187P
Evaluating Ideal Service Provision for Unaccompanied Immigrant Children: Findings from Key Stakeholders
Unaccompanied immigrant youth enter the US daily to escape violence, oppression, extreme poverty, and other political instabilities in their countries, or as victims of human trafficking. The US government has developed systems of specialized care for Unaccompanied Alien Children (UACs) through the Office of Refugee Resettlement, Division of Children’s Services (ORR/DCS). From 2000-2011, ORR served between 5,000 and 7,000 UAC’s annually. In FY2012, ORR/DCS experienced a dramatic increase in arrivals—14,649 UACs – and, in FY2013, nearly 25,000 children received such services. ORR/DCS has projected that in 2014 as many as 69,000 UACs will arrive in the US.
For decades, the federal government has wrestled with the appropriate treatment of UAC’s, vacillating between policies that emphasize enforcement, and ones that stress child welfare concerns such as safety and well-being. The remarkable influx of UAC arrivals recently has highlighted these contrasting approaches, resulting in rapid ORR policy shifts. A consequent strain on the ORR system, including the numerous voluntary and private agencies with which ORR contracts to provide services to the youth, both during initial detention, and post release, has caused concern among advocates (VERA, UNHCR) about the effects on service quality.
Although the characteristics and root causes of the current surge in UAC’s have been examined (KIND, Women’s Refugee Commission, UNHCR), no organized efforts to assess the current state of service responses by government agencies, private organizations, and local communities have occurred. Such efforts are crucial to ensuring the safety and security of UAC families and communities.
Methods:
Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (LIRS) is hosting a series of three roundtable dialogues to understand and address challenges, promising practices, and ideal service provision models for children arriving in the U.S. due to forced migration. This poster reports on the first roundtable in which thirty representatives from national immigrant and refugee voluntary agencies, migration and child welfare policy advocates, immigration lawyers groups, universities, and community-based organizations from communities receiving the UAC’s participated.
Data from the roundtable were analyzed using components from Glaser and Strauss’s (1967) grounded theory method. No software program was used to analyze the data. Data were independently coded through an open coding process by three members of the research team.
Results:
Three main themes emerged from the first roundtable. 1) Changing practices within the UAC system reflect a steady distancing from longstanding, general principles of child welfare practice; 2) Ideal service provision for UACs should be family-focused, and include in-home service provision; 3) Distinct policies in different regions of the country make it difficult to coordinate existing services.
Conclusions and Implications:
The paper will discuss executive, legislative, and programmatic recommendations to advance administrative practices in order to improve the short-term safety and well-being of UACs, and the long-term permanency and integration opportunities for these children. It will highlight the additional research needed to understand and define best practices, and gain knowledge of risk and protective factors for UAC families and communities across the U.S.