The administration has directed the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to start a mass roundup and deportation of about 2,000 immigrant families on Sunday, June 23, 2019. Here are some resources to protect yourself in the event of a potential raid.
Read MoreThis winter, seven-year-old Marcos and his father arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border after a difficult journey from Guatemala. Both are members of an indigenous community and speak the Mam language. Immigration officials interviewed Marcos’s father without an interpreter, and for reasons still unclear to the Young Center, separated father and son. They deported Marcos’s father without allowing him to take his son with him.
Read MoreTen years ago, 15-year-old May was taken from her hometown in Fuzhou, China—against her will—and brought to the United States. During her 8-month journey to the U.S.-Mexico border, May endured thirst, hunger, robbery, and sexual assault as she was handed off from stranger to stranger. When she finally reached the U.S.-Mexico border, immigration authorities identified her as an unaccompanied child and sent her to a children’s facility in Chicago.
Read MoreThe Young Center’s Policy team is expanding our base of support on both sides of the aisle and increasing collaboration with other children’s rights organizations to bring urgent attention to the issues impacting unaccompanied and separated immigrant children. Here are some of the issues we’re focused on.
Read MoreThanks to our supporters, we’ve been able to serve many more immigrant children. Our policy team has expanded to better amplify our voice. Your support has allowed us to respond not only to the family separation policy but also to the ongoing humanitarian crisis.
Read MoreMy family and I fled the bloody Salvadoran Civil War, which left 75,000 people dead, in 1988…I know what it is like to have to leave your home one day and come to a new country with a different language the next.
Read MoreWe hope you’ll join us in being a Waymaker and celebrating immigrant children, their resilience, and their human rights at our annual Chicago fundraiser on Wednesday, May 29, 2019.
Read MoreHSAC members released a report that not only excluded our recommendations, but contradicted our advice and ignored longstanding child protection principles.
Read MoreEach person you meet has a story. And each of you no doubt have made a remarkable journey to get here today. It’s what has made this country so extraordinary, that there’s no single story, no single narrative. It’s what makes you so extraordinary. Embrace your stories. Share them with the rest of us. We need to hear them.
Read MoreYoung Center Founder and Executive Director Maria Woltjen was honored with the Global Citizenship Award for two decades of tireless work for immigrant children’s rights at the Young Center and beyond.
Read MoreHow desperate were you to come this way?
Alone and ripped from family
On Friday, April 12, 2019, Miriam Abaya, Policy Associate at the Young Center for Immigrant Children Rights, provided the following testimony at the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights’s Public Session on Immigration Detention Centers and Treatment of Immigrants.
Read MoreLast week, the Department of Homeland Security called on Congress to effectively eliminate the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA). This is another outrageous attack on immigrant children’s rights by the administration.
Read MoreToday, February 15, 2019, the President declared an utterly unnecessary and anti-child “national emergency” on our southern border. The declaration would take money from other departments, mostly from the Department of Defense’s military construction budget, on top of the almost $1.4 billion Congress authorized to build a border wall.
Read MoreToday the U.S. government will take the unprecedented and unlawful step of turning away asylum-seekers under a policy the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has shamelessly named its “Migrant Protection Protocols.”
Read MoreYesterday, a federal watchdog agency released a report confirming what Young Center Child Advocates have reported for the last 18 months.
Read MoreLast month, the Young Center joined more than 216,000 organizations and individuals to oppose a new government effort to limit children’s access to essential government programs.
Read MoreThe Young Center mourns the death of seven-year-old Jackeline Amei Rosmary Caal Maquin, who came to the U.S. from Guatemala with her father. She died of septic shock, fever and dehydration in the custody of US Customs and Border Patrol. We are heartbroken to know that yet another child died an utterly preventable death in our country.
Read MoreWe are proud and grateful to announce that the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has awarded $250,000 to the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights to advance our work providing independent Child Advocates to unaccompanied and separated children in federal custody.
Read MoreLate this spring, when the news media began widely reporting that U.S. Border Patrol agents were carrying out an official policy of separating undocumented children from their parents, a public outcry erupted and activists sprang into action. At that moment, Maria Woltjen could be forgiven for thinking, What took you so long?
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