Una Pesadilla Americana: The Convoluted Distribution, Provision and Implementation of Care in Shelters for Unaccompanied Migrant Children

Abstract

In American law, an unaccompanied child is defined as “a child who has no lawful immigration status in the United States, has not attained 18 years of age and with respect to whom there is no parent or legal guardian in the United States.” Over the last decade, minors pertaining to this group and originating from the Central American Northern Triangle of Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras have been migrating into the United States in the tens of thousands every year. This regularized flow has represented a new policy challenge for the American government, who is obligated by law to grant these children an immigration court hearing, ideally when reunified with the family members that awaited them here. Until these hearings, unaccompanied migrant children are placed in shelters that have been controversial in the public eye due to their routine human rights violations. This thesis was specifically interested in the question of care for the minors in these shelters. It thus interrogated: Who is providing the care for unaccompanied migrant children in the United States and what is the impact of this distribution of power on the provision of standards of care that is granted to unaccompanied migrant children? The inquiry considered the totality of elements relevant to the question, from the general drivers of migration to the details of individual cases of abuse and neglect. The argument advanced in this essay is that the responsibility of Central American unaccompanied migrant children arriving in the United States is divided between three actors: the federal government, state agencies and third-party institutions, particularly non-profit organizations. It further posits that the role of the non-profit actor has become central to landscape of care in shelters due to the government’s reliance on contracting third-party expertise and specialized skills pertaining to minors to respond to the current migratory crisis. The result of this increased reliance has been to the detriment of the provision of care. This point is illustrated by a qualitative case study on shelters run by Southwest Key, a Texas-based charity that has been the main contractor of the federal government in the last 30-years, with its total budget allocation surpassing 1 billion dollars. The results found that in Texas, the centrality of Southwest Key’s services to the government has led to the opening of large-scale shelters such as Casa Padre, with a capacity of 1,500 youth, that only provide the bare minimum federal and state standards of care. Furthermore, the scale of these shelters reinforces detention-like conditions for the minors, who recount in testimonies harrowing stories of forced medication, emotional manipulation and threats of deportation for menial matters, among other things. These conditions are particularly hard to digest when considering that local economies and Southwest Key profit off of the commodification, dehumanization and incarceration of these young children. The thesis concludes by suggesting that the principle of best interest of the child, codified in international but not American law as an important marker of the child as a holder of human rights, be used for guidance for future policy decisions regarding shelter care for unaccompanied children.