Border crisis 101: eight things to know about unaccompanied children

Here’s a look at today’s immigration crisis and how it compares to the recent past.

7. What percentage of children fail to appear in court?

Charles Dharapak/AP/File
Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson (l.) sits with Deputy Chief of Border Patrol Ronald Vitiello on Capitol Hill in Washington in June as they testify before the House Homeland Security Committee.

Specific figures for unaccompanied children are unavailable, according to the Legal Access Project. But children who are placed with a sponsor and leave government custody have more opportunity to skip their court appearance. Statistics from the Executive Office of Immigration Review show that 20 to 30 percent of all immigrants failed to appear in court between 2008 and 2012.

Juan Osuna, director of the Justice Department's Executive Office of Immigration Review, told a Senate panel on Wednesday that "46 percent of juveniles actually don't show up before their immigration hearings."

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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