Last updated Stacked-bar chart showing the number of unaccompanied minors apprehended by the US Border Patrol, broken down by country of origin, 2014 - May 31, 2019.
Unaccompanied Alien Children (or UAC, also referred to as unaccompanied alien minors[1] or UAMs[2]) is a United States government classification for children in immigration custody and the name of a program operated by the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR; a division of the United States Department of Health and Human Services, HHS) to house and care for them.[3] The term designates unaccompanied minors who are aliens, typically those who have been apprehended outside of a legal port of entry or judged inadmissible[4] upon their entry.
The phrase "unaccompanied alien children" was first used in the Homeland Security Act of 2002.[5] HHS defines "unaccompanied child" (UC) as a person "who has no lawful immigration status in the United States; has not attained 18 years of age, and with respect to whom; 1) there is no parent or legal guardian in the United States; or 2) no parent of legal guardian in the United States is available to provide care and physical custody."[6]
However, the practice of the Department of Homeland Security is to only define children traveling with their parents or legal guardians as part of "family units" and all other children as "unaccompanied minors."[5] As a result, children traveling with grandparents, adult siblings, and aunts and uncles are referred to the UAC program.[5] Children separated from their parents under the Trump administration's family separation policy were referred to the UAC program.[7]
ORR's Unaccompanied Alien Children Program began in 2003 and housed fewer than 8,000 children per year through 2011.[3] Significant increases in the population occurred during crises in 2014, 2016, 2019, and 2020–21 all driven by a surge in unaccompanied migrants fleeing violence and poverty in the Northern Triangle of Central America.[3][8][9] In fiscal year 2018, 49,100 children were referred to the UAC program, an average of 135 per day.[3] This rate has since increased, and reached 287 daily referrals in April 2019.[3] In April 2019, an average of 12,587 children were housed in the program, which then had a capacity of 14,363 beds.[3] In April 2021, amid a renewed surge in unaccompanied minor migrants, more than 17,000 children were housed in HHS shelters, a number above the department's capacity.[9]
Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), an agency of the Department of Homeland Security, holds unaccompanied children after their initial arrest. CBP is legally obligated to refer them to the ORR's UAC program within 72 hours, but in 2019, such children are being for weeks or months in CBP custody.[10] On June 13, 2019, the government reported that 2,081 UAC were held by the CBP;[10] in late June, a CBP official stated that the number had been reduced to less than 1,000.[11]
Age
Most UAC are over 14 years old.[12] The younger minority are assumed unable to make decisions independently.[13] In 2009-2010, 41% of children under 14 were either 13 or 14.[14] In 2013, 24% of apprehended child arrivals were 14 or younger,[14] meaning 76% were 15-17.
When the U.S. Border Patrol apprehends a potential minor, the agency determines age based on biographical data collected from the child and "multiple forms of evidence, including interview statements, documentation (such as birth certificates) or professional medical opinion based on radiographs (or x-rays), if necessary."[15][16][17]
History
Number of Children referred to Office of Refugee Resettlement
The Office of Refugee Resettlement took over the supervision of unaccompanied minors in 2003. In the first nine years of its operations, it was charged with fewer than 8,000 children per year.[18]
The number of apprehended UAC doubled from 2009 to 2013.[14]
After a 2015 dip, in 2016 the number of apprehended UAC rose back to high levels similar to 2014.[21] The Border Patrol reports that it apprehended 32,372 unaccompanied minors from October 1, 2017 to May 31, 2018.[22] There was a 4% increase in the Southwest in FY2018 compared to FY2017.[23]
In early 2016, the Senate Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Committee published a report that sharply criticized the ORR's mishandling of resettling UACs.[24] The investigation found that ORR performed home studies in less than five percent of cases and never once terminated a sponsorship agreement with a sponsor. ORR's official policy stated that sponsors could refuse contact between the agency and the UAC, and should the sponsor refuse contact, the case was considered closed.
