Serving Separated and Unaccompanied Immigrant Children in 2020
We serve the most vulnerable immigrant children.
Children seeking protection in the United States are fleeing abuse, violence, persecution, extreme poverty, and trafficking. Many have traveled hundreds, if not thousands, of miles by themselves, facing further threats, violence, and trauma during their journeys. When they arrive at our borders to seek safety, they are met by armed border officials who are not trained in child welfare or trauma-informed care of children.
After spending days in Customs and Border Protection facilities, often without the bare minimum essentials for hygiene, warmth, and wellness, they are transferred to the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) at the Department of Health and Human Services. But their journeys don’t end there. Children can spend anywhere from days to months in ORR shelters and facilities while they wait for release to their families and sponsors. At least 50% of children don’t have legal representation.
Young Center Child Advocates are appointed to the most vulnerable children, including children forcibly separated from their loved ones at the border, children with mental or physical disabilities, teens who are pregnant or parenting, children who have survived human trafficking, infants and toddlers who are not able to voice their wishes, teens who are 17 years old and therefore exposed to the risk of adult immigration detention on their 18th birthday, and children who have witnessed or experienced severe violence.
Child Advocates are often appointed while children are in federal custody and continue to serve children after they are released, when they remain vulnerable because they are still in deportation proceedings. We train, assign, and supervise bilingual and bicultural volunteers to serve as independent Child Advocates, learn the children’s stories, and accompany them throughout their immigration proceedings. Volunteer Child Advocates work alongside Young Center attorneys and social workers to submit Best Interests Determinations (BIDs) championing children’s best interests to decision-makers.
With your support, in 2020, we served 1,213 children facing deportation across the country. They came from 41 countries around the world, but the majority came from the Northern Triangle of Central America: 34% from Guatemala, 37% from Honduras, and 9% from El Salvador.
Among the children we served, 310 (more than 25%) were younger than 12 years old and 367 (more than 30%) were 17 years old. We also served more than 50 parenting and pregnant teens.
To advocate for the best interests—the child’s wishes, safety, and well-being—of these children, we submitted 714 BIDs to stakeholders including immigration judges, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), attorneys of record or legal services providers, ORR, state courts, and other service providers such as medical or mental healthcare organizations. Of the BIDs we submitted, 20% are pending. Of the remaining BIDs, more than 85% were accepted by immigration officials.
We continue to find creative ways to fight. In our BIDs in 2020, we advocated for children to be reunited with their families and gain permanency and protection from deportation. We fought for them to be placed in family or community homes instead of large facilities and shelters and got them released from custody instead of being transferred to adult immigration detention. For children whose safety, wishes, and best interests depended on returning to their home countries, we advocated for their safe and timely repatriation during the global pandemic.
Our Response to COVID-19
The pandemic significantly impacted the way we do our work, requiring us to modify our methods so we could continue championing children’s best interests without interruption. Over the course of several months, our staff entirely redesigned visits with children in custody, participation in court, and volunteer trainings to address the challenges of a virtual environment and developed new methods of providing support to our volunteers.
In cities where there were confirmed cases of COVID-19 among shelter staff and children, the Child Advocate team prioritized advocating for the expedited release of children who: 1) had no COVID-19 exposure; 2) had not attended court or gone outside the shelter in 14 days; and 3) had sponsors who agreed to quarantine for 14 days after the child’s release. New advocacy strategies during this emergency included bringing in an outside pediatric expert to advocate for release of children while prioritizing public health needs, requesting that ORR care providers supply children and sponsors with masks and gloves, arranging travel by least exposed means, and confirming families’ capacity and access to essential services needed to quarantine.
Additionally, our Child Advocate program worked with facilities and shelters to ensure virtual weekly meetings between our volunteer Child Advocates and the children we serve continued without interruption and to ensure children felt supported during this time of increased isolation.
Young Center Child Advocate staff designed and gathered resources for interacting with children in new ways during their virtual meetings, including virtual play, games, and art. Our volunteer coordinators redesigned the volunteer trainings to allow us to continue to train new Child Advocates in a virtual environment and maintain our corps of volunteer Child Advocates
The Department of Justice Refused to Postpone Children’s Immigration Hearings
At the beginning of the pandemic, the Department of Justice was relentless in keeping immigration courts open despite the public health risks. We fought to end the dangerous and unnecessary practice of requiring children to appear in immigration court in the early days of the pandemic. Two of our teams collaborated with other nonprofits in their cities to persuade immigration courts to waive children’s appearances and allow us to participate in the proceedings by telephone. Other courts continued, as if nothing had changed, requiring children to appear in court or demanding their appearance by video from within government shelters. Having served vulnerable children facing deportation, we knew that many would not be able to tell their stories effectively via video stream. They need child-appropriate settings where they have the support of legal counsel and advocates. Whenever it was in the best interests of the child to do so, we fought for the cancellation or postponement of hearings. In one significant win, our team argued that a child in detention should not be forced to make his full asylum claim to an immigration judge over the phone. The night before the scheduled telephonic hearing, the court postponed the hearing.
The Government Closed the Border to Asylum Seekers, Including Unaccompanied Children
In March 2020, the government began turning away children seeking safety at the U.S.-Mexico border, using Title 42 of the U.S. code (a provision of federal law addressing public health) and COVID-19, as a pretext. Despite public health experts rejecting the justification for the rule, the government continued to cite Title 42 to deny children their legal right to seek protection under the anti-trafficking law, which grants unaccompanied children certain rights—first and foremost, the right to not be returned to their persecutors, traffickers, or abusers. The government’s order meant a near complete closure of the border. Without asking them a single question or giving them a chance to seek protection, the government unlawfully deported more than 16,000 unaccompanied children from March to December. We collaborated with the ACLU to stop the expulsion of dozens of children whose families reached out to the Young Center for help and advocated for their best interests.
Hundreds of the children subjected to expulsion were held in hotels with ICE officers and contractors and had no access to their legal rights or counsel before being returned to the same dangers they’d fled. In more than a dozen cases, our team at the border learned of children held in these hotels and fought for their transfer to state-licensed programs where they could pursue legal protection.
Ensuring Safe Repatriation When It’s in a Child’s Best Interests
When necessary, we conduct international home studies in advance of a final decision about whether a child will return to their home country. Often, the home studies are key to demonstrating why a child should not be repatriated. In some cases, a child wants to return, and we conduct international home studies to identify and mitigate potential safety concerns. We also conduct international home studies when a child has no choice but to return; this work is done in advance of the child’s travel, and our goal is to ensure the child has access to necessary resources for reintegration.
In 2020, the Young Center completed 126 safety assessments and consultations, gathering information by phone and virtual visits in 27 of these assessments. Of the 27 children for whom we conducted international home studies, 15 returned to their country of origin and 12 remained in the United States. We used the information gathered through these home studies to inform Best Interests Determinations (BIDs) addressing a variety of issues including safe repatriation, family reunification, placement in custody, child-friendly and culturally responsive practices, access to medical and mental health services, and permanency through legal relief.