#juvenile-asylum-seekers

#juvenile-asylum-seekers

Up to 21,000 asylum seekers who have waited for a year for their claims to be processed could be allowed to enter the jobs market so they can support themselves, the Home Office has said, as part of a package of measures to be announced on Thursday. As the government seeks to empty asylum hotels, claimants who break the law, work illegally or are found to have enough assets to live without support will from June be ejected and lose their support payments.

Project Play, an NGO that has worked with 2,192 children hoping to cross the Channel from northern France to the UK to claim asylum in the last two years, has documented the impact of the hostile conditions in northern France due to regular teargassing, evictions and dinghy-slashing by the French police. During that period the NGO documented the deaths of 22 children trying to cross the Channel, including five last year.

It is not normal for a healthy 41-year-old man to die less than 24 hours after being taken into government custody, said Shawn VanDiver, president of AfghanEvac, a San Diego-based group that helps Afghans who sought refuge in the United States after cooperating with U.S. authorities during the war in Afghanistan.

Juan Nicolás has been detained at Dilley since January, where his mother said he's been consistently sick. According to reports compiled by Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), Univision's Lidia Terrezas, and Juan's mother, at about 3 a.m. on Sunday, Juan suffered a "medical episode" where he was "choking on his own vomit." He was rushed to a hospital on Monday night and diagnosed with bronchitis.

The board employs more than 50 social workers to conduct the assessments, but some children have said they are out to get them. The report finds that in some cases the process has led to children's deteriorating mental health, including self-harm and suicidal ideation, and that going through a Home Office age assessment is far more severe and traumatic than a comparable experience with a local authority social worker.

An uprising broke out at an immigrant jail in southern Texas on Saturday, with around 1,000 immigrants detained in the facility - many of them children - chanting "Libertad" and "Let us go," according to an attorney who witnessed the event. The protest took place at South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, which closed in 2024 but was reopened by the Trump administration this year to detain immigrant families.