The double exclusion of immigrant youth

• Published in: The Georgetown law journal 2023-06, Vol.111 (6), p.1407-1493
• Main Authors: Hlass, Laila L, Davidson, Rachel Leya, Kocher, Austin
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Abused children; Child welfare; Children & youth; Children's rights; Citizenship; Deportation; Emigration and immigration law; Evaluation; Family law; Illegal immigrants; Immigrant youth; Immigration; Immigration policy; Laws, regulations and rules; Noncitizens; Politics and government; Practice; Teenage immigrants; Unaccompanied children; Vulnerability (Personality trait)
• ISSN: 0016-8092

Congress created Special Immigrant Juvenile Status (SIJS) in 1990 to protect vulnerable children from deportation by providing a pathway to lawful permanent residency and citizenship. Although relatively few immigrant children applied for SIJS in the early years of the program, the number of SIJS petitions grew significantly over the past decade. The growth of SIJS petitions coincides with growing numbers of immigrant youth arriving at the US-Mexico border and with the politicization of immigrant youth who are increasingly represented as national security threats. Despite the high stakes of SIJS cases, remarkably little empirical research examines the bureaucratic implementation, procedural outcomes, and social effects of the SIJS program. Immigrant youth who apply for SIJS may face discrimination based on age, immigration status, race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and language use. SIJS petitioners are often approaching a formative stage of social development, the transition from childhood to adulthood, which exacerbates the consequences of SIJS delays and outcomes. Moreover, SIJS petitioners are subject to disparities in representation, immigration and criminal enforcement, and access to visas based on national quotas determined by Congress. There is, therefore, an urgent need to understand whether the SIJS program accomplishes its stated goal of protecting children or undermines its humanitarian objectives by exacerbating immigrant children's vulnerability. To address this need, this article presents a systematic study of children seeking SIJS and SIJS-based lawful permanent resident (LPR) status using anonymized case-by-case SIJS data obtained from US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) through the 'Freedom of Information Act'. The data in this article represent 153,374 I-360 petitions for SIJS filed between 2010 and 2021, and 35,651 I-485 LPR applications filed between 2013 and 2021. As a result of this analysis, the article finds that the SIJS program has failed to meet the growing need for fair and timely protection for vulnerable immigrant children. Instead, SIJS petitioners encounter avoidable delays, inconsistent denial rates, and a growing backlog of SIJS petitioners who are already approved for SIJS but whose lives are on hold while they wait for visas to become available. In addition to raising significant concerns about USCIS's management of the SIJS program, these findings have broader implications for how legal scholars conce