Immigration Officials Are Using Pseudoscience to Justify Jailing Teenage Asylum Seekers with Adults

This week, the Trump administration announced it will detain asylum seekers and separate them from their children at the border. A case in California shows how some minors who arrived alone to seek asylum have been put in adult detention. Immigration authorities in California are refusing to release an Afghan asylum seeker from an adult detention center, even though a federal court had determined he is a child. His lawyers say the teenager, who has been held in adult detention for five months, is 17 years old. But ICE used a disputed "pseudoscience" age test based on a dental exam to insist he is over 18. The teen, who uses the name Hamid for privacy and protection, says he fled Afghanistan using a forged passport after the Taliban murdered his father. On Tuesday, Hamid spoke to Democracy Now! in his first phone interview from the Mesa Verde detention center in Bakersfield, California. We speak to his attorney Mariel Villarreal in New York.