The Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), part of the Administration for Children & Families (ACF), is officially responsible for the care of every unaccompanied child, “defined as a child who has no lawful immigration status in the United States; has not attained 18 years of age; and, with respect to whom, there is no parent or legal guardian in the United States, or no parent or legal guardian in the United States available to provide care and physical custody.”
ORR-funded facilities provide “care and custody for [unaccompanied children] until they can be safely released to a sponsor, repatriated to their home country, or obtain legal status. […] Services provided at care provider facilities include, but are not limited to, education, recreation, vocational training, acculturation, nutrition, medical, mental health, legal, and case management.”
ORR monitors the care facilities it funds, and it imposes a range of requirements, including that facilities submit reports when certain types of incidents occur.
Through a FOIA request to ACF, the Data Liberation Project has received 20 database tables with information about these incidents and reports. Unfortunately, the Data Liberation Project has some concerns about the completeness of the records — most notably, a core table seems to be missing.
In communications with ACF, the agency appears to be aware of the situation and willing to rectify it. But because the Data Liberation Project doesn’t know how long it will take to receive the missing records, and because some portions of the records may still be useful to the public in the meantime, we are releasing what we have so far. To familiarize yourself with the records and their caveats, please consult the Data Liberation Project’s introductory documentation for this data.