Newcomer immigrant youth in the Bay Area, p1

NeEddra James: I’m NeEddra James. Today’s show is a little different than the last two. We are focusing on what care looks like for immigrant youth in the Bay Area. As many of us look forward to vacation time and spending the holidays with family, immigrant children in federal custody will have a very different experience this holiday season.

So today, we are airing the first conversation in a series of episodes about youth immigration in the Bay Area. We’re gonna pick those back up when we return in January. Across the series, we’re gonna hear about the experiences new immigrant youth face here. We’ll hear how local providers navigate shifting institutional conditions, and fingers crossed, we’ll hear from a few of those youth peop- youth directly.

Today, we’re gonna talk to Melissa Adamson, an attorney at the National Center for Youth Law, and the primary author of the center’s recent report, Newcomer Immigrant Youth in the Bay Area: Uplifting Voices, Identifying Solutions. Melissa’s gonna introduce us to the complex conditions immigrant youth face.

I’m NeEddra James, and this is The Radio Show. We don’t just break the news, we break it open.

Zoe Meyer: Good afternoon, fellow listeners. My voice might sound a little unfamiliar to you. I’m Zoe Meyer in for Minahil Arif, and these are today’s top headlines. On November 20th, a tropical storm hit Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Thailand, killing over 1,000 people and leaving over 800 unaccounted for.

US and Ukrainian officials met for a four-hour discussion over the weekend. The goal of this conversation was to ch- strategize an end to war between Russia and Ukraine. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told AP that the meeting was productive, but work remains in the search for a peace deal.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu officially requested a pardon for his corruption trial on Sunday. He argued that his actions, CNN said, were in the public interest. Asylum decisions have come to a screeching halt after a National Guard member was fatally shot and another critically injured on November 26th.

Locally in Oakland, activists will rally against Amazon’s contracts with ICE and Flock Safety, a controversial video surveillance technology that scans license plates and has been used in tracking for deportations. In Berkeley, I’m Zoe Meyer.

NeEddra James: Now, what’s coming up on our show, newcomer immigrant youth in the Bay Area.

They receive little news coverage while they face down challenges no child or teen should ever face alone. When we come back, we’re joined by Melissa Adamson from the National Center for Youth Law to discuss the center’s new report on new immigrant youth in the Bay Area. Stay with us.

If you’re just tuning in, you are listening to The Radio Show on 90.7 KALX Berkeley. I’m your host, NeEddra James. In the wake of the DC National Guard shooting, the US government immediately froze asylum decisions and signaled a sweeping overhaul of asylum and refugee processing. Now, these kinds of rapid shifts in federal policy only deepen the precarity that immigrant communities already live with, and that precarity is felt most acutely by newcomer youth, young people who’ve already crossed borders and now navigate courts, schools, shelters, and survival largely alone.

Today, we’re joined by Melissa Adamson from the National Center for Youth Law to talk about what that precarity looks like on the ground and what it could take to build a system that meets these young people with care instead of crisis. Melissa, thank you so much for joining us.

Melissa Adamson: Thank you for having me.

NeEddra James: Um, how’s your morning?

Melissa Adamson: It’s great. Thank you. How are you?

NeEddra James: I’m... It’s, it’s, uh, going pretty well. Welcome back to Berkeley. Go Bears. All right. Um, I’m just really happy that you took the time to come chat with us because, as I was saying, that coverage of this particular population, um, is kind of few and far between, and certainly coverage that gives us insight into how the young people are feeling themselves.

And you had an opportunity to talk with, you know, 88 young people across the Bay Area for this report. Um, at a really high level, what did you hear? What did they tell you?

Melissa Adamson: Yeah. So I think, you know, I’d, I’d love to start with talking more about who these kids are and how they got here, ‘cause that really sets the stage for the import of what they told us in these focus groups.

And, you know, in California, the term newcomer generally refers to youth under 21 who’ve been here for fewer than three years. And the majority of youth in our focus groups were what we called unaccompanied children. Now, these are children that arrive to the United States without a parent or a guardian to care for them, and they don’t have legal status in the United States.