In 2018 the Trump administration reported tens of thousands of UAC were released annually and only 3.5% had been removed from the United States.[25] In 2017 and 2018, under a zero tolerance policy, children who were separated from arrested adults they were traveling with are treated as UAC.[7]
The number of unaccompanied minors sharply increased in 2020–21, and was projected to be larger than previous surges in 2014, 2016, and 2019.[9] Most unaccompanied migrant children were fleeing poverty and violence in the three "Northern Triangle" countries of central America: El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.[20][9] By April 2021, there were more than 20,000 children and teenagers in the custody of the government, of whom almost 17,000 were in U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) shelters, and the remainder were held in U.S. Border Patrol facilities that resembled detention.[9] The government's system was seriously strained, since it lacked the capacity to handle the surge; the Biden administration has sought to expedite transfers of migrant children from the "border jails" to HHS-run shelters, group homes, and other facilities.[9]
The New York Times reported in April 2021: "The United States has long struggled to quickly move children out of the government's care to make room for new arrivals. Most are eventually matched with a parent who is already in the country. But others are handed over to more distant relatives, friends or foster parents. The more distant the connection, the longer the children are typically held in the shelters while health officials do background checks to ensure their safety. Of the roughly 2,000 minors released to sponsors in the past week, about half were reunited with parents or legal guardians after an average of 23 days. Those with more distant relatives had to wait on average nearly two months."[9]
Customs and Border Patrol detention of UACs
Border Patrol Processing Unaccompanied Children on the South Texas Border in 2014
Customs and Border Patrol apprehends tens of thousands of children annually at the US–Mexico border, including those who are deemed inadmissible for legal entry into the United States at ports of entry and those detained outside of ports of entry. The CBP assigns children a status as either a member of a "family unit" or an unaccompanied minor, according to the following definition: "Individuals under the age of 18 who were not with their biological parent or legal guardian at the time of the encounter."[26] Adults traveling with children are required to verify their legal or biological parentage, and if they cannot, the children are deemed unaccompanied.[27] As a result, children traveling with grandparents, adult siblings, and aunts and uncles are referred to the UAC program.[5]
Regardless of whether they are deemed UACs or part of family units, children and adults are initially held in CBP processing centers. The 1997 Flores v. Reno Settlement Agreement requires the government to hold children "in facilities that are safe and sanitary" and to rapidly transfer unaccompanied children to ORR custody.[10] In mid-2019 reports on conditions in CBP processing centers showed that children were being held for days or weeks rather than the 72-hour maximum required under Flores.[10][11] HHS Secretary Alex Azar stated on June 24, 2019, that, "We do not have capacity for more of these unaccompanied children who come across the border. And what happens is they get backed up there at the Department of Homeland Security's facilities because I can't put someone in a bed that does not exist in our shelters."[11]
Conditions
In June 2019, a legal team inspected (per the Flores settlement) a facility in Clint, Texas (near El Paso) where 250 infant, child and teenage migrants were detained. The lawyers accused the government of neglecting and mistreating the young migrants. The relatively older minors had to take care of the younger ones. The children said they were not fed fruits or vegetables and had not bathed or changed their clothes in weeks. The children were "essentially being warehoused, as many as 300 children in a cell, with almost no adult supervision." The children were "malnourished", there were outbreaks of flu and lice, and "children sleeping on the floor". Professor Warren Binford of the Willamette University was one of the inspectors. She declared that in her years of inspections, this was "the worst conditions" she had ever seen. She also said that the children at Clint were claiming asylum. In response to the situation at Clint, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) declared: "our short-term holding facilities were not designed to hold vulnerable populations and we urgently need additional humanitarian funding to manage this crisis."[28][29][30]
Also that month, Dolly Lucio Sevier, a board-certified doctor, visited the largest CBP detention center in the United States, the Ursula facility in McAllen, Texas which held migrant minors. Her visit came after a flu outbreak at the facility that resulted in five infants requiring to enter a neonatal intensive care unit. Sevier wrote that a medical declaration that the "conditions within which [the migrant minors] are held could be compared to torture facilities ... extreme cold temperatures, lights on 24 hours a day, no adequate access to medical care, basic sanitation, water, or adequate food." All of the 39 children she assessed showed signs of trauma.[31]
