FRESNO, Calif. – For many years, the Community Justice Alliance provided long-term legal aid and case work for immigrant youths – including unaccompanied minors, who arrived in the U.S. under age 18 with no legal immigration status and without a parent or legal guardian in the country.
The non-profit organization, which has offices in Sacramento and Fresno, even used to provide leadership training and weekly meetups for the youths.
“I like to think of us not just as a legal services organization, but also as a refuge,” Executive Director Kristina McKibben-Sias said. “We've been able to develop a team of attorneys, social services staff, and also youth mentors that walk with youth as they come out of [Office of Refugee Resettlement] shelters and navigate their new home.”
But recently, all of that changed.
Now, her organization primarily offers rapid-response emergency support to keep youths from being detained and deported.
“CJA has really had to pivot,” she said.
That’s because, for years, many of these youths were protected from detention and deportation – specifically, those who qualified as special immigrant juveniles (SIJ), a specific federal classification for immigrants under age 21 who meet a handful of requirements including being unable to reunite with one or both parents due to abuse, abandonment or neglect.
Youths with SIJ status long qualified for deferred action, which means they were permitted to stay in the U.S. while they applied for work permits or green cards.
But this group is one of the latest to come under the crosshairs as the Trump Administration continues its crackdown on immigration.
In May, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) rescinded deferred action for youths with SIJ status, and made it impossible for those who were once granted deferred action to renew it. Now, they’re at risk of detention and deportation.
“It's just a complete dismantling of every angle of protection that they've had,” McKibben Sias said.
Many immigrants of all ages and statuses are being detained at routine legal appointments under the federal crackdown, and the government has vastly expanded its detention facilities to house them.
Last year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement began a system of “wellness checks” whose stated purpose was to ensure unaccompanied minors landed in safe homes, but which McKibben Sias said had the effect of terrorizing and intimidating the youths themselves.
“We receive calls from children that are shaking because there are federal agents threatening to break down their door,” she said, tearing up. “It's been a lot. It's been a lot.”
Since 2015, more than half a million kids have arrived in the U.S. as unaccompanied minors, according to the Office of Refugee Resettlement. Around 80,000 live in California.
Among those are Y.M. and O.L., who requested KVPR use only their initials in order to protect their immigration status.
Y.M. came to the U.S. at age 13, alone, from El Salvador.
“I was abused when I was nine years old by a family friend, and when I was 11 years old my stepfather began to abuse me until I was 13,” she said in Spanish.
Now 18, Y.M. just graduated from high school. She hopes to get a psychology degree and start her own practice.
“This would allow me to help other youths get settled, including those who have been victims of crime or something similar…in order to free themselves of the burden they’re carrying,” she said.
But her future is uncertain.
“I feel really scared on my way to school, that immigration officials might pick me up or something like that,” she said. “The way things are now, you just never know.”
O.L. emigrated from Guatemala at the age of 14 to find better opportunities in the U.S. Now 19, he hopes to start his own landscaping business – but the last year has been hard on him, too.
“I was looking for help, like some support at home, so I could continue my studies, but unfortunately, it didn't work out. Because of the current situation with immigration, everything is complicated. It’s impossible to get what you’re looking for,” he said in Spanish.
He still has yet to graduate from high school.
Since 2010, around a quarter million youths have been approved for SIJ status and deferred action protections, according to USCIS data. They include unaccompanied minors as well as other immigrant children.
Y.M. and O.L. don’t know enough about their legal cases to know if they qualified for SIJ status after coming to the U.S. But in light of recent policy changes, they say they feel unprotected either way.
Indeed, legal experts say youths all over the country – particularly those with SIJ status – have gotten the rug pulled out from under them.
“The Trump administration has put hundreds of thousands of young people with special immigrant juvenile status who should be able to apply for their green cards at risk of being deported before they can do that,” said Ellie Norton, a senior staff attorney with the non-profit National Immigration Project.
“They’re in a years-long process that they were going through and they thought that they were protected,” said Rachel Davidson, a program director with the same organization.
The National Immigration Project was among a handful of organizations that have sued the federal government to put deferred action back in place – especially since, according to federal code, the only way to apply for SIJ status and its protections is to physically be present in the U.S. Youths can’t apply from outside the country.
Plus, a bottleneck in the federal government and a quota for visas has led to a long backlog for SIJ approvals, which can leave some youths vulnerable for years while they wait for a determination.
Deferred action for these youths was only introduced in 2022. Before that, Davidson says most presidential administrations didn’t prioritize deporting them – but a lot has changed since January 2025.
“Congress created special immigrant juvenile status as a pathway to permanent protection for young people who are extremely vulnerable,” Davidson said. “If you interrupt the pathway by deporting them in the middle, that means that you're not understanding the purpose of the statute, which is to protect them.”
