Above photo: Migration is Natural, Deportation is Not. Flickr.
Due To Scam X-Rays, Rights Groups Say.
Hundreds of unaccompanied migrant children are incorrectly placed each year in adult immigration detention centers in the U.S. due to the illegal use of dental X-rays to determine their age, according to immigration lawyers and rights groups. Widely discredited by the scientific community, these age determinations severely affect a minor’s chances of obtaining immigration relief and remaining in the country.
Despite its impacts and scope, little is known about the practice of using dental X-rays to determine age. Federal agencies have refused to comply with Freedom of Information Act requests that seek to learn under what circumstances and how often dental and bone X-rays determine the age of unaccompanied minors. Civil rights organizations filed a complaint in a federal court in New York on Sept. 5 to obtain that information.
“The practice is illegal,” said Laura Belous, the legal director at the Florence Immigrant & Refugee Rights Project, one of the plaintiffs along with the Center for Constitutional Rights and an affected individual. To make an age determination, the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA) requires multiple forms of evidence, including documentation and statements.
However, advocates claim that bone and dental X-rays or radiographs have been the sole basis to determine a minor’s age despite only producing estimates of plus or minus three years.
Since 2018, Belous has represented at least 50 children in Arizona sent to immigration jails solely based on radiographs. This is a fraction of the unaccompanied migrants affected by the practice nationwide—a figure likely to be in the hundreds per year, she said.
Between 2014 and 2023, 6,203 unaccompanied minors under the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR)—part of the Administration for Children and Families, and the Department of Health and Human Services—were deemed to be adults after undergoing age-determination processes, according to federal data obtained by Brigham Young University researchers.
“In our experience, kids from Eastern African countries like Somalia and Eritrea, as well as from Southeast Asian countries like India and Bangladesh, have been disproportionately subjected to this process,” Belous said. Extremely vulnerable, these unaccompanied minors often fled their homes without documents because their lives were threatened, she said.
Take the case of L.B., an Eritrean national and the individual plaintiff in the complaint. In January 2018, he was found unaccompanied by immigration agents near San Diego. He told them his date of birth, Oct. 28, 2000, so he was transferred to a juvenile residential care facility, where he had access to legal counsel, school programs, therapies, and recreation.
However, based on the dental analyses of David Senn, a forensic odontologist at the University of Texas, L.B. was determined to be 17.10 to 23.70 years old, with 92.55% chances of having attained 18 years. Besides, a federal field agent opined that L.B. “acts like an early 20s person,” court documents show. As a consequence, L.B. was transferred to an adult immigration jail.
A baptismal certificate corroborated that L.B. was a minor. Moreover, forensic anthropologists disproved Senn’s dental analysis. And a state court in Arizona ruled that the method was “not supported by credible scientific evidence and best practices,” and that the Office of Refugee Resettlement’s “age determination was made in violation of” the trafficking victims protection act and, therefore, invalid. The Administration for Children and Families did not respond to a request for comment.
L.B. was ultimately granted asylum. Many others who arrived as unaccompanied minors are not as fortunate and end up deported.
Once a migrant minor whose age was misrepresented turns 18, their case is tough to win, said Belous. “We have a pretty small window to act,” she said. If the discrepancy remains, immigration authorities keep a record of the individual as “lying” about their age, which “complicates the whole situation for years and years,” Belous said.
An Undisclosed History Of Scam X-Rays
In 2008, a Congressional Committee called federal agencies to cease their reliance on dental X-rays to determine the age of a child, as this was “fallible forensic evidence” that “has led to the erroneous placement of children” in adult facilities.
Recent peer-review studies confirm that the method is “flawed” and “unable to provide reliable information to determine if an individual is a minor.” Nonetheless, the practice continues.
Dental analyses are based on four studies relating dental development to ethnicity. To estimate the age of an African minor, for example, the analyses rely on African American growth charts, regardless of the factors that distinguish these populations’ developments, such as nutrition, exposure to germs and viruses, body weight, hormones and genetics.
The American Board of Forensic Odontology (ABFO) endorses the method despite its shortcomings. The organization also lends credence to another forensic technique, the bite mark, widely considered “junk science.” Senn is an ABFO member—neither he nor the organization responded to requests for comment.
Mike Bowers, a forensic odontologist at the University of Southern California and collaborator of the Innocence Project—a legal nonprofit committed to exonerating wrongly convicted individuals—told Prism that he quit ABFO in 2012 over the bite mark misinformation the group espouses. “What they’re selling is a fraud,” he said, referring to the use of dental X-rays to accurately determine an individual’s age. “It could be considered providing false evidence to the federal government.”
The method is also employed unethically—by misleading the minors. Consider the case of B.C., a Somali unaccompanied minor assigned by the federal government to a foster family in Oregon in 2015. He was brought to a dentist, where he thought he would receive care, but the visit’s purpose was to take his X-rays, said Matt Adams, his attorney and legal director at the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project. Based on an analysis authored by Senn, the Office of Refugee Resettlement sent B.C. to an adult immigration jail. The process was so arbitrary, Adams told Prism, that officials assigned B.C. a precise date of birth based on their “guesstimates.”
“The government is relying on racist and unethical x-ray practices,” Samah Sisay, a staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, said in a press release. “This smacks of discredited race science, and we need to see the records because it disproportionately harms Black and South Asian youth.”
Organizations had already asked the federal government to disclose records on the use of X-rays to determine a minor’s age. In 2018, the Innocence Project filed an affidavit requesting information from federal immigration agencies on their forensic odontology reports of minors, citing Senn’s work. To this day, no information has been made public.
Immigration agencies are doing whatever they can to prevent the disclosure of their use of X-rays to determine a minor’s age, Adams said. “This program is so blatantly flawed that they don’t want that exposed,” he said.