It’s illegal to use forensic odontology to determine a persons age because it’s inaccurate by as much as 4 years. Yet ICE, ORR and its contractor Southwest Key continues to use it. Why? Dental contractors receive $228 for each examination.
Scott Lloyd, the director of ORR, is pure blood Republican:
- has no experience ✔️
- religious misogynist ✔️
- anti-abortion extremist ✔️
- racist ✔️
- Stephen Miller protégé ?
In the U.S. immigration system, the difference between being 17 and 18 is a crucial one. Undocumented minors who cross the border are housed under the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement. They stay in shelters, not detention centers, and they are on a path to be released to family-member sponsors. They also receive special protections under the law.
Immigrants 18 and older, however, fall under the jurisdiction of ICE. They are often kept in detention centers that are akin to prisons.
Young immigrants, though, don’t always come with birth certificates or other documentation of their age. When that’s the case, ORR contractors and ICE sometimes turn to a highly disputed science to determine how old the immigrants are: forensic odontology. ORR and its contractors work with specialized dentists to conduct “age assessment” reports on minors suspected of being adults.
Immigrant detainees are X-rayed, and those images are sent to a forensic dentist, who looks at the person’s wisdom teeth and performs a statistical analysis, factoring in a person’s race and gender using studies on different dental populations.
“Neither ORR nor ICE discloses how many of these assessments are ordered per year, or how often they are used as evidence of age.”
ORR is prohibited from using forensic odontology exclusively to determine age by the 2008 Trafficking Victims Reauthorization and Protection Act. But the agency has broken that law in the past. In 2016 a federal judge found that ORR had used X-rays alone to send a Somali boy to ICE detention. The judge ordered that the child be returned to ORR custody.
ORR contractors have continued to order dental assessments. Email records obtained by VICE News show that a Southwest Key shelter for immigrant children in Arizona used the method in April of this year to designate an immigrant as 18 and refer them to ICE custody. Southwest Key declined to comment on the referral.
“In interviews with VICE News, David Senn said he has performed this service, mostly for ICE and ORR contractors, 79 times in 2018, and hundreds of times over the years, going back to the 1990s. His current rate for an age assessment is approximately $228 per examination, paid to his employer.”
