Thursday, April 29, marks the 100th day of the Biden-Harris administration. During this time, the administration has taken significant steps towards welcoming unaccompanied immigrant children to the United States, but there is still no federal law requiring every agency to consider children’s best interests in every decision.

We are working to change that. In the last few months, the Young Center’s policy team has had more than two dozen meeting with White House officials, and more than a dozen additional meetings with newly appointed federal agency staff regarding the safe care of children seeking protection at our borders. We are heartened that many of these new officials bring deep expertise in working with children or people seeking humanitarian protection to their positions.

On a positive note, the Biden-Harris administration has kept the door open—as the law requires—to unaccompanied children seeking protection at our border. During 2020, using the pandemic as pretext, the Trump administration turned away at least 16,000 unaccompanied children and returned them to the very dangers that prompted them to flee their home countries. A federal judge ordered an end to that practice last November, and the new administration is abiding by that decision. Today, children escaping violence and persecution are able to enter the United States while they pursue their legal claims for protection.

Not surprisingly, the new administration was faced with far more children than normally arrive at our borders during the winter months, thanks to the Trump administration’s prolonged and unlawful closure. The administration quickly created new, temporary spaces to get children out of Customs and Border Patrol stations—often referred to as cages or “hieleras” (iceboxes”)—so they are cared for by an agency with a child welfare mandate (Health and Human Services). The new administration has also worked to expediate the release of children to their families, though there is much more work to be done.

However, adults and children fleeing with parents continue to face immediate expulsion at the border. This has forced thousands of families into in unsafe conditions across the border; understandably, some desperate parents have sent their children to the border alone in order to protect them from kidnappings, assaults, and other violence perpetrated against stranded asylum-seekers. The Biden administration’s expulsion of these asylum-seekers, despite an outcry from public health experts who confirm that asylum-seekers do not endanger public health more than other travelers—is simply unacceptable.

On a more positive note, the new administration also ended the Trump-era “Memorandum of Agreement” in which the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) was co-opted by the Trump administration to serve the law enforcement goals of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in ways that led to further family separation and children’s prolonged detention. Under the MOA, HHS gathered extensive information about children’s families, presumably to ensure the child’s safety upon release. Instead, the agency shared that information with DHS, which in many cases arrested and deported family members who had stepped forward to sponsor the release of children in government custody.    

The Biden-Harris administration has also welcomed hundreds of families previously trapped in Mexico under the Remain in Mexico policy, an injustice we challenged in an amicus brief to the Supreme Court. Despite this progress, thousands of families and adult asylum-seekers remain trapped across the border because their cases were unfairly denied by the sham tent courts at the border. Those families still have no indication of when they may return to the United States and pursue their claims for asylum.

Finally, the Biden-Harris administration launched its Family Separation Task force, a group of government-only officials which is consulting with the Young Center and other advocates on the reunification of children and parents who remain separated three years after the “Zero Tolerance” family separation policy. Our Child Advocates continue to work with children separated from their parents and are fighting to ensure each child’s best interests are considered by the Task Force.

There’s much to be done in order to protect immigrant children and families. Here are the priorities we are championing in our advocacy work:

1. Requiring all government actors to consider the best interests of the child—including their expressed wishes, safety, family integrity, liberty, development, and identity—in every decision impacting the child and support legislation to create such a mandate in federal law.

2. Ending the use of Title 42 (a public health law) to unlawfully turn away asylum-seekers at the border under the pretext of public health.

3. Ending Remain in Mexico for all families subjected to the policy since 2019: Welcome all those subjected to the Remain in Mexico policy and give them a fair chance to seek protection.

4. Reunifying and providing legal protection to every family subjected to family separation at the border.

5. Protecting due process by ending “rocket dockets” and video-teleconferences for children’s hearings and reversing attempts to weaken procedural protections in immigration court.

6. Restoring refugee resettlement efforts and increase the cap to the administration’s promise of welcoming 125,000 refugees.

7. Ending the use of large congregate care settings for unaccompanied children that fail to meet domestic child welfare standards.

8. Rescinding the changes in forms the government uses to process children that are contrary to its stated goals of more quickly releasing children to their families and treating children differently from adults. The Young Center has filed more than seven comments opposing these changes.

9. Ending ICE family detention and prioritize community-based alternatives.

10. Stopping all deportations, including that of parents, legal guardians, and caregivers while preserving parental rights.  

Photo Credit: whitehouse.gov