Project Summary:
Over a half million unaccompanied minors have been apprehended at the US-Mexico border in the past 10 years. They hail from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, countries where human rights violations, violence, and insecurity are widespread, and teenagers are especially at risk of being targeted and victimized by gangs. This study centers the experiences and perspectives of these youth and their immigration attorneys as together they navigate US removal proceedings, applying for asylum or Special Immigrant Juvenile Status. While unaccompanied minors are a formally protected group under US immigration law, I find that, in fact, there are vast gaps between legal protections in the books and their implementation in practice. As a result, even with high quality legal representation, too many youths remain in lengthy legal limbo or risk deportation back to home countries where they faced life threatening violence.
This study consists of six years of research (2015-2021), spanning the Obama and Trump administrations. I conducted longitudinal and multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in various non-profit legal aid organizations that represent unaccompanied minors in Los Angeles. There, I shadowed immigration attorneys and other staff as they helped nearly 80 youths apply for asylum and/or Special Immigrant Juvenile Status (SIJS) and navigate challenges beyond the legal realm. In these same legal aid organizations, I also spent countless hours working as a volunteer legal assistant and English-Spanish interpreter to help attorneys prepare asylum cases.
Data Overview:
The ethnography involved shadowing immigration attorneys and other NGO staff as they met with their Central American unaccompanied minor clients to help them apply for asylum and deportation relief for abandoned, abused, or neglected children. I complemented the ethnography by conducting 122 in-depth interviews, 55 of which were with immigration attorneys, other advocates, and asylum officers. The rest of my interviews were with 45 Central American unaccompanied minors and 10 of their caretakers; I stayed in touch with many of these youths over an extended period of time and re-interviewed 12 of them roughly two years after we first met.
Organization of Shared Data:
Metadata materials shared include immigrant interview protocols and demographic information for immigrant youth interviewees. Transcripts and fieldnotes are not shared to protect the identity and case information of this exceptionally vulnerable study population of unaccompanied children in active US removal proceedings. The fact that only the researcher would have access to those materials was a condition agreed upon both with UCLA IRB and with study respondents. A detailed description of the study methodology can be found in the appendix of Galli, Chiara. Forthcoming. Precarious Protections: Unaccompanied Minors Seeking Asylum in the U.S. University of California Press.
