January 21, 2021
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)’s ongoing practice of filing Notices to Appear (NTAs) with the local immigration court for unaccompanied children within days of their arrival to the United States creates severe operational inefficiencies and undermines children’s ability to secure counsel and prepare their cases. These harms have grown particularly acute during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) is initially staging unaccompanied children in quarantine shelters, then transferring them weeks after arrival to shelters located hundreds of miles away from the immigration courts where ICE filed their NTAs.
