"The Biden administration has not kept their promise--it's still criminalizing immigrants."

Erika Andiola discusses the Young Center's unrelenting commitment advocating for immigrant children's rights.

This week, we continue our interview with the Young Center’s Director of Communications, Erika Andiola. Focusing on the origins of the Young Center, the role of child advocates, and how La Cuenta’s readers can support the center. If you missed the first part of our conversation, you can read it here.  

ANTERO GARCIA: The Young Center started in 2004. Why was this the launch of the center?

ERIKA ANDIOLA: Basically, there was a change in law that strengthened the protections for unaccompanied kids in the US who were migrant children. One of those changes was that the government allowed for kids to have child advocates. A lot of times children didn't have attorneys or any type of support. They were literally alone in navigating the whole system. So the law was changed in a way that allowed for child advocates to be able to work with kids.

The Young Center was the first organization in Chicago that had a contract with the government to basically provide child advocates. Because of the population that was being sent to Chicago, it was mostly kids from China and from other Asian countries, kids with disabilities. It was a very particular population who needed the most support to be able to have child advocates -- they didn't speak Spanish, they didn't speak English. That's how we got started and now we're an organization of more than 100 staff.

AG: Have things changed under the Biden administration when it comes to the minors that the Young Center are working with? What's the landscape of the space look like right now?

EA: Under the Obama administration, unfortunately, what we saw was the creation of this detention and enforcement machine that a lot of advocates, including myself in a different capacity, were pushing back against. We knew that this could be something that would stay and that potentially could grow, and it could be weaponized against immigrants in a much worse way. We were right.

What happened was that the Trump administration used a lot of those tools and policies that were already in place to be able to create the situation in which they started separating families. We have been saying they shouldn't do that. They shouldn't put people through that kind of inhumane treatment at all, right? They shouldn't have family detention centers. All of that started under Obama: the family detention centers, where they literally kept children too with their parents. When it comes to unaccompanied kids, we've been pushing really hard to ensure that they have the rights that they deserve, and so on. All of that got started under Obama. It got way worse under Trump.

They shouldn't put people through that kind of inhumane treatment at all, right? They shouldn't have family detention centers… All of that got started under Obama. It got way worse under Trump.

Unfortunately, with President Biden coming into office, he basically promised when he was campaigning that he was going to undo all of this damage that was created under Trump. Now, some things got better. Some of the families who were separated have been reunited with their loved ones because of a task force that was created under President Biden. We do have more of an ability to advocate internally within the government to ensure that there's better treatment of kids. Last week we won this change of policy in ORR: basically, we were like, "Let those kids talk to their family members anytime they want over the phone," because they couldn't. They could only talk to their family members 10 minutes a week.

AG: Wait, really?

EA: Yes.

AG: It's wild that that's the victory! It's such a basic human right.

EA: That's exactly the reaction that everybody should have, right? 10 minutes a week for a child to be able to talk to their families when they're in a detention setting? We were able to advocate for that change. And I don't think we would've been able to win something, in the great scale of things, as small as that, under a Trump administration. So those kinds of things have changed.

Unfortunately, the big systemic problems that we thought could change under a democratic administration are still there. Border Patrol is still jailing families with children. We still have thousands of kids who are in the ORR- system by themselves. A lot of kids are forced to separate from their families because we have asylum policies that keep people on the other side of the border in very dangerous conditions. And I can go on, right? We still have detention centers for adults, which are also creating this family separation situation that's different than the Trump administration situation, but it's still as harmful to kids and families as it was before. Long story short, we are still seeing that the Biden administration has not kept their promise, and in fact, it's still criminalizing immigrants in general.

AG: What can people do? I imagine donations are probably the easiest way to support the Young Center, but are there other kinds of things that people can do?

EA: Financial support for the organization is always great, because we have to keep our work going. But as I mentioned earlier, we're the only organization in the country that trains volunteer child advocates. And so any person over 21 years old who could possibly pass a background check, because they'll be working with kids, would be able to volunteer to visit a child in detention and to be appointed as a child advocate. If you speak Spanish, it's great, but you don't have to speak Spanish. In my personal capacity, I'm a child advocate, outside of my communications director capacity.

AG: Oh, really?

EA: Yeah, I signed up to be a volunteer too, and it's just so rewarding. It's something that anybody can sign up to do. So I would ask people to go to our website and look for our volunteer application form, and they can apply to volunteer. When we receive that, we're able to reach out to folks to have them join at our upcoming trainings that we do every month.

So definitely become a volunteer, and you can also sign up for our newsletter and our action alerts for our policy team to send information on what can be done as far as changing policies.

AG: Once kids become adults, do you have a sense of where these individuals go?

EA: We don't stay in touch with most of the kids we work with. It’s actually part of the model that we have. We try to ensure that once we finish our work with a child, that we don't want to continue to be in their lives. We want to make sure that they thrive, and they go and move forward with their lives. There are a few that stick around cities where we work, and so they come back as adults, they want to volunteer, and they want to donate, and they want to help. So we have been able to be in touch with a few--including the person who's let us use their name as the name of the organization, Young, who's one of the first children who we helped as the Young Center.

Now that we have a communications team, we are actively working on creating an ethical storytelling framework in which we can figure out how to reach back out to some of the children we worked with if they agree to be in touch with us. We hope that they can, in the future, share their stories once they feel safe to do so. It should sort of change the narrative and try to get people to really understand their perspective from their own voice.

Propina

We’ll be back next week with the final part of our discussion with Erika Andiola. In the meantime, consider volunteering of signing up for the Young Center’s newsletter and action alerts here.

And, in the spirit of the ethical storytelling work that the Young Center is developing, if you have experience as a young person navigating the US while labeled undocumented, we’d love to hear from you (even anonymously).

See you next week.