As the crackdown on immigration by the Trump administration continues, unaccompanied migrant kids are now facing a reduction in services after the Trump administration canceled a contract with the nonprofit Acacia Center for Justice, which had previously worked with the government to provide legal services through its network of providers around the country to unaccompanied migrant under age 18.
So what are the consequences for these kids?
Alvaro de la Cruz-Correa, a Spokane-based immigration attorney who works with minors, spoke to SPR's Owen Henderson about the difference legal representation can make for children trying to seek asylum in the United States.
"A lot of the times these children here do have a path to legal status. They do have a way of becoming a legal permanent resident. They do have a way of becoming a citizen," de la Cruz-Correa told SPR News. "But if they don't know how to state their case, if they don't know how to present their case, they're going to go in front of a judge and they're going to say things that they're not really sure what they mean."
More policy changes under the Trump Administration are likely to decrease the number of families willing to sponsor children, the attorney said, which would result in some kids being left in the care of the Office of Refugee Resettlement. De la Cruz-Correa said that's not in the kids' best interests, claiming the children don't get the care they need and that the detainment can hinder their development.
"When they come here, they're seeking humanitarian relief. And now when they're coming here, they're being that much further detained and that much more denigrated," he said. "It's sad because, again, they are children dealing with real things.
"And if these were children within this country dealing with a similar issue, we would be having different kinds of headlines about how we should be protecting them. But because these aren't the correct people in the eyes of the government to protect."
In a statement to SPR, the Office of Refugee Resettlement said, "Children for whom no viable sponsor is identified remain in ORR’s care and can be placed in transitional or long-term foster care. Even after ORR places a child in long-term foster care because there is no viable sponsor available, case managers continue to look for and assess the suitability of additional potential sponsors.
"While they remain in ORR care, all children have access to healthcare, legal services, translation services, and mental and behavioral health counselors. They can communicate daily with their family and meet with a case manager at least once a week."
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
OWEN HENDERSON: So, on March 21st, the Trump administration ended a contract that provides legal help to children who enter the U.S. without a parent or guardian. Walk us through where things stand at the moment.
ALVARO DE LA CRUZ-CORREA: With the unaccompanied children program, there's a kind of big non-profit named Acacia that had a billion dollar contract with the federal government that was doing an attorney representation program throughout the country that enabled representation for unaccompanied youth within the country to be given their fair chance at due process. It wasn't a stop work order; it was a complete cut of the actual contract in and of itself.
So, what it actually did, took about 95% of the funding from the program where attorneys could no longer represent children in dire situations. And that all that is limited to right now is like basic know your rights programs to be given to the unaccompanied children. But when it comes to representation and their ability to get due process or access to an attorney, it's been completely cut off.
And from here on out, a lot of these children are going to be without representation and having to navigate the complex immigration system on their own. Due process is within the 5th and 14th amendment, and it's one of the greatest rights that people do not talk about.
What due process is, is it's your day in court. It's your day to state your case. It's your day to show why it is that you should be here within this country and the way that you're going to be attaining status. And by taking away attorneys, although they say that due process is still there, it's not the same.
The 14th amendment is there for a reason. And that's because due process is important and we don't want it just to be the states that enforce due process, but the entire federal government in and of itself, because that's the way a functioning democracy should work.
OH: Even before this contract was canceled, lots of unaccompanied minors in the U.S. were without legal representation. So what does this move change on the ground for these kids?
ACC: The legal process has to be maneuvered no matter what. So with an attorney, without an attorney, a four-year-old child, a seven-year-old child, a teenager, they still have to navigate the system. They still have to show up to court, but they now have to defend themselves.
And the administration has said that that is completely fair and that they should be able to state their case on their own. But in reality, the immigration system is extremely complex. And because there is no attorney no longer with them, you're going to have these children in front of judges trying to state their claim of whether it be asylum, whether it be special immigrant juvenile classification, to try to get their visa without representation.
And the statistics right now show that it's like, if you have representation, you have an above 70% chance of getting through the process successfully. But without an attorney, it's like 90, 95% failure rate. So what cutting off representation really does is it eliminates the opportunity for a lot of these migrant youth to be able to have access to the legal status that they're seeking.
