What Can be Done to Help Unaccompanied Migrant Minor Children?

According to the U.S. Border Patrol nearly 400,000 people who were attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border during the 2018 fiscal year were apprehended, and many of them were minors. 

The U.S. witnessed a 21 percent increase in unaccompanied minors attempting to cross the southern border.  

These children are generally unaware of U.S. Immigration regulations, traveling alone or with a human trafficker, sometimes being manipulated, working for drug smugglers, or led by traffickers and cartels making promises that cannot be kept.  The result is that most cannot be legally admitted to the United States.  While many families send their children on alone, or with smugglers or traffickers, in our piece, Are We There Yet? Immigration Reform for the Best Interests of Children, Berkeley La Raza L. J. (2013)(reprinted Regent J. Int’l L. (2013)), we discuss solutions for children which focus on trying to protect these kids.  Here are just two:

1) Immigration authorities apply the state’s best interests of the child standard:

Requiring immigration officials to apply the host state’s best interest of the child statutes in federal immigration proceedings is a realistic policy proposal immigration advocates should strive to achieve, as is largely already occurring. Immigration judges could use their judicial discretion to apply the local state’s best interests of the child standard.  Immigration judges work to consult the judges and officials of local family courts in order to ensure they apply the standard correctly.

2) Implement federal-state cooperation in immigration proceedings:

Too often conflict, rivalry, and competition characterize the posture between state and federal governments in immigration conflicts. Cooperation between ICE, state child welfare services agencies, and state family courts would strongly serve the best interests of the children whose families are involved in immigration proceedings. Such measures would allow for state child welfare agencies to facilitate more effective family reunification processes, which would reduce a portion of the burden on both federal and state child welfare funds.

These are just two of our many suggested solutions.  Helpful measures like these can occur, and are happening in many places already, but these solutions are also thwarted by sanctuary city or state status, causing what may have been intended for good to actually work to the harm of children, placing them at grave risk for human trafficking, and pitting state and federal officials against each other, with children caught in between.

To learn more about the harms – and the solutions - facing children in America’s immigration crisis download  Immigration Reform for the Best Interests of Children.