New Data on Unaccompanied Minors in US Immigration Court (2009–2023)

Lack of data transparency and administrative data quality issues have hindered our understanding of the treatment of unaccompanied minors in the United States to date. This Dispatch from the Field provides new statistics on nearly a half million unaccompanied minors navigating removal proceedings in US immigration courts nationwide between 2009 and 2023 (through March), including population demographics, geographic location of cases, representation rates, and case outcomes. We extrapolated these statistics, even the most basic of which have not been available to the public since 2017, by using a novel approach that we developed to identify unaccompanied minors in administrative data from the Executive Office for Immigration Review. During the study period, only 51% of unaccompanied children were represented by an immigration attorney at any time during their removal proceedings. There are significant geographic and demographic disparities in representation rates. Representation for unaccompanied minors declined almost every year during the first Trump presidency. Over half (56%) of children's cases on which a decision was reached during the study period ended in a deportation order. More children were ordered deported under the first Trump administration (70% of completed cases) than under either the Obama (51%) or Biden (45%) administrations. Children who were not represented by an attorney were far more likely to be ordered deported.