La Charla: documenting the experience of unaccompanied minors in immigration court

ABSTRACT

There is no minimum age for children to appear unaccompanied in immigration court in the United States; infants and toddlers, like adults, can receive notices to appear and are not given legal counsel. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in three US immigration courts, I examine how unaccompanied immigrant minors experience the legal removal process and represent themselves in court. I find that the US court system is ill equipped to deal with the unique needs of immigrant minors: fear and confusion infiltrate the process. The qualitative conditions of the courtroom prevent children from receiving fair legal counsel, thus denying them due process. Ethnographic data indicate that creating a more child-friendly immigration court includes providing access to legal help desks in municipal buildings; ensuring fair and accurate translation of removal proceedings; increasing the transparency of legal relief options and roles of stakeholders in the courtroom to families and minors; and streamlining national policies or the training on best practices for unaccompanied minors provided to judges who decide in removal proceedings.

KEYWORDS:

• Unaccompanied minors
• legal relief
• courtroom
• Central American migration

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Variations in English language interpretation existed in the three different sites and according to the judge. In most cases, a Spanish-English language interpreter was available in the room with the judge. Youth would listen via headphones to the translation. In one location, translators were called in over a phone line and broadcast to the courtroom.

2 University of Syracuse’s TRAC Immigration Center. http://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/359/.

3 According EOIR factsheet, immigration court hearings are closed when: (1) The case involves information subject to a protective order; (2) The case involves an abused spouse or child, and in the case of an abused spouse, a hearing may be opened to the public with the abused respondent's consent; (3) The case involves a respondent who, based on provisions of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), is a beneficiary of an application for relief under specific sections of the Immigration and Nationality Act, among other federal statutes; (4) The immigration judge grants an oral or written motion a party files to close a hearing; (5) The immigration judge makes a determination to close a hearing to protect witnesses, parties to the case, or the public interest; among other restrictions. See https://www.justice.gov/eoir/observing-immigration-court-hearings, accessed on 24 July 2018.

4 TRAC, Backlog of Pending Cases in Immigration Courts (2019), https://trac.syr.edu/phptools/immigration/court_backlog/ (last visited 5 May 2019).