by Lauren Heidbrink and Sarah Diaz

This ground-breaking study examines the treatment of unaccompanied children held in Office of Refugee Resettlement custody. The findings provide valuable insight into the government’s legal obligations to protect and care for migrant children and youth.

When established in 2003, the Office of Refugee Resettlement’s (ORR) Division of Unaccompanied Children’s Services cared for roughly 6,000 children in thirteen facilities. Twenty years later, ORR’s program has grown to over 240 facilities and programs spread across 23 states. Global child migration is at an all-time high as more children flee extreme violence, corruption, forced gang conscription, social inequality, and the effects of climate change. As ORR’s program for unaccompanied children is expected to grow, Loyola University Chicago’s Center for the Human Rights of Children (CHRC) undertook an 18-month interdisciplinary study to examine the conditions of care for unaccompanied children in federal custody.

The study uniquely brings together socio-legal scholarship on children’s rights, migration studies, and child welfare in a comprehensive examination of the care of unaccompanied children in ORR custody. Enlisting a national survey with 135 respondents and 55 in-depth interviews with current stakeholders—including facility staff, clinicians, attorneys, and advocates—we identify ORR’s strengths and challenges in providing research-informed, culturally-, linguistically- and age- appropriate services to children in government custody.

To ensure a holistic evaluation of children’s needs—those needs essential to ensuring the well-being and proper development the child—researchers employed a comprehensive, internationally-recognized interdisciplinary tool: the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Using this framework, researchers identified distinct areas for evaluation, including the recognition of a child’s voice; measures for safety and protection; right to family unity; access to health care, legal services, education, recreation, and leisure; and the right to practice one’s religion, culture, and language. Researchers also evaluated these core areas with respect to the intersectional identities of young people, including for specialized populations such as Indigenous children, pregnant and parenting teens, children with disabilities, LGBTQIA+ children, and children aging out of ORR care. Finally, the study sought to identify policies and practices that shape children’s experience of ORR custody, including information sharing as well as staffing and training.

Each section of the report identifies key findings and extensive recommendations across multiple domains. While too numerous to distill in an executive summary, the following high-level findings and recommendations can be used as a roadmap for the report. A deeper dive into each area of the report will yield detailed findings and corresponding recommendations that identify immediate, concrete, achievable recommendations and strategies to improve the quality of care for children seeking safety in the United States.

FINDINGS

1. Unsuitability of congregate care for children: Approximately 85% of children in ORR custody are placed in congregate care facilities—facilities that most commonly hold 50 to 200 children with some facilities holding up to 1,400 children. While the findings and recommendations contained in this document are designed to ameliorate the conditions of such care, it cannot go unnoted that ORR’s use of congregate care—a form of child detention—is contrary to the well-being, health, and development of migrant children.

2. Need to solicit and incorporate children’s wishes: Children in ORR custody have little opportunity to provide input on the conditions of their care. When asked if there are formal feedback mechanisms available to children, 45% of survey respondents indicated that they were unaware of any mechanisms for child feedback. 35% of respondents were aware of a comment box as the only feedback mechanism for children. In addition to conditions of care, the voice of the child is not routinely reflected in the family reunification process. Survey respondents indicated that 1 in 4 children do not have meaningful input in their family reunification. This trend appears across other areas including, importantly, decision-making related to the child’s medical and mental health care, preferred religious practices, and preferred cultural observances. Creating opportunities and processes that incorporate children’s wishes are central to providing trauma-responsive care and creating a safe space for children.