Under federal law, the migrant minors were supposed to be detained for a maximum of 72 hours. At both the facilities in Clint and McAllen, many children said that they had been detained for three weeks or more.[29][31]
In June 2019, three Ninth Circuit heard the case, 17-56297 Jenny Flores v. William Barr, in which Sarah Fabian, the senior attorney in the Department of Justice's Office of Immigration Litigation requested the Court to overturn the July 2017 district court's order "requiring the government to provide detainees with hygiene items such as soap and toothbrushes in order to comply with the “safe and sanitary conditions” requirement set forth in the 1997 Flores Settlement Agreement". During the June 20, 2019 proceedings, Ninth Circuit Judge William Fletcher said it was "inconceivable" that the United States government would consider it "safe and sanitary" to detain child migrants in conditions where it was "cold all night long, lights on all night long, sleeping on concrete and you've got an aluminium foil blanket?"[32][33] Fabian said that the Flores agreement mandating "safe and sanitary" conditions for detained migrant children was "vague" and it was not compulsory for the government to provide toothbrushes, soap or adequate bedding to them.[34][35]
Office of Refugee Resettlement UAC Program facilities
The ORR coordinates a network of over 100 facilities in seventeen states housing over ten thousand children within the UAC program.[18] Approximately, 11,400 children were in ORR custody in mid-June 2018.[36] The largest share of these children—5,129—were held in facilities managed by Southwest Key Programs, an Austin-based non-profit with facilities in Texas, Arizona, and California.[36] On average, as of June 15, 2018, children had stayed in these facilities for 57 days.[18] According to spokesperson Wolfe, the Tornillo Port of Entry is being used as a temporary shelter for UAC.[37]
By December 17, 2018, 14,314 children were housed by the program. Overall, the Associated Press reported that the UAC program supervised over 150 programs in 17 states in 2017 and 2018, noting that their conditions "range from bucolic to jail-like."[38] At that time, the three largest facilities—the Tornillo tent city, the Homestead (Florida) Temporary Shelter for Unaccompanied Children, and Casa Padre in Brownsville, Texas—housed over 5,400 children. The five largest contractors for the program oversaw more than 11,600 children in the UAC program. These providers are Southwest Key (headquartered in Austin, Texas); BCFS Health and Human Services (San Antonio, Texas); Comprehensive Health Services Inc. (Cape Canaveral, Florida); Cayuga Centers (Auburn, New York); and Heartland Alliance (Chicago, Illinois).[38]
In June 2019, HHS cut all recreational and educational programs for unaccompanied children to focus its budget on providing for the basic needs of the children it houses.[11]
UAC facilities include the following:
Casa Padre, a private facility owned and operated by Southwest Key Programs, in Brownsville, Texas—A housing facility for children built in a former Walmart and operated under contract for the Department of Health and Human Services. On June 13, it housed 1,469 children, a plurality of whom arrived as unaccompanied minors crossing the border. S
Unaccompanied minors walk in a Homestead, Florida, facility supervised by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, on June 20, 2018.
Estrella del Norte, a private facility owned and operated by Southwest Key Programs, in Tucson, Arizona—A 300-bed housing facility for children, that housed 287 children in mid-June 2018.
The United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is a cabinet-level executive branch department of the U.S. federal government created to protect the health of the U.S. people and providing essential human services. Its motto is "Improving the health, safety, and well-being of America". Before the separate federal Department of Education was created in 1979, it was called the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW).
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is a federal law enforcement agency under the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. ICE's stated mission is to protect the United States from cross-border crime and undocumented immigration that threaten national security and public safety.
Reno v. Flores, 507 U.S. 292 (1993), was a Supreme Court of the United States case that addressed the detention and release of unaccompanied minors.
The United States government holds tens of thousands of immigrants in detention under the control of Customs and Border Protection and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
The 2014 American immigration crisis was a surge in unaccompanied children and women from the Northern Triangle of Central America (NTCA) seeking entrance to the United States in 2014. According to U.S. law, an unaccompanied alien child refers to a person under 18 years of age, who has no lawful immigration status in the U.S., and who does not have a legal guardian to provide physical custody and care.
