Young Center for Immigrant Children's Rights

The Young Center for Immigrant and Children’s Rights, (Young Center) based at the University of Chicago Law School, was founded in 2004 to promote the best interests of unaccompanied immigrant children according to state, federal, and international law. With this award for general operating support, the Young Center helps to reunite child migrants who have been separated from their parents by federal immigration agencies. It provides child advocates to unaccompanied immigrant children who face deportation proceedings in the United States; these advocates make individualized recommendations to the immigration courts detailing the best interests of the children. The Young Center also educates policy makers on the humanitarian protection needs of child migrants, many of whom fled gang violence and other threats of harm in their countries of origin.

The Young Center for Immigrant and Children’s Rights, based at the University of Chicago Law School, was founded in 2004 to promote the best interests of unaccompanied immigrant children according to state, federal, and international law. With this award, the Young Center convenes leaders of child welfare, immigrants’ rights, and juvenile justice organizations to build strategies to respond to legislative and administrative threats to child protection in the United States. The group will develop action plans in each of the three spheres of child protection and work collectively to produce a cross-disciplinary, multi-issue, national network that responds with a unified voice to policies and proposals that would harm children.

The Young Center for Immigrant and Children’s Rights (“Young Center”), based at the University of Chicago Law School, was founded in 2004 to promote the best interests of unaccompanied immigrant children according to state, federal, and international law. This award helps to ensure that children in U.S. immigration court proceedings are treated in a child-appropriate manner. The Young Center develops models for the adjudication of children’s immigration cases drawing upon the expertise of practitioners and scholars in child protection, domestic relations, juvenile justice, and child and adolescent development. Through the production of a Benchbook (a guide to legal procedure) and training module for immigration judges presiding over children’s dockets, and training materials for Asylum Officers, the Young Center moves the immigration adjudication system toward systematic recognition of the special characteristics and vulnerabilities of children.

The Young Center for Immigrant and Children’s Rights (“Young Center”), based at the University of Chicago Law School, was founded in 2004 to promote the best interests of unaccompanied immigrant children according to state, federal, and international law. With this award, the Young Center facilitates the efforts of federal agencies to implement the recommendations of a Best Interests Framework developed with previous MacArthur support. The Framework applies to cases in which the federal government seeks to determine the best interest of an unaccompanied immigrant child facing deportation to his or her country of origin. The Young Center trains immigration judges on the Framework, develops case guidance for adjudication officers in federal agencies, and produces implementation checklists for those officials to follow in reviewing cases. It advises the Department of Homeland Security as that agency pilots a review of selected cases that may lead to discretionary relief from deportation where the best interest analysis recommends humanitarian action. These steps greatly diminish the possibility that unaccompanied immigrant children are repatriated into unsafe situations in their countries of origin.