By Wilder Research

In the decade since Safe Harbor became Minnesota law, the state has built an extensive network in response to the sexual exploitation of youth, and more recently human trafficking, both sex and labor. The network spans from state and local government to Tribal Nations and community-based nonprofit programs. Founded on a public health approach within the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) in recognition of the significant health and social impacts created by exploitation and trafficking on populations, Safe Harbor also partners extensively with entities in public safety, human services, and human rights, including the Minnesota Department of Human Services (DHS), the Minnesota Department of Public Safety (DPS) and the Minnesota Coalition Against Sexual Assault (MNCASA) to offer a comprehensive multidisciplinary response. State law requires the Safe Harbor Director, based in MDH, to submit a biennial evaluation of the program to the Commissioner of Health under Minnesota Statute Section 145.4718. The purpose of the evaluation is to ensure Safe Harbor is reaching its intended participants, increasing identification of sexually exploited youth, coordinating across disciplines including law enforcement and child welfare, providing access to services, including housing, ensuring the quality of services, and utilizing penalty funds to support services. The Safe Harbor law passed in 2011 and after a three-year planning period called No Wrong Door, the Safe Harbor system was fully enacted in 2014. In the years since, Safe Harbor has submitted three evaluation reports to the legislature, beginning in 2015. Each evaluation was conducted by Wilder Research at the Amherst H. Wilder Foundation (Wilder) under a competitive contract with MDH. The evaluation process is an opportunity to hear and learn from trafficked and exploited youth as well as participants from a variety of disciplines who respond to the needs of these youth on a daily basis. For the current Phase 4 report, MDH contracted with Wilder again while MDH’s Safe Harbor Program produced accompanying evaluation materials. As a result, this Phase 4 Safe Harbor evaluation draws from complementary background reports that are combined to represent a variety of perspectives from both outside and within the Safe Harbor network. These resources not only evaluate Safe Harbor’s activities, but also address these activities in the context of significant current events including the global COVID-19 pandemic and the civil rights movement in Minnesota, as well as around the nation and world, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. The supplemental evaluation materials, containing expanded findings, data, and appendix are contained in this document. All findings focus on the Safe Harbor network and activities between April 1, 2019, and June 30, 2021. The Wilder data collection and analysis took place between January 1, 2021, and June 30, 2021. The MDH data collection and analysis took place between September 1, 2020, and August 1, 2021. Between January 2021 and June 2021, Wilder interviewed grantees, multidisciplinary partners, and youth clients, and also surveyed youth clients to evaluate Safe Harbor. Wilder submitted its report including several findings and recommendations to MDH. Wilder found evidence for outcomes related to multidisciplinary partnership and access to services, including culturally specific services; the factors contributing to Safe Harbor’s impact; gaps and challenges; opportunities for improvement; and the pandemic’s impact on service provision. MDH analyzed the provision of the statewide Safe Harbor Regional Navigator component and the reach of the Safe Harbor Network to identify and serve youth, as well as availability, accessibility, and equity of Safe Harbor supportive services and shelter and housing, in addition to training for providers. MDH then submitted a Phase 4 evaluation report to the legislature including combined findings, recommendations, and conclusions. Summary recommendations are listed here, but included with further detail in the legislative report and within the supplemental evaluation materials included in this document: Recommended actions: ▪ Increase stakeholder ability to identify youth. ▪ Expand protections and services regardless of age and remain flexible in identifying service needs. ▪ Increase and improve access to services, especially for youth from marginalized cultures and greater Minnesota. ▪ Support more diverse and consistent staffing. ▪ Increase amount and cultural appropriateness of technical assistance, education, and training provided. ▪ Increase prevention efforts (by decreasing demand and identifying risk factors). ▪ Support improvement of more continuous, comprehensive, and robust outcome and process evaluation as well as inferential research. ▪ De-silo the response to sex and labor trafficking. ▪ Increase youth voice and opportunities within Safe Harbor. ▪ Heal organizational trauma to better help organizations, staff, and clients. ▪ Improve equity by conducting a cultural needs assessment with several cultural groups as well as strategically directing allocations of funds and resources to culturally specific groups. ▪ Strengthen relationships within the public health approach. ▪ Further promote government agency collaboration.