The bill H.R. 5230, also known as the Secure the Southwest Border Supplemental Appropriations Act, 2014 and the Secure the Southwest Border Act of 2014, is a bill that would provide supplemental FY2014 appropriations to several federal agencies for expenses related to the rise in unaccompanied alien children and alien adults accompanied by an alien minor at the southwest border. The bill would also change the procedures for screening and processing unaccompanied alien children who arrive at the border from certain countries. The bill would provide $659 million in supplemental funding.
The Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act, 2014 is a bill that would appropriate supplemental funds for FY2014 to specified federal agencies and programs to respond to the increased apprehensions of unaccompanied minors along the southwestern border, fight wildfires, and support Israel's Iron Dome anti-missile defense system. The bill would provide $2.7 billion in supplemental funding.
Garza v. Hargan is a case before the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit regarding a juvenile undocumented immigrant in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement who sought to have an abortion.
The Northern American Triangle refers to the Central American countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.
Casa Padre is a shelter for unaccompanied or separated immigrant minors in custody of the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement, a division of Health & Human Services, located in Brownsville, Texas. The site opened in March 2017, and is still housing children in 2022. The building was formerly a Walmart store. The center is run by the nonprofit group Southwest Key Programs under contract from the federal government. Casa Padre is the largest licensed childcare facility in the United States, housing approximately 1,500 youths. The former Walmart store houses boys ranging from ages 10 to 17. According to the Internal Revenue Service, the group houses approximately 5,129 immigrant children in the United States, approximately 4 percent of the unaccompanied minors in the United States today.
The United States family separation policy under the Trump administration was presented to the public as a "zero tolerance" approach intended to deter illegal immigration and to encourage tougher legislation. In some cases, families following the legal procedure to apply for asylum at official border crossings were also separated. It was officially adopted across the entire US–Mexico border from April 2018 until June 2018. Under the policy, federal authorities separated children and infants from parents or guardians with whom they had entered the US. The adults were prosecuted and held in federal jails or deported, and the children were placed under the supervision of the US Department of Health and Human Services. More than 5,500 children, including infants, were removed and up to 2,000 still have not been reunited as of March 2024.
Southwest Key Programs is a Texas-based nonprofit organization that operates shelter facilities for unaccompanied immigrant minors and immigrant youth. It also provides youth justice alternative programming and educational programming. The organization was founded in 1987. Southwest Key reported in August 2016 that it operates in 3 states: California, Arizona, and Texas, with annual revenues of $242 million in 2016.
Ursula is the colloquial name for the Central Processing Center, the largest U.S. Customs and Border Protection detention center for undocumented immigrants. The facility is a retrofitted warehouse that can hold more than 1,000 people. It was opened in 2014 on W. Ursula Avenue in McAllen, Texas. In June 2018, it gained notoriety for the practice of keeping children in large cages made of chain-link fencing.
Family detention is the detention of multiple family members together in an immigration detention context. In the U.S. they are referred to as family detention camps,family detention centers, or family detention facilities.
The Tornillo tent city was a temporary immigrant detention facility for children located in Tornillo, Texas and operated by BCFS on behalf of the Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Refugee Resettlement. The Department termed it an "emergency influx care facility" and named it the Tornillo Influx Facility. When it was built in June 2018, the capacity was 400 minor immigrants with a one month contract. It was later expanded to a capacity of 4,000 minors. As many as 2,800 teenagers were held at the site before its closure was announced in January 2019. This made it one of the largest facilities in ORR's Unaccompanied Alien Children Program. All immigrant children had left the facility by January 11, 2019. Nearly 6,200 minors cycled through the facility within the seven months it operated. The area was previously used for a few months in 2016 to process migrant families and unaccompanied minors.
Homestead Temporary Shelter for Unaccompanied Children is a 3,200-bed migrant children's detention center in Homestead, Florida. Until August 3, 2019, the center had been operated by Comprehensive Health Services, Inc. (CHSi), which is a subsidiary of the homeland security operator Caliburn International. It was believed to be the only remaining for-profit child detention center for migrants. The organization has faced severe criticism concerning immigration. Senator Elizabeth Warren had demanded that the detention facility be "closed down", and calls for investigation and oversight grew stronger when it was revealed that the federal government had paid $33 million in just 46 days for 1,200 of the empty beds.