So we talked to unaccompanied children, we spoke with recently arrived refugee youth, and youth that didn’t pass through formal feder-federal custody when they came to the United States. But what all of these kids had in common, even if their individual cases varied, they faced circumstances in their home countries that forced them to leave.

They experienced what was likely an incredibly difficult and traumatic migration journey to get to the United States. They may have endured a prolonged time, months, some even years, in government custody, and now they’re here living with us in the Bay Area. And so these, these youth, what we learned through the focus groups is that even in a state like California, which is very vocally committed to immigrants, and in a region like the Bay Area, which has a lot of resources and support for these youth, youth still described, sometimes with very chilling clarity, the instability and the challenges that overlap- Mm-hmm

and exacerbate each other through all areas of their lives.

NeEddra James: Right.

Melissa Adamson: Right? Housing insecurity leading to homelessness, inconsistent school attendance. Attending school as a newcomer youth, doesn’t speak English, is already incredibly difficult. It’s easy to get overwhelmed, drop out without support. And not having legal status as the underlying factor of all of these things means they’re not eligible for legal work opportunities.

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. So they end up in exploitative situations, they’re taken advantage of, and all of this while being a teenager. It’s-

NeEddra James: All of it while being a teenager, yeah.

Melissa Adamson: Yeah.

NeEddra James: Yeah. I... Thank you so much for that, both, like, grounding us in who they are and where they’re coming from, um, and the multiple pathways that, you know, lead, lead young people here.

Um- You all started the focus groups in 2024, and that was a year that both, like, expanded care and also we saw threatened, but, you know, funding. Why 2024? Why that moment? And what has shifted, um, or what did you see shift at all while you were actually doing the field work?

Melissa Adamson: Sure. So at the National Center for Youth Law, we, we have the privilege of representing classes of children that are in immigration custody.

Uh, we’re counsel on several class action cases, and, you know, our litigation has really focused on the conditions of federal custody, what children experience, um, and really the harm they experience when they are in custody of our government. And I think for a long time, our team wanted to believe that when children exited custody to families, that their lives were much better.

NeEddra James: Mm-hmm.

Melissa Adamson: But as we worked with children and families, we had to acknowledge that even outside of the immigration system, when kids went to their families, um, they went to communities that were completely unequipped to support them. For some of the youth that we worked with, one ended up in foster care, one experienced an unintended pregnancy, another was homeless for a long period of time.

And so it was very natural for us to then expand our work to focus on these kids once they were outside of federal custody.

NeEddra James: Now, are these kids, like, aging out? Are they over 18 and that’s why they’re out of federal custody?

Melissa Adamson: So for unaccompanied children that are held in federal custody, the government’s job, as determined by, uh, federal legislation, is to find a sponsor to release that child to.

Now, the vast majority of unaccompanied children in federal custody have a family member in the United States that they can go live with, whether that’s an aunt, an uncle, a grandmother. And so the majority of children are released to those, what we call sponsors-

NeEddra James: Okay ...

Melissa Adamson: in the US.

NeEddra James: So this is actually a, a interesting point because the sponsorship, um- Or, or rather the eligibility for sponsors to re-retrieve these young people from the system has been changing.

Can you, since, you know, the new administration came into power, can you speak about that piece a little bit and what the implications of those changes are?

Melissa Adamson: Absolutely. So, you know, historically, the Office of Refugee Resettlement has been the agency, we call it ORR, in the federal government that is in charge of taking, quote unquote, “care” of- Mm-hmm

these children and then releasing them to sponsors. What we’ve seen under the Trump administration is a real shift in interpretation of that role to the extent where they’ve implemented new unnecessarily restrictive identification requirements, documentation requirements, to the point where if, at this point, if a sponsor is undocumented, there is very little to almost no chance that they can retrieve or get their child out of custody.

The federal government has also, you know, really gone after sponsors in other ways to detain and deport them, leaving children with no sponsor. And so the practical impact of that is for children who may, you know, once upon a time in 2024, spent one to two months in custody, they’re now stuck in custody for an average of six months.

And we know that the longer a child spends in custody-

NeEddra James: Mm-hmm ...