3. Inconsistent quality of care and monitoring across facilities. There is considerable variation in the conditions of care, access to services, and training of staff across facility types, sizes and locations. For example, in the provision of medical care, our findings indicated that ORR struggles with “less visible” medical and mental health needs such that 90% of survey respondents opined that children do not receive the highest standard of mental health care. These inconsistencies persisted across other areas of a child’s care, for example outdoor spaces for recreation and leisure vary considerably such that only 38% of survey respondents indicated that children regularly go outdoors to play. The variations also appear in education and the implementation of access to culture, language, and religion. For example, one participant shared, “we provide Muslim children time and space to pray, but transportation to a place of worship with an Imam is rare.” In contrast, in another facility, a participant explained, “children get a prayer rug but not a special place to pray.” These inconsistencies appear to result from limited or ambiguous policy guidance, variance in the interpretation
   of ORR policy, and limited supervision of facilities by ORR and state child-welfare licensing bodies. In fact, even in areas related to safety and protection, including reporting abuse, interviewees consistently shared that law enforcement and child welfare agencies may not respond to reports of abuse. The inconsistency of care is further exacerbated by high rates of staff turnover and burnout which create challenges in hiring and retaining a well-qualified and well-trained workforce.

4. Specialized populations of children are acutely impacted. Children’s social and political identities are multifaceted and intersectional, uniquely shaping how they experience ORR custody. Specific populations—namely Indigenous children, pregnant and parenting teens, children with disabilities, LGBTQIA+ youth, and children aging-out or aged-out of care—consistently do not receive the services to which they are entitled. The clearest example of this related to Indigenous children and the underutilization of interpretation services; when asked why language lines are not used or underutilized, staff described the inconvenience of scheduling telephonic interpreters when they can “get by” in Spanish. Similarly, we found that facilities struggle to provide specialized services to children with disabilities with many respondents reporting that facilities will “screen out” children with specialized needs rather than accepting the child with heightened needs into the placement. Our findings indicate that ORR facilities were unable to either promptly identify or fully address the needs of those with intersecting vulnerabilities including pregnancy, LGBTQIA+ identity, and disability. The full findings for each of these specialized populations are laid out in the report.

5. Institutionalized procedures for family reunification and release presume immigrant parents are unable to provide proper care for the child. ORR’s family reunification policies appear predicated on the presumption that parents and identified care givers for unaccompanied children are “unfit” until proven otherwise. To overcome this presumption, ORR enlists a series of institutional processes—family reunification packets, fingerprinting, proof of income, and home studies—that are arduous for families to complete, fail to effectively evaluate the fitness of caregivers, and tend to ignore the harm of protracted custody. For example, 54% of respondents identified documentation requirements as the primary reason for delays in family reunification (followed closely by biometric requirements). These components of family reunification delay are reported to be deeply impacted by sponsors’ fear of ORR’s perceived or actual association with law enforcement. Similarly, 42% of survey respondents indicated that home studies unnecessarily delay family reunification. These procedures are contrary to fundamental domestic child welfare principles that presume fitness of parents or family members in the absence of allegations or evidence of abuse, abandonment or neglect.

6. Need for greater transparency and accountability. Staff and stakeholders consistently shared a need for greater transparency and accountability in processes and decisions regarding the care and custody of unaccompanied children. This includes investigations into abuse and mistreatment within facilities, family reunification/release decisions, significant incident reports, transfers to more secure facilities, referrals for specialized evaluations and health services, age-determination and age-out procedures, and information sharing between ORR and law enforcement agencies.

Read the full report here.

About the authors

Lauren Heidbrink, PhD is an anthropologist and Professor of Human Development at the California State U., Long Beach. She is currently a Fulbright Fellow in Guatemala (2024) and was recently a Visiting Fellow at the Center for US-Mexican Studies at the University of California, San Diego (2022-2023) and with the Program in Latin American Studies at Princeton University (2023). She is author of Migrant Youth, Transnational Families, and the State: Care and Contested Interests  (U. of Pennsylvania Press 2014) and Migranthood: Youth in a new era of deportation (Stanford U. Press 2020; published in Spanish with UNAM-CIMSUR 2021).

Sarah Diaz, J.D. LL.M.is the Associate Director of the Center for the Human Rights of Children and Lecturer in the School of Law at Loyola University Chicago. Professor Diaz has worked at the intersection of child migration and human rights for fifteen years, working with NGOs on complex human rights, migration, and international criminal law issues.