Where We Stand: A 20-Year Retrospective of the Unaccompanied Children’s Program in the United States

The passage of the Homeland Security Act in 2002 transferred responsibility for the care and placement of unaccompanied children from the Commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service to the Director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). Twenty years later, Jenny Rodriguez of USCRI assesses the impact of the legislation and subsequent developments in a report entitled Where We Stand: A 20-Year Retrospective of the Unaccompanied Children’s Program in The United States. Initial challenges such as Flores litigation or a lack of statutory guidance were remedied by the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008, but other events such as the 2010 earthquake in Haiti have brought an influx of unaccompanied children that required creative solutions. The authors conclude their study by making six policy recommendations: making post-release services for all unaccompanied children a legal requirement; requiring ORR to appoint child advocates for the most vulnerable children; allocating funding so all unaccompanied children released from ORR custody have attorneys; expanding the Unaccompanied Refugee Minors program for children without family or appropriate sponsors in the United States; developing new and creative support programs for unaccompanied children after release; and ratifying the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). (The Immigrant Learning Center’s Public Education Institute

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