“Children should be treated as children, no matter their status or how they come into this country.”

Discussing the role of advocacy for immigrant youth with Erika Andiola of the Young Center

For almost 20 years, the Young Center has been one of the few organizations offering direct lines of advocacy for immigrant youth in the United States. Erika Andiola, the Young Center’s Director of Communications, recently spoke with La Cuenta to share the Center’s ongoing work to preserving the rights of all immigrant children. In this first part of our conversation, Andiola describes the context of this work for kids ranging from young toddlers to 17 year-olds imminently turning the corner into different legal woes once they become adults.

ANTERO GARCIA: At a broad level, can you describe what the Young Center does?

ERIKA ANDIOLA: Absolutely. The Young Center is a national organization; we've been around since 2004. We basically came together to advocate for the rights of immigrant children in a system that does not treat immigrant children as children. We specifically work with children who are in detention or who are in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR).

We advocate for [immigrant children’s] best interests and their rights, and we are the only organization in the country that trains volunteers to visit children all over the US. In those visits, volunteers are able to build relationships with them, support them, and really learn their stories so we can build a better case to advocate for their best interests at the end of the day so that they can stay in this country. Or, if they choose to go back, we help to figure out how they can do that safely.

AG: Do the young people you work with mainly arrive in the US on their own? With parents?

EA: Both situations can happen. The majority of the kids who we see and who work with are kids who come in on their own. A lot of them are teenagers who might take this just dangerous journey to come to the US to meet with their families here or to work or to escape violence or other threats.

We also work with a lot of kids, particularly in the past few years under the Trump administration, who were separated from their parents at the border. We are working mostly with kids who are separated. They are not necessarily separated by force but rather by a hard choice that we have given parents at the border because they are not able to seek asylum. A lot of times families have to separate and they send their children on their own because asylum policies that were just changed allow for children to seek asylum.

We are working mostly with kids who are separated … not necessarily by force but rather by a hard choice that we have given parents at the border because they are not able to seek asylum.

AG: So while the child seeks asylum in the US, families stay on the other side of the border?

EA: Yeah. Some of the recent policies that were announced by the administration don't apply to unaccompanied children. We have heard stories of people literally sleeping in the streets of Mexico and in shelters at the border because they can't ask for asylum. People are suffering so much on the other side of the border because they can't seek asylum. Sometimes they have kids that are very vulnerable--children with disabilities, children who are small. At the end of the day, they decide to separate because of the safety concerns that parents have for their kids there. Many of them have family in the US, so a lot times the thinking is, “Let's have you go first and then reunite with our family over there.” But often people don't really understand the system here. They might not know that their children end up detained when they come.

AG: How does the Young Center find the individuals that you advocate for?

EA: We're in this interesting situation where we have our services program, which works very, very closely with the government because we have to. And then we also have our policy program, which is the program that's trying to change the status quo and the systems that we work within. We do both and it's a challenge, but we still do it.

One of the programs that works very closely with the government, specifically with ORR is our Child Advocate Program. We collaborate with the ORR to be able to have access to children. They let us know if there are particular kids who need the most support. So there could be kids who are very, very small – who are what the government calls tender age children - like four year old toddlers. It could be adolescents who are 17 and are about to turn 18. What happens when they turn 18 and they are in the ORR custody is that they're taken out of ORR and are turned over to ICE. And so they need a lot of-

AG: Wait, these kids turn 18 and are immediately entered into the deportation process?

EA: Literally ICE has shown up to shelters and gotten kids who just turned 18 on their birthdays, handcuffed them, and taken them to ICE detention centers. It doesn't always happen that way, but it is a possibility and it has happened. What we ensure is that kids who are at that age have more support to be able to figure out if they have some sort of relief and if we're able to figure out how to get them out of detention before they turn 18 so that they are not in this sort of danger of being sent over to ICE.

AG: Wow.

EA: Also, a lot of kids with disabilities are referred to us. We have a website with a page that has referrals. People can go on there and say, "There's this child who really needs an advocate."

That's what we do, and it's very hard work, but it's also very fulfilling to be able to provide the support that these kids need because they're not being treated as children. They're navigating a system that was created for adults. It's still an unjust system for adults, but imagine being a child having to go through it.

AG: I can't even imagine what it would be like growing up as a four- or five-year-old in this system. What happens to these children?

EA: It depends on the case. What tends to happen is that when the child comes in, they're usually first placed in Border Patrol custody. Border Patrol is not supposed to keep children for more than 72 hours. Unfortunately, we've seen that, for example, under the Trump administration, that was something that was not really done. I don't know if you'll remember that there were lots of pictures with kids in cages. Those are Border Patrol stations, and that's where they first encounter the child and then put them in these places. They're not supposed to be there for more than 72 hours. If they're unaccompanied, they are transferred from CBP to ORR custody. It could be shelters or other congregate settings. There's a place called Fort Bliss that was literally just closed not too long ago, which was this big military base where they had children, lots of children; I think, at some point, there were hundreds of children who were there. A lot of advocates were pushing back against having this type of setting. In general, we don't advocate for kids to be in shelters either, but having them in these congregate settings, it's even worse.

And so it just all depends on the situation of the child. And there are juvenile detention centers, if you will, that take some children who have been criminalized by ORR. So there's this system that they have; they call them SIRs, which are basically just write-ups. So if a child gets enough write-ups, they're basically stepped up into this other system, which is basically secure facilities. To be honest, they're jails where they're held, and they're terrible places. We're pushing to ensure that that doesn't happen. We believe that no child should be in jail .

AG: The system seems like it's there to perpetuate the stereotypes of what becomes of undocumented individuals once they come into the US--to create this image of criminalized individuals and to treat them as such.

EA: Absolutely. We advocate for every individual, family. Immigrants should not be treated like this in any way. But, because we work with kids, children should be treated as children, no matter their status or how they come into this country.

Propina

Next week, we’ll learn more about Erika Andiola’s personal work as an advocate for immigrant rights in the US. In the meantime, consider supporting the Young Center—as a volunteer, through financial contributions, or by sharing their work with others.

And for a current look at asylum practices in the United States, take a look at this recent post from Austin Kocher:

Biden's Asylum Ban is Unlawful Says Federal Judge

We’ll see you next week!