Why It’s So Hard To Get Migrant Kids In Rural Minnesota Through Immigration Court

About 438 children who crossed the southern U.S. border alone, fleeing poverty and gang violence from Latin America were placed with sponsors in Minnesota in the 2014 and 2015 fiscal years. At least 59 of those children have already been given deportation orders, “usually after skipping their court hearings,” the Star Tribune recently reported. And an undetermined number of additional kids are facing fundamental barriers to making their legal case that are exacerbated in the small rural towns where many migrants live: a lack of transportation to the Bloomington immigration court located three hours away in Minneapolis, a critical shortage of legal representatives, and few court interpreters who speak the appropriate language.
Read full article