unaccompanied alien children

Following an emergency federal court action taken last week, New York group home providers caring for unaccompanied Central American minors have begun to move some of those children out of shelters that now constitute a contagion-risky environment in a city that has become the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic. 

The Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) program began in 2003 as part of a recognition by both political parties that when children arrived alone at our border, often in search of safety from circumstances back home, they warranted special protection.

Changes made to the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) website before May 23, 2019, foreshadowed policy changes related to unaccompanied migrant children that were not announced, even to ORR grantees, until May 30, 2019.

A group of California legislators want the state to exercise more oversight over the federal program that handles unaccompanied minors from other countries, including the ones who were separated from their families under Trump’s controversial 2018 policy.

This past Christmas, approximately 9,800 children in the U.S. spent the holiday in large-scale institutions holding more than 100 kids each. These children came from countries including Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador — nations with the highest child murder rates in the world — seeking refuge and safety in the United States.

Each day for the next two weeks, we’ll count down 10 of the biggest stories The Imprint published in 2018. In each, we’ll connect readers with a few links to our coverage of this issue.

There is an old political adage that you should “never let a crisis go to waste,” meaning that a crisis can awaken public interest and create an opportunity to advance policies that might otherwise be unachievable.

I believe that the time has come for each of us to take whatever action is available to stop the abuse of asylum-seeking unaccompanied minors and families being implemented by the current federal administration.

President Trump has backed off his wildly unpopular policy of separating children from asylum-seeking Central American families at the southern border, which was rolled out to help facilitate the administration’s zero-tolerance approach on prosecuting crossers.