U.S. immigration law ordains several key protections for the under-18 set, and unaccompanied immigrant children receive the lion’s share of these. However, these protections dissolve the moment the child turns 18 years old, which can leave a number of vulnerable youth in untenably precarious situations, long before they are developmentally or practically ready to hack it on their own.
In immigration law, an unaccompanied alien child (“UAC”) is under 18 years of age, has no lawful immigration status, and has no parent or legal guardian in the U.S. available to provide care and physical custody. One of the principal protections they receive is shelter, provided by the Department of Health and Human Services, through its Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). However, ORR’s legal authority to provide shelter terminates upon a child’s 18th birthday, when s/he is no longer meets the unaccompanied alien child definition.
For a child without someone able and willing to care for them in the U.S., this means that turning 18 presents an untenable choice: transfer into adult immigration detention with ICE or life in the streets.
Adult immigration detention, or ICE custody, is a world away from ORR custody for unaccompanied immigrant children. It’s the difference between a children’s shelter and jail. Children’s shelters provide education, mental health and medical services, and case management. Adult detention centers don’t provide these supports, and the detainees’ access to counsel is significantly more limited. And for the many, many unaccompanied immigrant children who have experienced significant trauma, the overnight switch from a children’s shelter to an adult jail setting can have harmful effects, including possible re-traumatization.
However, the other choice, release to a life on the streets, similarly carries significant risk of harm and re-traumatization. It’s an especially harmful scenario for a child from another culture without family or friends, who speaks another language, and who has few resources to assist him to confront the margins of American society.
Moreover, it’s the very factors that make these street children particularly vulnerable – different language, culture, and education, as well as lack of immigration status – that likewise constrain the already severely limited shelter options for homeless youth in the U.S. As a result, unaccompanied immigrant children seeking shelter post-18 face a menu of options limited to a handful of culturally-appropriate programs with very few openings, homeless youth shelters without language access or other cultural supports, or adult homeless shelters that typically operate only at night. For those outside of major urban areas, there are often no options at all.
These untenable choices and the dearth of pragmatic options for those unaccompanied immigrant children who have the misfortune of turning 18 in the U.S. without having a friend or family member to help them highlights a serious gap in the system of protections for vulnerable unaccompanied immigrant children codified by Congress in the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA). In order to meaningfully address this gap in protections for unaccompanied immigrant children, the combined efforts and expertise of government officials, immigration advocates, and child welfare professionals will be required. In the meantime, CAIR Coalition’s Detained Children’s Program is working to bridge this gap by helping those children in need of shelter at 18 to find it. Although we’ve connected with great programs at local service providers like the Latin American Youth Center and Catholic Charities of Washington and Baltimore, as well as national organizations like the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, these excellent programs alone cannot meet the need, which is why more must be done.
