As City Sees Uptick in Unaccompanied Immigrant Youth, Lawmakers Probe ‘Gaps in Services’

As the number of immigrants and asylum seekers arriving in New York City has increased, so has the number of unaccompanied minors, advocates and city officials said during a recent hearing.

Some arrived as children. Others arrived as teenagers, some without any documentation. Others used passports showing they were of legal age, even when they weren’t, simply to be able to board a plane, leave their families or troubled countries, and enter the United States alone.

Members of the City Council heard these stories during a hearing Tuesday on unaccompanied immigrant minors in the U.S. and New York City, held jointly by the Committee on Immigration and the Committee on Children and Youth.

Generally, when minors cross the border without a parent and encounter immigration officials, they are designated as unaccompanied minors (UCs or UACs) and placed in shelters with the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), which is part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. ORR is required to care for unaccompanied children until they are placed with a sponsor, who can be a parent or relative, while their immigration cases proceed. 

According to Councilwoman Alexa Avilés, chair of the City Council’s Committee on Immigration, between Oct 1, 2023, and June 30, 2024, New York City received 2,873 unaccompanied children to sponsoring families. 

“We want to make sure that the city does not forget the lessons of the past,” Avilés advised, referring to the Council’s Unaccompanied Minors Initiative, launched in 2014 to provide legal representation to minors fleeing violence in Central America. 

“Advocates have noted that gaps in services remain for immigrant youth to arrive in the U.S. as UAC,” she noted during the hearing.

According to Sierra Kraft, executive director of the Immigrant Children Advocates Relief Effort (ICARE) coalition, minors often face judges alone, because they have no right to court-appointed representation in immigration court.

“I recently sat in immigration court and saw two young brothers from El Salvador—ages 2 and 6—sitting at a table before a judge, expected to represent themselves,” said Kraft during the hearing. 

“The judge gave them a continuance and urged the family to find an attorney—warning that without one, the boys would likely be ordered removed. After the hearing, I spoke with their family, and they told me they had been searching for an attorney for nearly a year,” she added.

The coalition is calling for increased funding for the seven legal services organizations that provide free representation to unaccompanied children facing deportation in New York City.

“Children supported by ICARE attorneys have over a 90 percent success rate, giving them a real chance to stay and build bright futures here in New York,” Kraft stated.

Advocates and city officials acknowledged during the hearing that as the number of immigrants and asylum seekers arriving in New York City has increased, so has the number of unaccompanied minors.

The number of minors needing legal services has also increased, Kraft said, but funding has stagnated for five years.

“Despite our growing waitlists and the overwhelming demand, we were approved for far less than what’s needed to fully meet the need,“ Kraft said.

While the federal government is primarily responsible for the policies and procedures in place to ensure the safe release of unaccompanied children within the ORR, there are other youth migrants in need living in the city.

According to the most recent Mayor’s Management Report (MMR), the number of children entering foster care rose 8 percent in fiscal year 2024. That growth was driven by an increase in destitute minor petitions—when the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) determines that a child’s parent or caregiver is either not available or not able to provide sufficient care, and that the child has unmet needs. 

The uptick was “partly attributable to an increase in migrant youth in New York City with no family connections in the area,” reads the report. ACS officials said this number has quadrupled over the last two years: from 58 children and youth placed in destitute minor petitions in 2022, to 80 in 2023, to 239 as of Aug. 31, 2024.

ACS does not track whether a child is a migrant because the state’s system of record does not provide that information, a spokesperson said in an email to City Limits.

The agency does track the number of immigrant youth in foster care to ensure migrants are referred for legal representation, and about 500 children with immigration matters are in currently in the system, an ACS spokesperson said.

However, advocates and councilmembers complained that some young migrants are not receiving ACS services.

Kimberly Schertz, a staff attorney with the Legal Aid Society's juvenile rights practice, said in a statement to City Limits that some under-18 youth are entering the country with legal documents saying they are adults over the age of 18, a newer development.

“We [are] seeing the issue of ACS challenging the youth’s age as a basis for denying them care,” Schertz said. 

“We believe a contributing factor is the history of adultification of Black African males,” Schertz added. “We also believe that youth brought to our attention are just the tip of the iceberg.”

When asked, ACS said that in these cases, it assesses age based on both a conversation with the young person and a review of documents such as passports, birth certificates, Homeland Security records, NYC IDs, and other government IDs.

However, Schertz said that ACS fails to give appropriate weight to the youth’s statements, and inconsistently credits some documents while discounting others. 

When asked to specify the weight of documents accepted, ACS did not provide specific information. “Youth voice is a top priority for ACS and listening to young people is a critical part of all of our work,” a spokesperson said.

ACS also did not specify how many migrants with a passport indicating they were 18 had been accepted as minors, or how many were being evaluated, but said that these cases began occurring in late 2023.

“Unfortunately, whether a youth has a knowledgeable advocate seems to be the most crucial element in getting a youth into ACS care,” Schertz said. “This is particularly worrisome for youth who are nearing 18 and may not be able to access an advocate in time before they age out of Family Court’s jurisdiction to hear their destitute child petition.”

Migrants under the age of 18, as well as those under 21, may be eligible for a range of immigration statuses such as Special Immigrant Juvenile Status (SIJS, for migrants under 21), T visas (for victims of human trafficking), or asylum.

The city's Office of Asylum Seeker Operations (OASO) has been helping some migrant youth with filing SIJS applications, a representative said during the hearing, but using a "pro se" model —in which attorneys offer advice but the client is still largely left to their own devices in court.

“We were interested in doing a pilot to see if we could do such cases,” said Masha Gindler, Asylum Application Help Center (AAHC) executive director, detailing that they have filed 39 SIJS applications for migrants over 18, and two have been approved.

City Hall stated that when possible, SIJS-eligible migrants are referred to community organizations that handle these types of cases, but that many do not take referrals when the migrant is less than 14 months from their 21st birthday. The initiative is an ongoing effort, officials said, and the city will review any denials as they come in.

During the hearing, Avilés expressed her concerns and questioned the appropriateness of using the pro se model (from the Latin meaning “in one’s own behalf”) for SIJS cases.

“To claim to use a model that we know does not work for this population, to use a metric of how many applicant petitions you were able to file, is not okay,” Avilés said, following Gindler’s responses during the hearing. 

“These [are] city resources that we have to invest appropriately, to protect people and to support them,” she added. “If we know this is not going to work in the long term, investing in it because we did a bunch of applications, doesn't make any sense to me.”

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