Immigrant Children

The scheme, initially targeting 17-year-olds in federal custody, offers $2,500 to return home voluntarily, raising concerns it could pressure minors to abandon asylum claims and legal protections

An Arizona judge temporarily blocked the Trump administration's effort to remove Guatemalan and Honduran children living in shelters or foster care after coming to the US alone, according to a decision Thursday. US District Judge Rosemary Marquez in Tucson extended a decision made over the Labor Day weekend. Lawyers for the children said their clients have said they fear going home, and that the government is not following laws designed to protect migrant children. A legal aid group filed a lawsuit in Arizona on behalf of 57 Guatemalan children and another 12 from Honduras between the ages 3 and 17. Nearly all the children were in the custody of the US Health and Human Services Department's Office of Refugee Resettlement and living at shelters in the Phoenix and Tucson areas. Similar lawsuits filed in Illinois and Washington, DC, seek to stop the government from removing the children. The Arizona lawsuit demands that the government allow the children their right to present their c

The Trump administration is planning to remove nearly 700 Guatemalan children who had come to the US without their parents, according to a letter sent Friday by Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon. The removals would violate the Office of Refugee Resettlement's child welfare mandate and this country's long-established obligation to these children, Wyden told Angie Salazar, acting director of the office within the Department of Health and Human Services that is responsible for migrant children who arrive in the US alone. Unaccompanied children are some of the most vulnerable children entrusted to the government's care, the Democratic senator wrote, asking for the deportation plans to be terminated. In many cases, these children and their families have had to make the unthinkable choice to face danger and separation in search of safety. Quoting unidentified whistleblowers, Wyden's letter said children who do not have a parent or legal guardian as a sponsor or who don't have an asylum case alread

A federal judge in California on Tuesday ordered the Trump administration to temporarily restore legal aid to tens of thousands of migrant children who are in the United States without a parent or guardian. The Republican administration on March 21 terminated a contract with the Acacia Centre for Justice, which provides legal services for unaccompanied migrant children under 18 through a network of legal aid groups that subcontract with the center. Eleven subcontractor groups sued, saying that 26,000 children were at risk of losing their attorneys; Acacia is not a plaintiff. Those groups argued that the government has an obligation under a 2008 anti-trafficking law to provide vulnerable children with legal counsel. US District Judge Araceli Martnez-Olgun of San Francisco granted a temporary restraining order late Tuesday. She wrote that advocates raised legitimate questions about whether the administration violated the 2008 law, warranting a return to the status quo while the case .

A federal appeals court on Friday ruled against an Obama-era policy to shield immigrants who came to the country illegally as young children, only three days before Donald Trump takes office with pledges of mass deportations. The unanimous decision by a panel of the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans two judges appointed by Republican presidents, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, and one by Democrat Barack Obama is the latest blow for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals programme, whose beneficiaries have lived in legal limbo for more than a decade. It signals no immediate change for its more than 500,000 beneficiaries, who can renew temporary permits to live and work in the United States. But the federal government cannot take new applications, leaving an aging and thinning pool of recipients. The decision may tee up the policy for a third visit to the Supreme Court. Trump sought to end DACA during his first term, but he also occasionally expressed wishes that

When Balu Natarajan became the first Indian American champion of the Scripps National Spelling Bee in 1985, a headline on an Associated Press article read, Immigrants' son wins National Spelling Bee, with the first paragraph noting the champion speaks his parents' native Indian language at home. Those details would hardly be newsworthy today after a quarter-century of Indian American spelling champs, most of them the offspring of parents who arrived in the United States on student or work visas. This year's bee is scheduled to begin Tuesday at a convention centre outside Washington and, as usual, many of the expected contenders are Indian American, including Shradha Rachamreddy, Aryan Khedkar, Bruhat Soma and Ishika Varipilli. Nearly 70 per cent of Indian-born US residents arrived after 2000, according to census data, and that dovetails with the surge in Indian American spelling bee champions. There were two Indian American Scripps winners before 1999. Of the 34 since, 28 have been

A US delegation discussed immigration and regional development in a series of meetings in Mexico at a time when rising numbers of migrants arriving at their shared border have raised concerns

The index, a policy tool that measures a country's national policies on international immigrants across eight parameters, is published jointly by two European think-tanks

Of those, only 18 children are currently in the pipeline to reunite with their parents in their countries of origin

Trump signed the executive order following widespread protests against the move of his administration to separate children from their parents who illegally enter the country

When children move to another culture and context, their experiences of play can be quite complex