Articles

Law Review Articles

Reno V. Florez: A Violation of International Law?

In 1985, a fifteen year old girl named Jenny Lisette Flores was arrested and detained by the Immigration and Naturalization Service ("INS") on suspicion of being a deportable alien. Jenny was summarily strip searched, and incarcerated in a juvenile detention facility. Read more...

An Analysis of Treatment of Unaccompanied Immigrant and Refugee Children in INS Detention and Other Forms of Institutionalized Custody

Over the past decade, the number of refugees throughout the world has more than doubled, and the number continues to grow." At least half of the world's refugees are estimated to be children below the age of eighteen. Traditionally, the flow of immigration consisted of single men who came to the United States to work and then returned to the families they had left behind. Increasingly, entire families and unaccompanied minors are migrating to the United States due to the worsening conflicts in Central America. Read more...

Toward a Comprehensive Response to the Transnational Migration of Unaccompanied Minors in the United States

The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is responsible for approximately 22.3 million of the approximately fifty million refugees or displaced persons in the world. 1 Almost ten million of these people are children. 2 Unaccompanied minors comprise almost five percent of any given refugee population, thus approximately 500,000 children in total. 3 Half of all displaced persons seeking asylum are children. Read more...

Internationalist Gatekeepers?: The Tension Between Asylum Advocacy and Human Rights

Despite the well-established status of refugee protection in today’s international regime, most refugees fleeing to safety in developed states do not arrive with a ready guarantee of access to enduring human rights. Read more...

Newspaper Articles

LATimes Special: Enrique's Journey: The Boy Left Behind

In The vast migration that is changing the U.S., thousands of children travel alone, seeking the mothers who went before them. Most are visited by cruelty. Some are touched by kindness. Success comes only to the brave and the lucky.Read more...

Teen Is Snared in Post-9/11 Security Net

Brought to U.S. illegally by his mother at age 3, he visits father in Mexico, is caught on return trip. Read more...

Children Alone and Scared, Fighting Deportation

Once a month, in a windowless courtroom at 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan, children are summoned before a judge who can decide whether they will be removed from the United States. Read more...

13 year old Guatemalan Girl “lost” by Mexican Immigration…

Transporting a 13-year-old girl from Mexico City to the Guatemalan border seems like routine work for the Mexican immigration authorities, but this time they “lost” the child somewhere along the southern Mexican border. Read more...

When Deportation Is a Death Sentence: Sending U.S. gang Members Back to Honduras can Amount to Killing them

Tom Hayden, a former state senator and author of "Street Wars: Gangs andthe Future of Violence" (Dimensions, 2004), recently visited Honduras. In May, 105 alleged gang members, including an undisclosed number of deportees from Los Angeles, burned to death in a Honduran prison while guards watched through a closed gate and did nothing. Read more...