Hardened borders
Today: Zach Rabiroff, a writer on books, comics, and culture living in Brooklyn, New York.
Issue No. 423
Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing
Zach Rabiroff
HYDRANYM No. 21
The Editors
Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing
by Zach Rabiroff
An estimated 1.5 million undocumented kids under the age of 18 are currently living in the United States. Of these, a large but unknown percentage arrived unaccompanied by an adult family member. Since 2009, 600,500 unaccompanied immigrant children have been entrusted to government shelters, and an unknown number were entrusted to no authorities at all.
On October 3, 2025, the Department of Health and Human Services sent a memo to legal services across the U.S., directed toward unaccompanied migrant children in the services’ care. The memo offered children who arrived in the United States as unaccompanied migrants, and who were not themselves citizens, the sum of $2,500 in exchange for “voluntary departure” from the country.
“This effort is intended to support reintegration efforts following departures”—that is, “reintegration” into countries from which they’d fled as children, years before, where they might have no connections left.
If that was the carrot, a day later came the stick. As the Trump government prepared on October 4 to institute a new policy of immediately detaining undocumented immigrants once they turn 18, a federal judge granted a temporary restraining order to stop the directive from taking effect pending further court decisions. The ruling was widely expected to be appealed.
Dr. Stephanie Canizales has spoken with more than 200 of these undocumented teenagers, following their lives in and around downtown Los Angeles between 2011 and 2014 while researching her PhD at UCLA. Her book, Sin Padres, Ni Papeles: Unaccompanied Migrant Youth Coming of Age in the United States, tells the story of hopeful but deeply uncertain lives marked by a constant sense that any achievement or advance in American society would, in the end, prove impermanent.
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