America’s Young Refugees

The surge of unaccompanied minors crossing the border between the United States and Mexico isn’t an immigration issue: "It’s a refugee issue," says Michelle Brané of the Women’s Refugee Commission.

Since October 2013, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security estimates that 52,000 children have arrived on the border. To put this in perspective, the Washington Office on Latin America estimates that the 9,859 unaccompanied Salvadoran youth that U.S. Border Patrol detained from October 2013 to May 2014 represent approximately one out of every 240 children in all of El Salvador.

Unaccompanied youth are far more vulnerable than adult immigrants to the dangers of the perilous journey northward: There are gangs, rapists, drug cartels, and the risk of falling from the freight trains the children use to move. But more than half the youth arriving at the border have faced harm at home too — the sort that prompts the need for international protection. This includes violence at the hands of organized armed criminal actors and human trafficking, according to a recent report by the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

The crisis of unaccompanied minors is dividing the U.S. government and prompting a range of problematic solutions. This includes changing aid — increasing or freezing it, and making resumption contingent on Central American governments’ stopping youth migration — and gutting the legislation that governs the treatment of unaccompanied youth: On June 28, President Barack Obama announced he would seek congressional approval to grant increased power to the Department of Homeland Security so that it can accelerate repatriation of Salvadoran, Honduran, and Guatemalan minors who have no immigration recourse that allows them to stay.

Under current law, unaccompanied minors from noncontiguous countries (that is, ones that are not immediate U.S. neighbors) are turned over to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, housed through the foster-care system or with a family member, and allowed a hearing before an immigration court. The time between apprehension and their hearing affords minors an opportunity to obtain legal representation. According to the Associated Press, an unnamed White House official has indicated that Obama is seeking to "fast-track" this process to more closely match the framework followed for Mexican and Canadian unaccompanied youth; these youth are taken into custody and allowed a hearing before an immigration judge only if a Border Patrol agent determines that they qualify. Otherwise, they are quickly repatriated without the benefit of a legal hearing or representation.

Immigrant and human rights groups have criticized Obama for a strategy that they say could force thousands of children to return to dangerous and inhumane circumstances without appropriate proceedings or adequate representation. By contrast, Republicans such as Sen. John Cornyn of Texas are making headlines by claiming that Obama’s immigration policies are actually encouraging youth to flee north. These policies include the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which allows the Department of Homeland Security to exercise prosecutorial discretion in deciding whether to institute removal proceedings for certain individuals who came to the United States before reaching their 16th birthday and who entered the country before June 15, 2012.

Troublingly, this latest politicking obscures the real, complex story — one involving a combination of economic and social factors that motivate youth and families to consider fleeing their homes in the first place. Understanding that story illuminates which policy solutions would actually tackle the illness, and not just its symptoms.

Considering murder and other violence — including direct sexual and physical threats — economic depravity, and a weak civil society that many Honduran, Guatemalan, and Salvadoran children grow up in, it’s not hard to understand the desperation that could inform their decision to head north. For example, in 2013, the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime found Honduras’s homicide rate, based on the previous year’s national registration data, to be an incredibly high 90.4 per 100,000 people. Indeed, for most of the youth coming across the border, embarking on the dangerous, occasionally fatal, journey was preferable to staying at home. (Central American parents are often involved in helping their children make this choice, and statements and letters from U.S. policymakers to regional leaders implying or assuming that these parents are, in essence, bad at their job are woefully misguided.)

Unfortunately, the U.S. government’s aid-based policy response is the wrong one. The Obama administration is rapidly pumping millions of dollars of aid into new and existing initiatives, like a new $25 million Crime and Violence Prevention USAID program in El Salvador and a $40 million USAID citizen security program in Guatemala, without taking the time necessary to carefully assess the likelihood that these programs could have an enduring, possibly negative, effect on the rule of law, long-term economic conditions, and other factors that push undocumented youth north. Without taking the time to vet potential aid solutions and develop solutions in concert with those who stand to be affected, policymakers could potentially repeat past errors.

The United States has a long history of problematic aid interventions in Latin America that have at times fueled violence and further destabilized the very countries they were created to help. For example, the Merida Initiative that provides financial assistance to Mexico and Central America to tackle violent crime has been criticized extensively for a range of issues. These include the program’s emphasis on fighting drug trafficking on the supply side without adequately addressing demand in the United States. In practice, drug-war-related aid to Mexico in the past has succeeded in proliferating violence, as criminal cartels have splintered following the capturing of high-profile drug lords.

Likewise, recent Republican-led efforts to halt aid altogether miss the point and evidence a failure to fully assess those proposals’ potential consequences. Cutting aid risks collapsing already-strained institutions and potentially fomenting violent government action against vulnerable youth, particularly if resumption of support is made contingent on governments’ successfully ending the migration.

In short, the aid-related interventions currently being executed and proposed not only might fail to stop the migration, but they might also worsen Central American in-country conditions. U.S. officials cannot just throw money at this "problem," nor can they solve it by holding governments at ransom with regard to already-promised aid.

Certainly, acknowledging the root causes of the mass migration of unaccompanied minors should be a focus of a long-term approach to diminishing the numbers of young people crossing the border. But these efforts need to be carefully thought out and developed, in conjunction with Central American governments and with the very people who are fleeing north. The bottom line: The U.S. government cannot, in a month (or even a few weeks), undo decades of economic and political turmoil by simply adding or withdrawing financial support.

What the United States can more readily control is its own legal and humanitarian response. Before divesting youth of rights under the current legal regime, the U.S. government should remember the horrifying historical circumstances — incarceration alongside adult migrants, detention in Guantánamo Bay, rape at the hands of law enforcement officials or other migrants, repatriation of victims of human trafficking — that have plagued the country’s policy on unaccompanied minors. The present, improved legal framework, a hodgepodge of policies and regulations that have been implemented over the last decade or so, secures minimal protection for at least some unaccompanied children and must not be dissolved impulsively.

U.S. policy should prioritize protecting some of the country’s most recent and most vulnerable migrant residents. And it should also ensure that those children who qualify for immigration relief — including refugee asylum or special visas available to children who have been abused, neglected, or abandoned by one or more parents — can avail themselves of this relief.

The president’s solution to change the law governing the processing of unaccompanied youth would be a disaster, particularly for youth who have valid immigration claims. For now, the White House has decided to separate its emergency funding request from these contentious policy changes in order to more carefully consider the competing needs of respecting due process and speeding up removal. This is a good and prudent start to setting better policy in a trying context.

No doubt the United States is now facing a refugee crisis within its borders. Yet the administration should not bow to pressure simply to gain political cover. Rather, it should advance policies based on the principle that unaccompanied youth migration is a humanitarian crisis.