More than 4,000 unaccompanied migrant children have moved in with sponsors in Washington, Idaho and Oregon since the start of 2015, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.
Many of them are being settled to await their court proceedings with families in rural parts of the Northwest, and a growing number are coming to stay with families in Eastern Washington.
SPR’s Morning Edition host, Owen Henderson, sat down with reporter Rachel Spacek, who’s been digging into the challenges those kids and their sponsors are facing for the news organization InvestigateWest.
Read Spacek's original piece here.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
OWEN HENDERSON: So let's break this story down a little bit. If lots of these kids are now living in rural areas of the Northwest, which already don't have a ton of legal or case management type resources, what does that mean for these kids' situations in particular?
RACHEL SPACEK: They are in really difficult situations and there are not a lot of legal resources for them. They do rely a lot on offices in kind of the bigger cities, but that have, you know, maybe a couple resources that they're able to dedicate to more rural parts of the states.
But it's really lacking. And according to data from the Executive Office of Immigration Review, which is kind of a clearinghouse of data on migrant children, over 3,000 unaccompanied children in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho did not have legal assistance in their deportation cases. Really very few children have legal representation in their cases.
OH: So I think a lot of listeners would be familiar with the idea of getting a court-appointed attorney if you can't afford one here in the U.S., but is that not the case for these unaccompanied minors?
RS: Yeah, that is not the case. Immigration court is a little bit wonkier compared to those kinds of domestic cases, but you don't have a legal right to a court-appointed attorney. So this is someone that these kids or their sponsor families have to find.
And if they're, again, in rural parts, there's not a ton of pro bono resources, especially for immigration court. So this is something that you have to pay for. So again, this kind of points to why there are thousands of kids who don't have legal representation, because it's definitely harder to find and afford.
OH: And you've touched on this a little bit, but put a little bit of a finer point on why that access to representation is important for these kids in these legal cases.
RS: So an organization called Kids in Need of Defense found that the success rate for getting some type of legal status in unaccompanied migrant cases is five times higher when you do have legal representation.
So someone to kind of defend you and navigate your case through immigration court.
SAMUEL SMITH: “Removal defense cases are incredibly complex.”
RS: That's Samuel Smith. He's an immigration attorney and director of Immigrant Legal Aid Services at Manzanita House, a Spokane-based nonprofit that supports immigrants and refugees.
SS: “We want to make sure that if we're taking someone's case that we have the time and the knowledge base to do a good job.”
RS: He says immigration cases, especially those involving deportations, are complicated and time consuming.
And attorneys have to file motions to reopen cases that may have been closed and already ordered for deportation. They have to file time extensions. And all of that would be incredibly difficult for a child to navigate alone.
And again, we're talking about minors. So these kids could be anywhere from babies to a 17-year-old.
OH: These kids, we've already established, are often in rural areas. What other kinds of challenges can they face besides a lack of legal representation, especially a lack of pro bono legal representation?
RS: Even just very basic things like getting to their court hearings can be hard. I talked to Cindy Liou from KIND, again, Kids in Need of Defense. And she said with the growing numbers of children in eastern Washington especially, it's a challenge for them to get to immigration court in the Seattle area.
And they often live with sponsors who live in more farm working and rural areas. So it's very difficult to get time off to drive kids up there. And there's not a lot of case management in the rural areas.
So they don't have a lot of resources to get them to court. So that's really difficult. Smith, again, with Manzanita House in Spokane, worked with an unaccompanied migrant child who was navigating their case alone.
And he found that the client was ordered to be deported basically for missing a court hearing. And that client just didn't know where they were supposed to be and when. And just missing that one hearing because they didn't know their case was at a different location led to very severe consequences.
And lucky for that specific client, Smith was able to take their case, and they reopened it and are in the process of trying to get them legal status. But for someone who misses a court date or didn't know where it was, the consequence is deportation possibly.
OH: So that's the overall situation. But I have to imagine that things are going to get a lot more complicated under the incoming Trump administration.
RS: Yes, that's true. Trump has promised mass deportations on a level that the U.S. hasn't seen before.
And he has a number of other promises. He wants to end birthright citizenship for children born in the U.S. to undocumented parents. He also says to attempt to avoid separating families, that he would deport entire families.
And that would include even family members with U.S. citizenship or some kind of legal status if other members are undocumented. And that's very scary for all kinds of mixed status families.
And we did contact several organizations that work with unaccompanied migrant children in the Pacific Northwest. And many of them declined to be interviewed, mostly out of concern for their client safety and just fear of the rhetoric around children and deportation and immigrants under the Trump administration and just lead up to the election.
Smith with Manzanita House, again — he said that he's seeing that a lot of clients have withdrawn from any type of legal assistance and are planning to basically leave the country to just not deal with possibly getting deported by the U.S. government.
SS: “People considering that they have or fearing that they really have no opportunity and worried that their family and their lives are going to be really negatively impacted by the policies that might be implemented.”
RS: I also talked with Molly Chew, who's a Portland-based immigration advocate. She works for VECINA, which is an organization that assists sponsor families for migrant children. And on her end of things, she worries and has seen that a lot of sponsor families are fearful of their own deportation and possibly fearful of becoming sponsor families because you do have to work with the federal government to become a sponsor.
A lot of sponsor families are migrants themselves and might have family members who are undocumented and many of them are worried about their risk of deportation in addition to the child that they've sponsored.
And with fewer sponsor families, that would leave a lot of unaccompanied migrant children staying longer in shelters and detention centers as they're waiting to connect with a sponsor.
And current policy under the Biden administration is the federal government office that deals with unaccompanied migrant children cases.
The Office of Refugee Resettlement doesn't share information about sponsor families with the Department of Homeland Security for immigration enforcement purposes, but she knows that that's no guarantee that that policy will remain the same under the Trump administration. So there's a lot of fear around that.
