The U.S. Is Checking Immigrant Kids Teeth To See If They Belong In Adult Detention (HBO)

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.

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