This week’s conversation about unaccompanied children is about the essential services provided by USCRI’s Center for Refugee and Immigrant Children (CRIC) following their release to parents and guardians. Vice President AnnaMarie Bena talks to Director Matt Haygood about the post-release needs of unaccompanied children on their immigration journey. In 2005, USCRI began providing services to […]
Category: Unaccompanied Migrant Children
The Journey of Unaccompanied Children through the U.S. Immigration System
In March of this year, 15,918 children from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador crossed into the U.S. at our southern border—the highest number of children since we began collecting data in 2010. Although this number has dropped in recent months, the children who have made this long and dangerous crossing without their parents are of […]
Unaccompanied Children’s Arrivals are a Humanitarian Challenge – But a Solvable One
For much of 2020, U.S. authorities turned away all asylum seekers at the U.S. southern border, including both families arriving together and unaccompanied children. The prior Administration attempted to justify the restrictions by a novel invocation of Title 42 of the United States Code, which grants a weak form of quarantine power to the Centers […]
USCRI Chooses to Challenge: Statement on International Women’s Day
This year’s theme for International Women’s Day is “Choose to Challenge.” Every day, the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI) unwaveringly commits to challenging gender inequality in all of the work we do with refugees, immigrants and other vulnerable people worldwide. For this year, however, we would like to recognize the indomitable courage of […]
USCRI Calls for DHS Investigation of the Unlawful Detention of Unaccompanied Children in Hotels
Nelson Mandela wrote, “There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than how it treats its children.” The United States continues to lose its way in how we treat the unaccompanied children fleeing the intractable violence, endemic poverty, and widespread lawlessness of the countries located in the Northern Triangle—Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. […]
Learning from COVID-19: An Early Analysis of “Pain Points” in Congregate Care for Unaccompanied Children in Pandemic
Readers will be well aware that the COVID-19 pandemic is ongoing. While many scientific questions about COVID-19 remain, scientists and public-health officials are reasonably certain about a number of aspects of the virus. Transmission is primarily airborne. Individuals have several days between contracting the virus and becoming symptomatic. A large proportion of people afflicted with [...]
U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants Statement on the COVID-19 Pandemic
ARLINGTON, VA – The U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI) expresses its solidarity with our global community in their efforts to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. This kind of pervasive and far-reaching global event reminds us all that we share one planet and our lives are inextricably linked together in an unbroken chain of […]
USCRI Advocates to Protect Unaccompanied Children at our Border
A recent New York Times article tells the story of just one of the hundreds of unaccompanied migrant children being turned away at our border. Gerson is ten years old. Let that sink in. His mother so feared for his safety in Honduras that she put him in a makeshift raft to cross the Rio Grande, […]