Melissa Adamson: the more their mental health deteriorates.

NeEddra James: Right. Right. This is actually the conversation I was in with your colleague, Neha Desai, and how we started having these conversations. So we know that while they’re in custody, the conditions are horrible, and now what you’re sharing in this report is the next step of the fallout.

So let’s talk a little bit about, um-

The idea that the newcomers are, you know, the experts on their own experience and, and the providers are the experts, why start there? What shows up when you kinda take that as the assumption or the first, first step?

Melissa Adamson: So I think y- youth are incredibly smart. Y- youth know-- They are the lived experts on their own lives.

They’re there. They know what they experience. Um, and so for me, it was really important to center their voices and how they interpret their experience and understand their experience as the heart of this report. And I think what, what really kind of came to life in the report is youth giving the why behind the struggle or behind their actions.

You know, it’s one thing for me to interview a teacher and for the teacher to mention that newcomer students that they teach really wanna succeed in class, but they fall asleep all the time. It’s a much more powerful understanding of the issue when I talk to a focus group and a youth describes the cultural weight of wanting to provide for family back home, the financial weight of needing to pay rent, and wanting to honor their parents’ sacrifices by going to school and succeeding.

And that’s why they’re tired in class, because they’re working until 2 a.m. and then getting four hours of sleep before they go back to school.

NeEddra James: Right.

Melissa Adamson: And to look around that room and see not only one child sharing that experience, but 10 other youth nodding in agreement- Mm-hmm ... and understanding of that shared experience.

NeEddra James: Oh my goodness. And I imagine it’s extraordinarily validating to be in a space where other people are like, “Yes, I get that, and it’s so hard,” and to know that, like, now here are some adults that are trying to help me. We’re gonna talk about this a little bit more. We’re gonna take a quick break. Um, when we come back, we’re gonna chat with Melissa more about what the document, um, shares in terms of what the young people are experiencing.

There are some incredible quotes, and then we’re gonna talk about this, um, kinda conundrum you’re, you, at the heart that you’re talking about here. Legal status makes every... kinda cascades out to everything. So we will be back in a moment. Don’t go away. You don’t wanna miss this.

We are back, and this is The Radio Show. I’m NeEddra James. We are talking to Melissa Adamson. And, uh, Melissa, so we were beginning to talk a little bit about, um, the young people specifically, and some of the stories that are in this report that, my goodness, I, I have two kids, one is five and one is three, and, you know, just imagining as a parent that this is an outcome for a little one whose diapers you change is just...

It’s very difficult to sit with as a parent, you know? So we’re talking about 16-year-olds doing roofing work to pay rent, a young mother trying to finish high school while caring for her child, you know. So let’s talk about to what’s hap- let’s talk about what’s happening to these young people, specifically this, um, piece you were naming of, “I don’t have legal status, so what are the implications for my, for work, for feeding myself,” and so on.

Melissa Adamson: Hmm. I really felt like this was the crux of the report, was youth sharing and providers sharing the difficulty of balancing work, the need to work, uh, with the desire to go to school and succeed. So youth describing working really long and late work hours, fatigue, exhaustion, difficulty focusing in class.

And one of the providers actually shared a quote that I, I feel like is, is almost my favorite quote in, from the providers, in which she described adolescence as a privilege and a social construct.

NeEddra James: Hmm.

Melissa Adamson: And really talking about how a lot of these youth were not children in their countries of origin.

NeEddra James: Mm-hmm.

Melissa Adamson: And here they have a very different, more communal understanding of their role in life as composed, as opposed to our more individualistic culture here- Right ... in the United States, and that conflict of people here telling them, “Just go to school.”

NeEddra James: Mm-hmm.

Melissa Adamson: “Focus on yourself. You shouldn’t be working. You’re a child.”

NeEddra James: Oh, I see. Uh-huh.

Melissa Adamson: Versus the child saying, “Well, you know what? Like, I need to help my family- Right ... back home. They sent me here. They’re supporting me. They need medicine today.” Mm-hmm. “I need that money today.”

NeEddra James: Right.

Melissa Adamson: Um, a- and really that, that clash.