St. Paul, MN : Minnesota Department of Health, Safe Harbor, Violence Prevention Unit, Health Promotion and Chronic Disease Division 2021. 130p.

By Michael Garcia Bochenek

In the last few months of 2017, public defenders working in United States communities along the US-Mexico border began noticing a pattern. Over several months, they had seen an increasing number of people facing criminal charges for irregularly crossing the border arriving in court with a new concern: When these people had a chance to speak in court, their primary worry was not that they were facing prosecution; instead, they were asking the judges where their children were. These public defenders were seeing the early days of the forcible family separation policy put in place by the administration of US President Donald J. Trump and developed in a larger context of overheated, dehumanizing, and at times racist official rhetoric toward migrants. The policy began in March 2017 as a pilot program in and around El Paso, Texas, and was then rolled out along the entire US-Mexico border in early 2018. The policy deployed a minor federal criminal charge—“improper entry”—to force children and parents apart. Its official name, “Zero Tolerance,” referred to Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ directive that every adult who entered the United States irregularly would face prosecution. Criminal charges for improper entry have long been misused as a means of immigration enforcement, raising serious human rights concerns. More than five years before Sessions’ “zero tolerance” directive, improper entry and improper reentry were the most prosecuted federal crimes in the United States. As misguided and abusive as this earlier use of such charges was, it had not deliberately targeted children and their parents. In fact, before mid-2017, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) generally did not request prosecution of parents arriving with their children and federal prosecutors had usually declined to pursue improper entry charges against parents traveling with their children precisely to avoid separating arriving families. The policy developed at Sessions’ directive did not appear primarily aimed at securing convictions. Although a criminal conviction would mean more serious consequences on a subsequent irregular entry, the offense is, as a federal magistrate judge observed, “quite literally one of the least serious federal offenses.”1 The real payoff, as far as the architects of the policy were concerned, was that a criminal charge could be used as a reason to transfer the immediate responsibility for protective care of the child. Parents who faced charges were in the custody of the US Marshals Service. Their children remained in US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) detention. The parents were rapidly convicted—some spent less than a minute in front of the judge once their case was called, and most received sentences of time already served in government custody, so they were back in CBP holding cells in short order. In the meantime, however, DHS, the federal government department that includes CBP, had deemed their children to be unaccompanied. DHS agents not only knew exactly where the parents were but also knew that the parents would quickly return to CBP detention. Even so, the department treated the brief change in custody as meaning that parents were not “available” to provide care. Unaccompanied migrant children are entitled to specific protections. In response to a court case settled in 1997, Flores v. Reno, care of unaccompanied children is the responsibility of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), an agency of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). A 2008 anti-trafficking law requires DHS to transfer unaccompanied children to ORR expeditiously, usually within 72 hours. The forcible family separation policy weaponized these requirements. Keeping families together is, in the vast majority of these types of cases, in children's best interests. But instead of making every effort to keep families together, DHS transferred the children it had separated to ORR, without planning for or putting measures in place that would enable authorities to reunite them with their parents. Discussions about separating children from their parents at the border began less than a month after President Trump took office. One federal prosecutor commented in early 2017, “History would not judge that kindly.” 2 In March 2017, after Reuters broke the story that family separation was under consideration, a DHS staffer emailed Allen Blume, the department’s budget director, to say, “I would be truly grateful if you could tell me this isn’t being seriously considered.” 3 This report is based on a review of public and internal government documents, legal proceedings, and the findings of DHS, DOJ, and HHS internal investigations, drawing on Human Rights Watch’s extensive interviews with forcibly separated children and parents in 2018 and 2019. It finds that the forcible separation of children from their parents was a deliberate, targeted policy choice taken even though the architects of the policy knew or should have known that it would inflict anguish and suffering on families. Forcible separation of children from their families inflicted harms that were severe and foreseeable. Once parents realized they would not be immediately reunited with their children, they were distraught. Some children sobbed uncontrollably. Many felt abandoned. Nearly all were bewildered, not least because immigration officials would not tell them where their parents were or gave responses that proved to be lies. Children forcibly separated from their parents experienced anxiety, had nightmares, regressed to earlier developmental stages, or found it difficult to trust others and form attachments. Some lashed out. Others stopped speaking.