The Trump administration has detained migrants attempting to enter the United States at the United States–Mexico border. Government reports from the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General in May 2019 and July 2019 found that migrants had been detained under conditions that failed federal standards. These conditions have included prolonged detention, overcrowding, and poor hygiene and food standards.
This is a timeline of events related to migrant children's detention centers in the United States.
John P. Sanders is an American technologist and business executive, who is the former Acting Commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
References
↑ "Remarks by President Trump at Cabinet Meeting". whitehouse.gov. 21 June 2018 – via National Archives. Since 2014 alone, nearly 200,000 unaccompanied alien minors have been released into the United States pending their immigration court proceedings as required under the Immigration and Naturalization Act and related laws and court orders
1 2 3 4 5 6 US Department of Health and Human Services. Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs (ASPA) (2019-05-02). "Latest UAC Data – FY2019". HHS.gov. Retrieved 2019-06-26.
1 2 Holpuch, Amanda; Gambino, Lauren (18 June 2018). "Why are families being separated at the US border?". theguardian.com. After being separated from their parents, the children – some as young as 18 months – are then treated as "unaccompanied alien children", a category which exists primarily to serve children who voluntarily arrive at the border on their own. Unaccompanied alien children are placed in the custody of ORR within 72 hours of being apprehended by border agents. They then wait, in government-run facilities, for weeks or months while agency officials search for relatives or sponsors to care for the child while their immigration case is pending.
1 2 3 "Child Migration by the Numbers"(PDF). BipartianPolicy.Org. June 2014. The number of UAC apprehended doubled between FY 2009 and FY 2013 and is on pace to nearly double again by the end of FY 2014. .. In FY 2013, 24 percent of arriving children were 14 or younger, compared with 10 to 15 percent in FY 2007 and FY 2008. .. Based on case file data obtained from ORR, the Vera Institute of Justice reported that in FY 2009 and FY 2010, 41 percent of children under age 14 were either 13 or 14 and about 59 percent were 12 or younger.
↑ Zamora, Lazaro (21 July 2014). "Unaccompanied Alien Children: A Primer". Bipartisan Policy Center. Upon apprehension, Border Patrol agents gather biographic information from the child and determine age based on multiple forms of evidence, including interview statements, documentation (such as birth certificates) or professional medical opinion based on radiographs (or x-rays), if necessary. via DHS
↑ "Age Determination Practices for Unaccompanied Alien Children - Update"(PDF). Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General. September 2010. To separate unaccompanied children from adult's in ICE custody, ICE attempts to establish the date of birth for any apprehended person not readily identifiable as an adult or child. In those instances, ICE relies on various forms of information for age determination purposes, including interview statements and documentation such as birth certificates. When ICE officials have difficulty determining whether an individual is a child or an adult, they may also obtain a professional medical opinion based on dental or skeletal radiographs, commonly referred to as x-rays, to help make an age determination. ICE's use of radiographs, however, has been criticized as unreliable by some in the medical and advocacy communities. OIG-10-122
↑ Caroll, Rory (15 December 2016). "How Breitbart and the conservative right opened a new front in the war over fake news". theguardian.com. Its main evidence is a "massive increase in the numbers of apprehensions, particularly in the numbers of Unaccompanied Alien Children 'UAC' and Family Unit Aliens (FMUA)". Family unit apprehensions are indeed at a historical high and UAC apprehensions are surging back to levels seen in 2014.
↑ Kopan, Tal (14 June 2018). "Texas port of entry chosen as temporary shelter for unaccompanied children". cnn.com. In a statement, the office that handles child settlement within the Health and Human Services Department said it had chosen a location in Texas to handle the influx. "The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), with the support of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), has selected Tornillo Land Port of Entry as a temporary shelter location for unaccompanied alien children cared for by HHS' Administration for Children and Families," said spokesman Kenneth Wolfe.
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