NeEddra James: Let’s talk a little bit about how y’all support them as they’re in this struggle.

Um, I know that, you know, your... the report covers a whole range of, um, domains that support is provided in, and y’all give us a window into what it’s like to try to navigate those systems. So let’s talk a little bit about that. Um, y’all end up calling for integrated support, so walk us through what the experience is like for, for one of the young people you worked with.

Melissa Adamson: Sure. So you know, listeners, if you can imagine, say you’re 14 years old, and let’s say you were born, uh, somewhere else in the world, not in the United States, and you speak a different language, and circumstances in your country mean that you’re not safe, and so you have to flee, and you come to the United States where you don’t speak the language.

You might have some family, but not a lot, and the society’s entirely different. School is entirely different, and you somehow need to survive. And maybe the family that you’re with doesn’t speak English either, and so they can’t help you navigate the, the support that children would usually expect or get from their parents in understanding school assignments or going to the doctor’s office or finding a lawyer.

The adults that you’re living with can’t necessarily provide that for you, and so you need to find that somewhere else. And so it’s, it’s incredibly difficult at almost every level, and that’s even before you get to the question of do these services even exist for kids? And so I think that’s the baseline question, is first you have to have services available for children to access, then you need channels for those services to talk to each other and know that each other exist, and then you need connectors.

You need social workers. You need case managers that are gonna be able to sit down with a child and say, “Let me assess your needs. Let me now match your needs with the resources that exist,” and then really help that child connect and help that child’s family connect. That’s huge. And so kind of every step of the way, we need to build up those structures, and it’s not a question of knowing or wondering what would help.

It’s we know what would help. Mm-hmm. We need to fund it and fund it consistently.

NeEddra James: Mm-hmm. Let’s talk about funding. So what is the funding terrain like for these programs?

Melissa Adamson: Well, the funding terrain is extremely difficult on the federal level, ‘cause I, I don’t think it’s any surprise that the federal government is not going to be funding services for newcomer immigrants anytime soon in this administration.

NeEddra James: Right.

Melissa Adamson: Um, so we look at the state, and we know that California is in a, a state budget deficit, but we also know that California has been a national leader in programs serving newcomer immigrant youth-

NeEddra James: Mm-hmm ...

Melissa Adamson: over the last several years, and has really taken a leadership position to create innovative programs.

The struggle with that comes with when funding is not always sustainable, uh, or it’s not consistent. And so programs take a long time to grow.

NeEddra James: Mm-hmm.

Melissa Adamson: You know? They, they don’t... You can’t just snap your fingers and a full-fledged program to support newcomer youth in schools a-appears out of thin air. You need years to train people, to innovate, to figure out what works and what doesn’t work.

Right.

NeEddra James: Yes.

Melissa Adamson: And it’s really, like, two or three years into a program that you have a, a well-running program. And then for that program to not, not know how much money are we gonna get the next year, how many people can we hire, what kind of program can we offer, are we gonna get any funding next year? That kind of instability is not best practice.

NeEddra James: Right. And just so I’m clear, you’re saying these programs run at the state level rather than the county level?

Melissa Adamson: That’s right. So these are programs like California Newcomer Education and Well-Being, or CalNEW, or the Opportunities for Youth program. These are all state-funded and administered by the California Department of Social Services.

NeEddra James: Got it. And you mentioned that mental health was, like, one of the biggest challenges and impacts for the young people. And in the report, y’all also focus on mental health as a domain, um, for s- for support. And I’m wondering if you could speak a little, just a little bit about, um- What that looks like for young people, like I imagine being in, in one, in the group, like, uh, CalNEW for example, where they’re, they have access to other young people who have similar experiences, is, is very helpful.

Um, is there anything you can share with us about some of the young people you’ve had an opportunity to talk with, um, how they have experienced more com- m- having more community, having access to these programs, um, and just their overall experience?

Melissa Adamson: Yeah. I think what’s important for people to understand is acculturation stressors- Mm-hmm

is what we call them. So the, the stressors that come with a newcomer youth arriving in a new society and having to adapt to a completely different society-

NeEddra James: Right ...

