Volunteer Child Advocate for Unaccompanied Immigrant Children

Save to Favorites

About The Young Center for Immigrant Children's Rights

Location:

1303 San Jacinto St, Suite 926, Houston, TX 77002, US

Mission Statement

The mission of the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights is to promote the best interests of unaccompanied immigrant children with due regard to the child’s expressed wishes, according to the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Position Statement: Every young immigrant deserves to be safe. Young children who flee violence, abuse and poverty need an advocate, not an adversary. The Young Center is their champion in an immigration system that is not designed to treat children as children. We help assure that their needs are put foremost and their best interests take priority. They’ve taken the first step to improve their futures, and we step in, with their assent, to help them move forward.

Description

In 2003, the United States Department of Health & Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) provided seed funding to build a model project to provide guardians ad litem (Child Advocates) for unaccompanied immigrant children. Although civil and criminal courts routinely appoint guardians ad litem to represent the best interests of minors-and although the US "best interests" model was the benchmark around which the international Convention on the Rights of the Child was crafted-US Immigration Courts do not recognize immigrant children as distinct from adults, nor do they consider the children’s best interests when deciding whether to grant protection or order the child deported.

The Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights developed a model through which Young Center attorneys who have experience in children’s rights and immigration recruit, train and supervise bilingual law and social work students as well as lay volunteers who are assigned to serve as Child Advocates for individual unaccompanied children. Many of the students and volunteers are immigrants themselves, or the children of immigrants.

Informed by our work on behalf of individual children, the Young Center also advocates for policy change at the national level. In March 2006, the Young Center was invited to join the legal clinic at the University of Chicago Law School as an independent project.