The Distance Between Us Artifact #5

This article is about the situation with immigrants who are minors, and how the government is  dealing with the situation.

In the first 6 months of 2014, Louisiana courts have faced hundreds of juvenile immigrant cases. This is when a child enters the country without an adult. Last year, the Lousiana only had 540 cases through the whole year. Three years ago it was 71. Other parts of the country like California and Texas have even more cases like this, and the country overall has 375,503 pending cases of child immigration.

A big part of the problem isn't how many unaccompanied children there are, but how few lawyers there are to represent them. Louisiana is the focus of this article, because New Orleans draws the most unaccompanied children out of every city in the U.S. The problem is that there are only a handful of nonprofit lawyers who are willing to represent them. Because of this, children are forced to go into courts by themselves, without any legal representation. At the end of June, the New Orleans Immigration Court had 1,216 pending juvenile immigration cases, 81% of which the child didn't have a lawyer.

Juvenile immigration has become a big problem in recent years for the U.S, and we don't really know how to deal with it. Lawyers aren't willing to represent kids who don't have any money, and we can't just grant them citizenship because they're children. This creates a legal and moral dilemma. Should the kids get a break out of the goodness of our hearts? Or should we lay down the law?

What if Reyna, Mago, and Carlos had ended up going to the U.S by themselves? They would've had to deal with both the dangerous journey to the U.S, and try and understand the entire legal process of getting in (without knowing English). That's what these kids have to face. They just want to get away from the violence or poverty that plagues their country of origin and try to have a better life.

If I've learned anything from doing these reflections, it's that the U.S needs to change how we handle immigration. We need better regulation of who we let in and why. We need to get more lawyers to represent immigrants so they have a fair chance to getting into the country. Basically we need a whole immigration reform so that we can stick by our American principles of 'liberty and justice for all'.