Soaring Housing Costs Make Life Even More Challenging for Oakland’s Unaccompanied Minors

Lea esta historia en español.

Jorge arrived in the United States aged 16 and roughly $9,000 in debt to those who helped him make the harrowing journey from Guatemala to California.

The day after he arrived in Oakland, he found a job cleaning roofs and attics and eventually working in construction.

“I didn’t have the opportunity to continue with school or to go to school,” Jorge said in Spanish, though his native tongue is Mam, an indigenous language spoken in Guatemala. “When I came here, finding myself with such a huge debt, with pressure on me like that, [people] asking me to pay that debt, it affected me.”

An increasing number of young people like Jorge are arriving in Alameda County. While the exact numbers are unclear, between October 2023 and June 2024, more than 500 unaccompanied minors were released to a sponsor (an adult who takes responsibility for the child while they await immigration proceedings) in Alameda County, according to the latest Health and Human Services data. Alameda County is second only to Los Angeles County in the number of unaccompanied minors released to sponsors statewide. More than 64,000 unaccompanied children settled in California between January 2015 and May 2023, according to an analysis of federal data by CalMatters.

Unaccompanied minors’ journeys to the U.S. leave a lasting mark on their mental health, compounded by the economic demands on them when they arrive. Once here, they face a staggering cost of living fueled by the Bay Area’s housing crisis. Some, like Jorge, must also pay the debt they accumulated getting to the U.S. As the challenges build, so do the traumas, yet the need for mental health care is often lost behind basic survival.

“They’ve sometimes experienced layers of trauma and family separation,” explained Lisa Hoffman, the Co-Executive Director of East Bay Sanctuary Covenant (EBSC). “They are incredibly vulnerable and need many layers of support.”

Hoffman’s organization works with the Children’s Holistic Immigration Representation Project (CHIRP), a pilot program with the Acacia Center for Justice, a nonprofit, non-governmental organization that pairs a social worker with an immigration lawyer to provide stabilizing and trauma-informed support to unaccompanied minors immigrating into the U.S., while also helping them maneuver the immigration court system. The program is one of few that offers assistance to unaccompanied minors. According to data from CHIRP, between Sept. 1, 2022 and Dec. 31, 2023, legal representation was provided to more than 600 children with immigration cases. CHIRP also accompanied 300 youth to critical appointments including educational or medical services.

Governor Gavin Newsom’s proposed budget for 2025–2026 excludes funding for CHIRP, which would leave a more than $17 million gap in the program’s budget.

Federal funding for the Acacia Center’s legal aid program for unaccompanied minors is also in flux. On Feb. 18, the Department of Interior emailed a stop-work order to the center to immediately pause services for their Unaccompanied Children Program. The order was lifted by the Trump administration on Feb. 21 and the center issued a statement reading in part: “Children who arrive in the U.S. unaccompanied by parents or legal guardians often have survived targeted violence, abuse, persecution or trafficking. It is unconscionable to think that they should be forced to represent themselves in immigration court against a trained government attorney in an adversarial hearing before a judge, without even a child-friendly orientation or understanding of their legal options.”

Unaccompanied minors are a group targeted by the Trump administration’s plans to deport undocumented immigrants, according to Reuters, which reviewed an internal memo from the administration to ICE detailing those plans.

‘Kids experience trauma in different ways than adults’

The immediate needs of unaccompanied minors can both subsume and multiply their mental health needs.

Center on Immigrant Child Welfare Director Kristina Lovato described the experience of these young migrants as the triple-trauma paradigm: the trauma of leaving your home, the trauma of the journey and the trauma of resettling in an ambiguous or even hostile environment.

“The mental health needs of unaccompanied minors are severely impacted upon resettlement in the U.S.,” Lovato said. “They’ve dreamed of being in the U.S. for the ability to go to college, the ability to send money back home, but once they arrive here, there’s a different reality and they realize that they have to go to work immediately.”

Time constraints and a need to work were significant barriers to establishing a sense of community, further affecting their mental health, Lovato said, according to a forthcoming study in which the Center on Immigrant Child Welfare interviewed 90 unaccompanied minors and young adults across California about their mental health needs.