Melissa Adamson: is, is very, very difficult on many levels. And what these programs often do is connect peer groups. And, you know, kind of our... a Western concept of mental health might be one-on-one therapy with a therapist where you- Right

sit in a room and you talk for an hour. Mm-hmm. And across the board, when we spoke with youth, they had a lot of vocabulary around mental health because schools now talk about it more. It’s, it’s more socialized. Youth are given the vocabulary to describe it. But what they said was the thing that was most helpful for their mental health was being with other newcomers.

NeEddra James: Right.

Melissa Adamson: Was that shared experience, was programs like Soccer Without Borders, which operates here in Oakland and San Francisco. And yes, they play soccer, but infused in those soccer programs are community and belonging- Mm-hmm ... and building of those frameworks of community. Um, and that, that kind of peer programming was more helpful for their mental health than sitting in a room talking to a therapist.

NeEddra James: That makes so much sense, both being outside, moving your body, talking to people who get you-

Melissa Adamson: Mm-hmm ...

NeEddra James: um, and not talking to those people because... But what I mean by that is just being able to be in space together and not have to explain yourself- Mm-hmm ... um, but to feel seen and understood in ways that allow you to just relax.

You know, a lot of what you’re describing from the conditions that push me out of my home to the conditions of the journey itself to what I’m met with once I arrive at this place that’s supposed to help, um, is, is... I mean, stress doesn’t even quite capture it. We’re really talking about complex trauma here.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And when there isn’t, um, one, just a broad-based agreement on what that even is, first of all, then how we treat folks for it, you know, um, is difficult to figure out as well, or at least it’s contested. And then when you are in a population that is as marginalized as these groups, you’re just not gonna get that care.

So, um, yay, Soccer Without Borders. What a great idea. Um, let’s- Oh, where would it go from here, Melissa? I’m just really curious to hear, um, I think what would be helpful for our listeners to understand as we move into kind of wrapping up our conversation is, um How do we, or how do you all rather, think about, um, kind of reframing how the public understands, um Resourcing programs like this, right?

So on the-- what, what you all ultimately recommend is more integration, more connective tissue between all of these resources so it’s easier for folks to, the young people to navigate them. And you’ve also said the, the kind of infrastructure for it has gone un-underfunded and most recently not funded. So in an environment like California, where we are, you know, are a sanctuary state, we have sanctuary cities, we have programs, and we have a deficit, and people would...

might say, “Oh, we can’t afford this, though. We can’t afford to keep funding, you know, for these immigrant children,” what would you say to those folks to, um, I don’t know, have them just reconsider their, their, their position?

Melissa Adamson: Mm-hmm.

Melissa Adamson: Yeah. I think to reconsider it’s to understand the actual situation of newcomer youth.

I know that many people that I’ve spoken with about this report didn’t even really know this population of kids existed. And so I think if you understand that these are kids fleeing dangerous situations, they are risking their lives to travel here. They are enduring unimaginable hardship. And once they arrive, they are literally struggling to survive here in the Bay Area.

If you care about the vulnerable people in your community, and it’s harder, as you mentioned, to think of a more vulnerable population than these kids, then we can’t afford to ignore the situation. If we do, we’re intentionally failing them to know of this need and then not support it.

NeEddra James: Thank you so much.

So y’all, thank you, Melissa, for coming. If you wanna read more about the conditions these young folks are experiencing, the programs and providers that try to help them, you can read the full report at youthlaw.org. Melissa Adamson, thank you so much for being here.

Melissa Adamson: Thanks.

NeEddra James: Um, friends, we’re gonna start to wrap it up.

Can’t believe it’s December. It’s the end of the year. It’s been a super transformative year, locally, nationally, and globally. So where are we now? We, The Radio Show, will be taking a little break. We’ll be back in January, and we’re gonna pick up where we ended today, asking whose futures get protected, whose lives get funded, who gets care, and who gets left waiting for it.

Until then, I’m NeEddra James. This is The Radio Show. We don’t just break the news, we break it open.

The radio show is produced by Jasmine Asencio and Zoe Meyer. Minahil Arif is our newscaster. I’m NeEddra James, host and executive producer.