Towaoc, do not usually allow adults to stay overnight, creating a dilemma for INS agents faced with detaining a barrage of illegal immigrants, some with very young children, who are apprehended traveling through Southwest Colorado.

Locally, Beuchner hopes to coordinate with organizations such as churches, community groups, shelters or families that are willing to temporarily house immigrant families to avoid separation, but says that so far no one has come forward.

"That will be a learning curve to see if it works, because for us to do that, those groups have to be aware of the consequences if (the housing) is not secure," he said.

Lancaster said that she took it upon herself to change the policies of the shelter and allowed the immigrants to make phone calls from the facility in an effort to reach lost relatives. She also obtained a Spanish-language interpreter living in Towaoc to assist with communication and to help calm frightened immigrant children.

That assistance from Lancaster and the interpreter prompted the FBI to begin investigating the incident, confirmed Beuchner, after two immigrants — a mother and her child — managed to escape from the youth shelter April 20 during Lancaster’s shift. The two escaped during the night and were located in the vicinity of Towaoc, he said.

"They did escape and it took several hours to track them down," Beuchner said, adding that there is an ongoing investigation into the incident.

"They think that I was trying to aid in their escape, which I was not," Lancaster said. "I was simply organizing a humane environment for these people by getting involved when I brought in an interpreter and allowed phone calls.

"As far as I’m concerned, everyone is entitled to a phone call. They were only contacting family members in Chicago and New York to tell them what had happened and that they were to be deported, but were safe. It was simply a matter of communication."

Comfort said that housing juveniles captured entering the country illegally is a big problem for the INS because the type of facility needed is difficult to find.

"We have agents scrambling to find the right place to put them that meets our standards," Comfort said. "They are not hardened criminals and a jail setting is not appropriate, but it can really get to be a bizarre situation when smugglers throw children into their load because they know it makes our job more difficult."

The elaborate Mexican labor-smuggling operation targeted by the INS is increasingly passing through the Southwest delivering hundreds, if not thousands of Mexican workers every month to pre-arranged sweatshop and harvest jobs in labor-starved industries of the East, according to the activist group Campeñero Latino Resource Center, an immigration think-tank and support network based in Durango.

Comfort said more national discussion is needed to examine the U.S. immigration system, one that simultaneously turns a blind eye toward employers who hire the scores of undocumented immigrants needed to fuel the superheated U.S. economy, while attempting to also prevent those workers from entering the country.