Pamela Florian is an attorney at the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, a nonprofit that provides free legal services to immigrants who have been detained in Arizona. She came on staff two years ago to work with unaccompanied minors—at the time, mostly teen-agers from Central America’s Northern Triangle who had crossed the border alone to seek asylum in the United States. A few months ago, Florian began seeing a different kind of client: small children who had entered the country with a parent, only to be separated at the border. At first, the number was relatively low. “We had a few kids a week, and those were usually people who were separated because their parents had crossed multiple times,” Florian told me.
Then, in May, the Trump Administration instituted its “zero-tolerance” policy, which calls for the criminal prosecution of all migrants, including asylum seekers, who cross the border without turning themselves in at so-called ports of entry. After they are apprehended by Customs and Border Protection, undocumented adults are briefly put in criminal custody, and then transferred to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Their children are sent to shelters run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement (O.R.R.), an office within the Department of Health and Human Services. ICE seeks to deport people as swiftly as possible, while O.R.R. aims to place children with relatives or foster families in the United States. By all accounts, there has been little communication or coördination between the two.
Florian works closely with one O.R.R. shelter in Arizona. Since it is equipped with a nursery, it was one of the first in the area to receive young children—“tender age,” in the official parlance. “Once the policy was implemented, it was everyone,” Florian told me. “Every single shelter has tender-age children now. There are huge numbers of children who have been separated from their parents.”
Florian told me that the separation policy has dramatically changed the nature of her work. “We’re just seeing all these challenges that were not there,” she said. “It’s not because we have an influx of children”—as was the case in 2014 and 2015, when a surge of tens of thousands of unaccompanied children arrived at the border, fleeing violence. “At that time, the government was not prepared. But family separation is a problem that was created by the government.” Florian spoke with me by phone from her office on Tuesday morning to describe her experience working with young children who have been separated from their parents. Her account has been edited and condensed.
“I am an attorney for unaccompanied children; I’ve been doing this work for about two years. I have experience working with teen-agers, because teen-agers are usually the ones who come by themselves. I’ve become really good at working with teen-agers, and helping them to understand their immigration cases.
“But now, with the new policy on family separation, we have had to change our strategies as we increasingly work with younger children. It takes a really long time to build trust with tender-age children. We want to provide honest information to them, but we have to explain it in a more child-friendly way, and in a child-friendly setting, to gain the children’s trust as we try to understand their wishes and navigate our complex immigration system. We have to get creative in our approach. We find ourselves sitting down on the floor with them. We play while we talk. We sometimes use coloring books with cartoon characters, or meet in the playground in an O.R.R. facility. We have toys for different ages, things that help with stress, like little balls or gooey toys so that kids can have something in their hands to hold or be distracted by. We have dolls. We have teddy bears. We have Legos. I’m not super familiar with types of toys, so I’ll go to our social-services team: ‘I need a toy for a two-year-old.’ And they give me something that’s appropriate.
“We mostly focus on building trust—making the child feel comfortable. We’re not there to get all the information we can all at once. It takes time. So we focus on the child being comfortable, and we move on to our questions later.
“Our social-services program trains us to understand biological and brain development. We really focus on trauma-informed interviewing, so we don’t traumatize the children any more than they are. We talk about stress reactions, and how to work specifically with different age groups. We also get ethics training for working with kids, and we take into consideration cultural differences. If the child is younger, we see that he or she may speak a different language, and we try to figure out what it is so that we can call an interpreter. There are children who speak indigenous languages, so we can’t assume that everyone speaks Spanish.
“Our philosophy is that we keep eyes on every single child. Even if they are pre-verbal, we still meet with them. We do not assume that a child will not be able to talk with us. Even if they are two or three, we still meet with them in case they might be able to communicate with us. One thing that has surprised me is that some children are much more vocal than others. We have four-year-olds who say a lot more than different four-year-olds. I don’t have children of my own, so I didn’t know anything about that. But now that I’m working with kids, I see that children are very expressive, and that sometimes they can share a lot of information, even when they are very young.
“We don’t have a specific first question that we ask the kids. Everything is case by case. We have to build that trust. We try to ask: How’s their day? What movie have they been watching? What is their favorite cartoon? So that hopefully they can get to know us. Eventually, we start asking, ‘How did you come to the United States? How old are you? Do you know your parents’ names? Do you miss your parents? Do you want to go home?’ We ask about their safety, to make sure that everything is O.K. at the shelter.
“We want to be part of a friendly environment, which means that we might shift the way that we ask certain questions, or the way that we do our Know Your Rights presentations. There’s a presentation for all the kids who get to the shelter each week. We tell them, ‘You have these rights. You have the right to talk to your family this many times a week. You have the right to be safe.’ We also tell them, ‘If you reunify with a family member, this is what’s going to happen when you go to court. This is how to call to find out when you have a hearing.’ We dial the number on the phone so that they can hear how it is, and we tell them the Spanish number, too. We give them our phone numbers so that they can call us. Children who are younger than five are usually not required to be there; we meet with them individually and try to explain the process.
“As far as the emotional aspect, working with tender-age children is difficult for our staff, and difficult on me as an attorney. We see children become more anxious and stressed the longer that they are away from their parents. When they first get to O.R.R., maybe they’re doing a little better, but as time progresses, we see behavioral issues. They are a little more emotional. They sometimes start crying. Sometimes they get nervous around older people. They just want to be able to be around other young children. So, for example, sometimes they’re in day care, and they get used to being around the day-care staff, and they don’t want to go with a case manager or anybody else who seems like they have authority.
“Our duty as attorneys is to represent the child’s express wishes. Sometimes, when they are really young, it’s difficult to ascertain those wishes, so we reach out to other professionals. But we try to get something from them. If they do want to be with their parent, we try to reunify them. If the child expresses that they have been abused—and we’ve had cases where the child says, ‘I don’t want to go back home’—we try to help them stay. But that’s very rare. If they are too young, we approach other professionals to make sure that we are really researching and getting all the information available.
More coverage of the Trump Administration’s immigration policy from The New Yorker.
“It is especially difficult with the younger children, because they can’t express as much. They say, ‘Mommy, Daddy,’ but they don’t know their parents’ names, or their phone numbers, as older children will. We spend a lot of time trying to find and communicate with the parents. We have an adult team, and they work in adult detention centers, so sometimes we try to find them that way. If they have had communication with a parent who says that they were separated from their children, we try to see if we can get information and ask questions from the parent as well. But that takes a lot of time. It is not an easy process. If the child is pre-verbal, we try to get documents to prove his or her identity, which is another challenge.
“We have had many kids who have been able to reunify with their families. It just takes time. What happens sometimes is that the parent has to be deported before the child. That is very heartbreaking. We try to help the child get back to their family as soon as possible. It does happen, but it doesn’t always happen that they leave at the same time.
“It is very emotional on me, and everyone else on staff. It is very hard to see very young children. When it first happened, of course we were not prepared; we have become better and better at doing this. We know that if we go see a very young child, it’s going to be upsetting. But we have to do it, and we want to make sure that they are safe, and able to go back home. I feel like if we don’t do this, who else is going to? As upsetting as it is, we have to do it.”
