Alone in America: The Immigration System Through a Child's Eyes
In the summer of 2025, TSOS participated with The Florence Project in a webinar focused on critical issues impacting unaccompanied minors within the immigration system.
The Florence Project is Arizona’s leading nonprofit organization providing comprehensive legal and social services to detained and formerly detained immigrants, including children. Founded in 1989, it is the only large-scale provider of these critical services statewide, working to ensure due process and support for some of Arizona’s most vulnerable populations.
TSOS Executive Director, Kristen Dayley, met with Roxana Avila-Cimpeanu, Deputy Director of the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Project. The conversation below has been edited for clarity and length.
In describing their work with unaccompanied minors, Ms. Avila-Cimpeanu said: “One of the things that we do, in addition to direct representation, is Knowing Your Rights presentations and legal intakes for every single child who enters the detention system in the state of Arizona, and we do that within 10 days.”
The physical conditions these children encounter vary dramatically. Describing where the children are detained, she continued: “Each shelter is different. Some of them are in our community and can seem more like a boarding school. Others are in deep, dark basements of old hospital buildings. Some of them are tiny, little buildings in the middle of our communities. The physical space can be very different, but what you feel is just sort of the dissonance of you walking in from the outside, and now there are children, there are fences. The children are very curious to see you and excited to talk to somebody who’s not from the shelter facility. And oftentimes we’re the first people they’ve met in the United States who have actually said, ‘Welcome to the United States. I’m so happy to see you, so happy to talk to you.’ One of the things that we track is Border Patrol abuse to children. They may face things like lack of food, or being held in cold cells, or being verbally or physically abused by Border Patrol. Sometimes we’re the first people who are there just to help them.”
Given that Immigration law is one of the most complex areas of U.S. law and is difficult to explain to an adult, let alone a child who often does not speak English. Ms. Avila-Cimpeanu described how they adapt their approach.
“We are so proud to work with a team of seasoned and experienced social workers, and they really help us develop programs and techniques for how to work with young children. We work with children ranging from 6 months to 17 years old, and so each child is going to come with different experiences and is going to be at a different developmental stage. We have a presentation for older children. When it comes to tender-aged children, which we consider under five years old, we do different things. We talk more in visuals. We have little dolls that we show them to represent different people in the immigration court process. We really talk to them at their level and focus on tailoring the things that we need to say in a way that matches where they’re at in their development.”
“The system is not designed for children, and you can even see how it trickles into the way children are treated in this process. In 2016, a judge who was in charge of training other judges said in a sworn statement that he could teach immigration law to three and four-year-olds. And that’s flabbergasting to me.”
When asked about the root causes that bring these children to the U.S. alone, Ms. Avila-Cimpeanu emphasized the gravity of their situations. “That is such a complex question. We see children from all over the world, and so depending on the individual child, the area of the world they’re coming from, or geopolitical updates, it could be different. The largest threat is because something has gone terribly wrong. Some of the reasons we see are abuse at home, slavery or trafficking, they’re being trafficked to come here, or political instability. It could be extreme poverty. More recently, we’re seeing a lot of climate change refugees. Volcanic explosions or floods or hurricanes resulting in a situation where there is not a safe place for them to be. Some of them are coming to reunite with their loved ones and their family members in the U.S. who can take care of them. I think at the end of the day, no child makes a decision on their own to end up alone unless something has gone horribly wrong.”
Beyond the initial legal support, The Florence Project also witnesses the ongoing challenges children face within the immigration system.
“The administration is making it nearly impossible for safe, responsible parents and sponsors to reunify with their children and to sponsor family members and to provide a loving environment and culturally competent care in a way that allows that child to go through this complex process in a stable and safe way. These policies are putting children at risk rather than saving them, and the prolonged detention that we just talked about is only increasing the mental health distress that many of these children face,” Ms. Avila-Cimpeanu said. “I don’t see how putting children in danger benefits us as a society or benefits us as citizens.”
“During the last year of the Biden Administration, the administration actually filed a lawsuit against one of the shelter providers for years and years of pervasive sexual abuse of minors. As an organization who worked with some of those children, who has repeatedly seen over the years the abuse of children being perpetrated by the people who are supposed to take care of them, we were glad to see that we were on a road to accountability. But one of the first things that this (Trump) administration did was drop that lawsuit.”
Despite the systemic challenges and heartbreaking circumstances, Ms. Avila-Cimpeanu draws strength from the children themselves. “I have represented over 150 children during my time at The Florence Project, and every single one of them has been so special to me. And the thing that I think about the most when having these types of conversations is if you could just meet the kids that I know, you would see that they are children. They are kids just like any other child, and they deserve our respect, and they deserve our protection. I keep going because I know that is the right thing to do.”
Emergency Response in Action: The life-or-death nature of The Florence Project’s work became evident during Labor Day weekend 2025, when they learned of plans to illegally remove hundreds of Guatemalan children from the U.S., possibly within hours. The organization’s rapid response exemplified their comprehensive approach: identifying every at-risk child in Arizona, creating age-appropriate presentations for indigenous children who spoke Mayan languages, and working through the weekend to file emergency litigation. When contractors arrived at shelters in the middle of the night to remove children, The Florence Project’s advocacy secured a temporary restraining order that protected the children from forced removal.
For more information on the Florence Project, visit https://www.firrp.org. To hear the full conversation, visit Alone in America: The Immigration System Through a Child’s Eyes.