By Susan Schmidt

While gang violence, community violence, and domestic violence have been recognized as contributing factors to Central American migration, less is known about the intersection between child maltreatment and migration. This article uses secondary data from United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) interviews with unaccompanied minors from Central America and Mexico to examine child maltreatment. It provides information on the abused children, their abusers, and the questions that led to their disclosure of maltreatment. It finds that girls reported maltreatment at higher rates than boys; only girls in this sample reported sexual abuse and intimate partner violence; and boys experienced physical abuse more than any other form of maltreatment. Overall, girls experienced all forms of abuse at higher rate than boys. Fewer than half of this sample described maltreatment as an explicit reason for migration, even those who viewed it as a type of suffering, harm or danger. In addition, some disclosures suggest that childhood transitions, such as in housing, schooling, or work status, warrant further inquiry as a potential consequence of or contributor to maltreatment. The article recommends that professionals engaged with migrant children in social services, legal services, or migration protection and status adjudications should inquire about maltreatment, recognizing that children may reveal abuse in complex and indirect ways. Protection risks within the home or family environment may provide the grounds for US legal immigration protections, such as Special Immigrant Juvenile Status (SIJS) or asylum. Practitioners working with unaccompanied migrant children should use varied approaches to inquire about home country maltreatment experiences. Maltreatment may be part of the context of child migration, whether or not it is explicitly mentioned by children as a reason for migration. Policy Recommendations • US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) should update SIJS regulations to reflect changes in the law, and modify application procedures to incorporate research knowledge on the impact of trauma on children. • The US Departments of Homeland Security (DHS), Justice (DOJ), and Health and Human Services (HHS), should ensure that all children in immigration proceedings receive legal representation through public-private partnerships overseen by the HHS Office of Refugee Resettlement  (ORR). Passage of Senate Bill 3108, the Fair Day in Court for Kids Act of 2021,1 would at least guarantee legal representation for unaccompanied minors. • Codify legal standards (via USCIS regulation, or Congressional statute) for granting asylum based on gender and gender-based violence, and include standards for children and youth. • Adjudicators from USCIS, Asylum Offices, and the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) should consider new information about painful, traumatic, or shame-inducing experiences—such as child maltreatment—as part of the gradual process of disclosure, rather than negatively reflecting on the credibility of the applicant. • Federal agencies with immigration responsibilities such as USCIS, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and ORR, should be included in the federal government’s Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s (SAMHSA) Interagency Task Force for Trauma-Informed Care. These agencies should require new trainings for immigration adjudicators, including immigration judges, asylum officers, Border Patrol agents, and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) officers, on interviewing and making decisions related to children. • Legal service providers should adopt a holistic approach to service provision that includes social workers as part of the child’s legal team. 

  Journal on Migration and Human Security 2022, Vol. 10(1) 77-92  

By Michael A. Clemens

A recent surge in child migration to the U.S. from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala has occurred in the context of high rates of regional violence. But little quantitative evidence exists on the causal relationship between violence and international emigration in this or any other region. This paper studies the relationship between violence in the Northern Triangle and child migration to the United States using novel, individual-level, anonymized data on all 178,825 U.S. apprehensions of unaccompanied child migrants from these countries between 2011 and 2016. It finds that one additional homicide per year in the region, sustained over the whole period – that is, a cumulative total of six additional homicides – caused a cumulative total of 3.7 additional unaccompanied child apprehensions in the United States. The explanatory power of short-term increases in violence is roughly equal to the explanatory power of long-term economic characteristics like average income and poverty. Due to diffusion of migration experience and assistance through social networks, violence can cause waves of migration that snowball over time, continuing to rise even when violence levels do not.

published in: Journal of Urban Economics, 2021, 124, 103355. Bonn: Center for Global Development & IZA Institute of Labor Economics, 2021. 56p.

By Tess Hellgren, Rebecca Cassler, Gracie Willis, Jordan Cunnings, Stephen Manning, Melissa Crow, and Lindsay Jonasson

Since its creation, the contemporary immigration court system has been perpetually afflicted by dysfunction. Today, under the Trump administration, the immigration court system—a system whose important work is vital for our nation's collective prosperity—has effectively collapsed. This report explains how the collapse came to be and why the immigration court system cannot be salvaged in its current form. Decades of experience incontrovertibly demonstrate that the immigration courts have never worked and will never work to, as Chief Justice John Roberts says, “do equal right” to those who appear before them. The immigration courts will never work because the structure of the immigration system is fundamentally flawed. Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, the attorney general of the United States is required to craft a functioning immigration court system: a system that provides genuine case-by-case adjudications by impartial judges who apply existing law to the evidence on the record following a full and fair hearing. Yet every attorney general has failed to do so. Despite the life-or-death stakes of many immigration cases, the immigration court system that persists today is plagued by decades of neglect and official acquiescence to bias. These trends have created a system where case outcomes have less to do with the rule of law than with the luck of the draw. And under the Trump administration, the attorneys general have gone even further by seeking to actively weaponize the immigration court system against asylum seekers and immigrants of color.

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  Overwhelming evidence shows that the Office of the Attorney General has long allowed immigration judges to violate noncitizens’ rights in a systemic Was the Central American Migrant Caravan created in the United States? , pervasive manner that undermines the integrity of the court system. In speaking with immigration practitioners across the country, the authors of this report have heard first-hand accounts of how the attorney general’s unitary power shapes adjudication practices that are biased, inconsistent, and driven by politics: Judges fail to apply binding legal standards, make decisions based on illegally invented rules, engage in abusive treatment of noncitizens and their counsel, and even decide cases before holding hearings

Portland, OR: Innovation Law Lab; Montgomery, AL: Southern Poverty Law Center, 2019. 40p.

By Natalie Gonnella-Platts, Jenny Villatoro, and Laura Collins

Violence against women and girls is often excluded from conversations on the nexus of Central American migration, regional development, and domestic immigration reform. Over the last half-century, topics such as economic empowerment, democracy, transparency, and security have dominated the root-causes conversation. The aim of these investments is to improve the overall stability and well-being of countries and communities in the region, but their effectiveness is limited by a failure to consider the impacts of gender-based violence on social and systemwide challenges. Though there has been increasing focus from US and international influencers on the levels of violence in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras (known as the Northern Triangle) and its impact on migration, an adequate response to the gendered differences in the ways violence is perpetrated remains limited and at times nonexistent. This needs to change, especially since gender-based violence within the Northern Triangle constitutes a daily threat to women and girls—one that has been significantly worsened by corruption, weak institutions, and a culture of impunity toward perpetrators. At individual and community levels, gender-based violence drives women and girls to internal displacement, migration to the United States, or a somber third path—death either by femicide or suicide. At national levels, it seriously inhibits security, opportunity, and development. As circumstances at the southern border of the United States demonstrate, gender-based violence has a direct influence on migration flows across the region and is deeply tangled with cyclical challenges of inequity and poverty. For those who choose to seek assistance or flee their communities, high rates of revictimization and bias further obstruct access to justice and safety. Until policies and programs respond to the serious violations of agency and human rights perpetuated against women and girls (and within systems and society at large), instability in and migration from the Northern Triangle only stand to grow. As the United States and the international community consider a comprehensive plan on Central America and immigration reform, proposed strategies must anchor the status and safety of women and girls at the center of solutions

Washington, DC: Wilson Center, 2021. 24p.