The uneven geography of asylum and humanitarian relief: place-based precarity for Central American migrant youth in the United States judicial system

ABSTRACT

The rising number of unaccompanied migrant children (UMC) crossing the U.S.-Mexico border received intense media attention during 2014 and remains significant. Unaccompanied minors seeking relief through the immigration court system is at a record high. A crisis of legal representation and of disparity in granting asylum or other humanitarian relief across Department of Justice (DOJ) immigration courts and among individual judges creates an unequal geographical landscape of justice for young migrants/asylum-seekers. This study uses empirical data from over 232,000 UMC cases to analyse the effect that place of residence has on access to a fair court hearing. This research adds to previous studies by emphasising the importance of place for unaccompanied minors who have been released to sponsors across the United States. Given that court adjudications vary considerably from judge to judge and across courts; and that access to legal resources differs from city to city and across regions – where a UMC resides has a major impact on the likelihood of a fair hearing. This finding has major implications for understanding how locality impacts unaccompanied minor migrant youth precarity.

KEYWORDS:

• immigration
• unaccompanied minor
• deportation
• asylum
• Central America
• legal geography

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 While U.S. government entities and other organizations refer to “Unaccompanied Alien Children” (UAC), we reject this term as pejorative and instead use “Unaccompanied Migrant Children” (UMC). Many unaccompanied minors are asylum seekers or potentially qualify for other forms of legal relief to remain in the United States.

2 Underscoring the temporal precarity of UMC’s situation, the legal rights granted to minors, including the protections under the Flores Agreement and the right to remain with their parents, has been under attack by the Trump administration.

3 TVPRA treats children from contiguous states of Mexico and Canada differently, requiring that they be screened within 48 hours by DHS. Screening is normally performed by CBP rather than asylum officers.

4 The Justice AmeriCorps program ended in September 2017 when its funding was not renewed by the Trump administration’s Department of Justice (Einbinder 2018).