The research examines facilities operated by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which have been responsible for the care and custody of unaccompanied migrant children since 2003.
The research examines facilities operated by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which have been responsible for the care and custody of unaccompanied migrant children since 2003.
Loyola’s Center for the Human Rights of Children held a webinar Sept. 24 discussing their recent study which examined the care migrant children receive while in state custody.
The study provides empirical data on how state facilities treat children, filling a decade-long gap in research. The last landmark study on the condition of care of immigrant children was published in 2010, when the number of children taken into custody was less than a tenth of what it is now, according to the new study. Global migration is at an all time high and is predicted to keep rising, the study found.
The CHRC Director, Professor Katherine Kaufka Walts, and the Associate Director, Professor Sarah Diaz, said they came to Loyola to advance human rights advocacy with cutting-edge research.
“Loyola is committed to visionary thinking and radical change when it comes to immigration,” Diaz said. “Especially when it comes to how immigration treats children because it is the last space left where children are treated like miniature adults.”
The research examines facilities operated by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which have been responsible for the care and custody of unaccompanied migrant children since 2003, according to Dr. Lauren Heidbrink, the study’s principal investigator.
Before the ORR, the care and custody of migrant children was the responsibility of Immigration and Naturalization Services — the same agency which detained and deported them. Heidbrink said the change came from a child welfare perspective.
The ORR assumed the Unaccompanied Children Program after years of litigation and advocacy to move guardianship of migrant children away from a law enforcement agency, according to Kaufka Walts.
In 2010, the ORR was responsible for just over 7,000 children and a handful of facilities. In 2023, the ORR was referred 118,923 children, the study reported. Heidbrink said as the number of arrivals increase, the ORR is increasingly looking like a law enforcement agency where the point is detention.
“The system keeps getting bigger and bigger,” Kaufka Walts said. “No one’s done anything. Everyone’s just acting more reactively to it. So there’s more places, more buildings, more facilities, more policies, more staff added to manage this. But you know, we’ve never actually looked at, are we helping kids or are we hurting them?”
Diaz said the goal of the study is to provide sound data anyone in the system can use to advocate for better outcomes for children.
The study provides empirical data which clarifies the scene and illuminates specific areas where improvement is needed, Kaufka Walts said. Several advocacy organizations reached out to the research team to thank them for the data as they want to use it in their own work, she said.
Kaufka Walts said media coverage of crises involving children who were released into the community has previously led to a demand for policies regressive to child welfare.
“The blame always goes back to ORR,” Kaufka Walts said. “Then people say, ‘Oh, now we need stricter rules, and we need law enforcement to take over.’ That’s not what we’re suggesting at all. We don’t want to go backward.”
Approximately 85% of children in the ORR are placed into congregate care, “a form of child detention,” the study found.
“Think about it as kind of the opposite of community care or family care,” Kaufka Walts said. “That is where you have a group of people who are living together, and that could be a residential facility for children who are wards of the state, it could be a prison, it could be a detention facility, it could be housing for seniors.”
The confinement of children in large-scale institutions results in high rates of post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation, according to Heidbrink.
Vida Opoku, a graduate student studying international affairs, said she immigrated from Ghana shortly before turning 18 and aged out of the ORR.
“They have cages, you know, where each cage contains at least ten, six kids,” Opoku said.
Opoku said it was lousy at the detention facility. There were no blankets, so they handed out long foil as a covering. She said they would put you in a cage, and you would stay there.
“People were crying for help,” Opoku said. ”Your mom, your dad, there were no family members, and the people who were there don’t even care because I think they get overwhelmed too. It’s a lot of kids to attend to. So it’s just like, you cry, you get tired, you go to sleep. That was my experience in Texas.”
When Opoku aged out of the ORR, she said she was by herself in Chicago, facing discrimination without support or family.
“You will be mature whether you like it or not,” Opoku said. “When I came here, I had to be a great adult.”
She said many children who are released from the ORR begin school, but end up dropping out without any other option, due to the difficulty of surviving on one’s own.
A few decades ago, the U.S. was using congregate care to detain children domestically, in the form of orphanages, Heidbrink said. However, since better understanding congregate care’s effects, the U.S. has moved in the opposite direction, to more community and family-based care.
Nowadays, placing orphaned children into congregate care is a measure of last resort, as opposed to the ORR where it’s the primary type of care immigrant children in the federal system are placed into, Heidbrink said.
The money the ORR has for migrant children comes from a yearly budget designated by Congress, according to Kaufka Walts. So, she explained, if there’s a lacking budget, then the reason for that is a political decision.
Heidbrink said there’s not much continuity between administrations either, so the ORR ends up just maintaining the status quo instead of reinventing the system.
Kaufka Walts said the data has demonstrated the disparate treatment of these children, versus how other systems designed to protect youth respond.
“If every child serving institution in the U.S. and in Europe is moving towards kinship care and family based placements, why are we 10 years behind in terms of research and policy when it comes to child welfare?” Heidbrink said.
Opoku said if her volunteer advocate wasn’t able to take her case, she could have been deported without anyone knowing. Other than Jajah, nobody was watching, she said.
“There is, like, no financial aid, there is nothing,” Opoku said. “So everything is just you, and it’s so hard.”
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