New York: Human Rights Watch, 2024, 145p.

By Naomi Schaefer Riley and Rafael A. Mangual

Every year, more than 2,000 children in the U.S. die of maltreatment—and, in most of these cases, the child’s family is known to child welfare or law enforcement before the fatal incidents. Most Americans agree that the main goal of the child welfare system should be to prevent these tragedies—by closing the gaps that lead to children being left in the custody of guardians who abuse and neglect them. Balancing the safety and well-being of children with the rights of parents is no easy feat. A nationally representative poll conducted last year by the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) shows that the public is sensitive to this tension: a majority (58%) favored parents’ authority to raise their children as they see fit, over the government’s authority to intervene—but nearly the same percentage of respondents (57%) did not believe that the child welfare system is engaged in government overreach. Alarmingly, a small group of increasingly vocal activists are trying to upset this balance by pushing a radical policy agenda that would all but eliminate the government’s role in child protection. Not only is this agenda wholly incongruous with the broader American public’s views regarding the appropriate scope of child welfare systems; it also undermines the well-being of at-risk children across the country. Illustrative of this broader push to weaken, if not wholly abolish, the child welfare system is a recent report issued by the New York Advisory Committee (NYSAC) to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, “Examining New York Child Welfare System and Its Impact on Black Children and Families.” One of the coauthors of this brief, Rafael Mangual, resigned from NYSAC in April 2024—after serving nearly four years on the committee—ahead of its final vote to approve its report on child welfare.

The NYSAC report offers a litany of policy recommendations that would make it more difficult for child abuse and neglect to be reported and investigated. The report calls for a “new paradigm of child welfare” that deemphasizes “reporting, investigating, surveillance, and family separation,” and it recommends that “federal, State and Local government offices and agencies” enact “legislation, policies and practices” prohibiting “the conflation of the consequences of poverty [including ‘parental/pregnancy substance use’] with child maltreatment” (emphasis added). The report also calls for federal law to be amended to:

• Eliminate or severely restrict mandatory and anonymous reporting of suspected child abuse or neglect

• Make it easier for convicted felons to become foster parents

Revise the definition of neglect to exclude parental drug abuse (including while pregnant) And for New York State law to be amended to:

• Prohibit routine drug screenings of pregnant women and newborns

• Establish a universal basic income

NYSAC’s proposals are ultimately premised on three false claims about the child welfare system: (1) what is often termed child neglect is often a consequence of poverty, which cannot justify traditional child welfare interventions; (2) parental drug abuse is an inadequate reason for intervention; and (3) racial disparities in child welfare enforcement in NY prove that the system is characterized by unlawful discrimination—particularly against black families. This issue brief provides an overview of the child welfare system’s central role, responds to each of these three claims, and highlights the dangers invited by the recommendations made in the NYSAC report.

New York: Manhattan Institute, 2024. 10p.

Edited by Alejandra J Josiowicz, Irasema Coronado 

The Americas are witnessing an era of unprecedented human mobility. With their families or unaccompanied, children are part of this immense movement of people. Children Crossing Borders explores the different meanings of the lives of borderland children in the Americas. It addresses migrant children’s struggle to build a sense of belonging while they confront racism and estrangement on a daily basis.

Unified in their common interest in the well-being of children, the contributors bring an unrivaled breadth of experience and research to offer a transnational, multidimensional, and multilayered look at migrant childhoods in Latin America. Organized around three main themes—educational experiences; literature, art and culture, and media depictions; and the principle of the “best interest of the child”—this work offers both theoretical and practical approaches to the complexity of migrant childhood. The essays discuss family and school lives, children’s experience as wage laborers, and the legislation and policies that affect migrants.

This volume draws much-needed attention to the plight of migrant children and their families, illuminating the human and emotional toll that children experience as they crisscross the Americas. Exploring the connections between education, policy, cultural studies, and anthropology, the essays in this volume navigate a space of transnational children’s rights central to Latin American life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2022. 255p.