Unaccompanied Minor Children: A Hidden Dilemma
“Immigration law wasn’t written with kids in mind.”
-Wendy Young, Director of Kids in Need of Defense (KIND)
The U.S. Homeland Security Act of 2002 (HSA) defines the term “unaccompanied alien child” (UAC) as a child under the age of 18 who has no lawful immigration status and for whom there is no parent or legal guardian in the United States, or no parent or legal guardian available to provide care and custody. In recent years, undocumented children — or UACs — crossing the United States-Mexico border, typically from the Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, have come in staggeringly high numbers.
These children have diverse reasons for trying to make it into the U.S, despite known significant threats to their health and safety on the journey. A number of children make the journey to join a parent who immigrated in search for work, and attempt to be part of the families their parents established in the U.S., or to escape endemic poverty or tenuous family situations in their home countries. Others come in search of refuge after violence back home tore their families apart and threatened their lives.
Whatever the reason, if unaccompanied minors make it to the U.S. and are apprehended by US law enforcement after crossing into the country, these children enter into a complicated maze: a system that includes Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) officers, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centers, private subcontracted facilities and programs for minors, and immigration courts. And then, whatever the outcome of their court proceedings, unaccompanied minors can face challenges in integrating in the U.S. or re-integrating into their home countries.
“The U.S. has a long tradition of offering refuge for those who fear for their safety, for those who because of their status face serious danger, but there’s a gap in our law when it comes to children.”
-The Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights
The above quotes from KIND and The Young Center note the legal gap in the U.S. that migrant youth contend with — and we argue that this gap extends into our consciousness. While children are recognized as a vulnerable population by the United Nations, outside of outrageous cases of children dying in U.S. custody, this population has been hidden from much of U.S. public scrutiny surrounding immigration reform. Instead, immigration discourse either criminalizes migrants (which is factually inaccurate, as the majority have only committed the “crime” of illegal entry, a misdemeanor) or focuses on the Dreamers’ and the “hard-working” immigrants’ pathways to citizenship debate.
Every so often, pictures and articles surface, and UACs make headlines. But these children are more than just headlines. It’s long past time to understand this complex maze of the U.S. immigration system for unaccompanied children.
We hope this series can shed some light and spark your advocacy and activism.
- Note on Language: Throughout this blog, we will try to use the terms unaccompanied minor (children), unaccompanied child(ren), and migrant child(ren)/youth interchangeably to signal the population legally known as UACs. We find that the term UAC, though legally correct, is a sterile and dehumanizing way to speak about these youth.
Danielle Bertaux, Jenni Gargano, Amal Rass, and Kara Sparling are graduate students at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in Medford, Massachusetts. This blog was developed for Professor Katrina Burgess’ Migration and Transnationalism in Latin America course conducted in Fall 2020.