People think that people are here illegally, but it's not really that simple. A lot of the times, these children here do have a path to legal status. They do have a way of becoming a legal permanent resident.
They do have a way of becoming a citizen. But if they don't know how to state their case, they're going to go in front of a judge and they're going to say things that they're not really sure what they mean.
And it's going to ultimately lead to their departure, as opposed to if there's an attorney that represents them and is there to give their case to kind of relax and give the facts that are necessary, they might be able to become permanent residents and citizens eventually.
It's not that they're here and want to do bread crimes or be criminals or anything like that. They're here looking to escape tragedy or abuse, abandonment, neglect, or political turmoil to try to start a life in a place that has been told for decades is a land of opportunity for those who are dealing with these humanitarian issues. But without attorney representation, it just becomes a dwindling number.
OH: Now, on March 24th, the administration announced that the Office of Refugee Resettlement would be allowed to share the immigration status of these kids' sponsor families with law enforcement agencies. A lot of sponsor families have mixed immigration statuses. So how do you think this could affect that aspect of these kids' care?
ACC: Yeah, so in the legal field, there's a thing called the chilling effect, where it might not necessarily affect everybody, but because the policy is out there, people will be that much more scared to sponsor a family member, to sponsor a child, to sponsor a cousin, because they are looking out for themselves and they don't want to be scrutinized.
So people don't want to go to school. People don't want to sign up for things. And as well with the ORR policy, now they made it that much harder to become a sponsor where you need to prove that you have familial relation of some sort, and that there are that much more barriers to even getting out of the ORR system.
Because to my understanding, what the Office of Refugee Resettlement is for a lot of these unaccompanied children is essentially kind of like a detention center in its own right. And without the ability to have sponsors for these children, one, because of the chilling effect, two, because it's that much harder to become a sponsor, what happens is a lot of these children will remain in this kind of pseudo foster care system within the Office of Refugee Resettlement and will eventually, at the time where they turn to adults, will either be removed or they'll be taken up to an adult detention center. It's just one way of facilitating migrants to be stuck in a facility, move on to the next facility and not into the general public broadly.
OH: And what impact do you think that would have on these kids?
ACC: Eventually, what some of even my clients have stated within themselves is that they just kind of want to go back to their home country. They want to give up. They understand that there's dangers back in their home country, but they would rather risk being able to just maneuver freely in their home country and be at risk of gangs or bad politics or the inability to work, find food, because they're just in a situation that could be that much worse here in the United States because they're now being given the bare minimum, as well as — a lot of these migrant youth, they're not ignorant to the fact that the sentiment across the country is negative against them.
A thing that kind of constantly is being told is, ‘Are they really trying to do this to me? Do they really want us out of the country?’ And the hard thing that I have to say is ‘It's not that simple, but there is some truth to it. That's why the representation that you have with me currently is that much more important because we don't want you to be a forgotten person in society.’
One thing that I try to tell people is that at the end of the day, these are all humans, but when we go ahead and put them in these detention facilities, they don't get the ability to develop.
They don't get the ability to learn. They don't get the ability to read, write, and they just become that much less of a human in its own right. And that's kind of what it seems to be the goal, is to dehumanize.
Although they might not be able to articulate it in that same way, they understand that that's kind of what is happening to them.
I accepted this job because I am a father and being a father is something that is deeply important to me. So when I went and sought an immigration job, I understand that it's politically divisive.
So I went and focused on doing unaccompanied children work because I thought that would be the area that wouldn't be attacked by the federal government. And what I've come to find out is that's one of the first areas that's being attacked. And in and of itself, it's a shock to me because you would think that children would be one of the more important people in general, not even an immigrant, a child that is someone that we protect.
So I'm still in very much shock that it's children that they're going after. It's a shock.
OH: Alvaro de la Cruz Correa is an attorney with the Immigrant Justice Corps and the Spokane nonprofit Manzanita House. Thanks so much for your time.
ACC: Thank you very much. It was an honor to be here.
