Session: Mapping Systems of Care for Unaccompanied Immigrant Children (Society for Social Work and Research 29th Annual Conference)

In recent years, record-breaking numbers of minors arriving at the US-Mexico border have entered US government custody as unaccompanied children (UC). After apprehension by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), UC are transferred to the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Care for UC while under HHS custody is the responsibility of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). ORR in turn issues grants and contracts to nongovernmental organizations that are tasked with identifying and determining the safety and suitability of a sponsor, often family members, and many of whom are undocumented. In line with the overall increase in the number of UC apprehensions in recent years, the number of ORR-contracted facilities has grown significantly.

Prior research has focused on how UCs experiences at particular periods of time (for example, while in custody and following release) impact outcomes. Limited scholarship has examined the experiences of human service professionals working within programs that are contracted by ORR to care for UC in government custody. In these programs, social workers, mental health clinicians, medical providers, educators, and transitional foster parents collaborate to provide care for UC while assessing the safety and suitability of the sponsoring context. The papers that make up this symposium examine how, in the context of an expanding UC care network and acute media attention, care for UC is conceptualized and implemented from the perspective of frontline human service professionals.

The first paper sets the conceptual landscape for the UC system of care and the ambiguities of best interest doctrine. By focusing on three different cases where staff must provide a form of care: when adapting to the needs of Afghan arrivals, securing medical and mental health services, and assessing for human trafficking. This analysis underscores the challenges of care provision within the UC system, as well as a critical inroad for thinking differently about how to structure it.

The second paper examines how two classic organizational dilemmas are resolved within the UC system. Specifically, ORR uses coercive isomorphic pressures to ensure that UC policy is structured in the same ways across the care network, and care providers cope with organizational constraints on their roles by focusing on small moments of joy, even as they turn away from their complicity in a harmful system of youth detention.

The third paper narrows in on the core tension embedded in the UC program, namely the twin priorities of timely reunification and careful assessment. This paper analyzes the ways front line workers manage this tension in practice and finds that staff see institutional pressures to accelerate time to release as undermining core social work ethics and positive post-release outcomes for UC and families.

The fourth paper examines the emotional labor of implementing a program that is both immigrant detention and child welfare. This paper examines the forms of emotional labor that Spanish-speaking staff members who are largely first or second-generation immigrants engage in as they implement care and how their colleagues within the UC system understand this work.