“The need to work is primary and that means other things fall to the wayside, like the ability to go to school, the ability to feel like they can engage in civic life,” Lovato said, as was the case for Jorge.

Abigail L’Esperance is the interim co-director of the immigration unit at the East Bay Community Law Center (EBCLC), which provides legal aid for CHIRP participants. She emphasized the importance of trauma-informed practices when working with children, noting that they often have difficulty talking about their experiences because of the trauma they have endured.

“Kids experience trauma in different ways than adults,” L’Esperance said. “It takes them longer to build trust with their legal advocate and to also understand what’s happening during the legal process. We’ve learned we need to prioritize the mental health of the child, to avoid having the child be retraumatized during the process.”

Jorge came to the U.S. with his brother, following family members who had come to Oakland before them. The brothers were seeking better education and work opportunities. However, the financial support promised by a family member who had said they could help fell through almost immediately. Meanwhile, Jorge was pressured to hand over the money he owed.

Jorge said he skipped meals to save money any way he could to pay off his debt within six months and avoid accumulating interest. He didn’t have the time or the financial stability to attend school or socialize. He had bills to pay — rent, a cell phone, car insurance and $1,500 a month towards his debt until it was paid off. At the time, he was making about $120 a day, working five to six days weekly.

“I can’t forget, I was able to endure hunger to pay everything I owed,” he said. “I didn’t want people to put more pressure on me, asking me, ‘When are you going to pay me?’”

For Jorge, the financial stress was isolating, he said. “I was only thinking about that … I almost didn’t want to talk to other people anymore.” Had he not been able to find work, he added, the stress would have been even more daunting.

Housing insecurity and mental health

Even after he paid off his debt, Jorge said working to afford monthly rent and other bills kept him from attending school. A 2019 Alameda County report, which is the most recent data (PDF) on unaccompanied minors, found that they are “highly impacted by the housing crisis.”

Some unaccompanied minors live in stable family situations, but others contend with high rent and overcrowded housing. They face a litany of needs, from assistance navigating a byzantine legal system to basic health care like teeth cleaning. But, the report noted, “the need for stable housing seems to be paramount.”

During the 2023–2024 school year alone, the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) had approximately 1,006 immigrant students — 75% of whom were unaccompanied minors — who came to the U.S. in the past three years and are considered housing insecure, according to the most recent OUSD McKinney-Vento data, which tracks the number of students considered homeless.

OUSD Newcomer and Refugee/Asylum Services Program Manager Nate Dunstan said in a Sept. 2024 interview that almost all the students he works with are housing insecure or living in overcrowded housing. “Either they’re doubled up or they’re in substandard housing,” he said.

For many, the lack of basic needs, such as housing, often pushes aside the ability to address mental and emotional needs.

“We do see a lot of that,” La Familia Caminos Program Supervisor Elizabeth Ventura said. “We’re client-driven, so if their need is food and basic needs or medical or whatever it is … through that process, we’re planting seeds. We’re planting seeds around mental health.”

The Caminos Program, which is a collaboration between Alameda County Health Service’s Healthy Schools and Communities Agency and the nonprofit organization La Familia, was launched in 2013 following an uptick in unaccompanied minors arriving in the county, according to Jasmine Gonzalez, the program coordinator. The program partners with schools around Alameda County to offer training and wraparound support for unaccompanied minors, including mental health support.

Gonzalez and Ventura said the program has found success working within schools to build community trust, offer services and sometimes break down the stigma around seeking mental health support.

“Schools are a safe place for students to be at when they’re unaccompanied,” Ventura said. “So really working with administration and the school sites … providing that education around [students’] needs and their challenges, so that they can work with them and not work against them.”

However, language access, time constraints and navigating health systems are some of the continued barriers unaccompanied minors and recent immigrants face, especially when resources are scarce. Lisa Hoffman with EBSC said she has long dealt with a lack of resources in her work and she expects that scarcity to continue.

“There’s not enough lawyers, but there’s also very few mental health professionals who are trained to be able to work with this population in linguistically and culturally accessible ways,” Hoffman said. “Many people in immigrant communities, whether youth or adults, are living in a lot of fear right now, and unaccompanied minors are also absorbing a lot of this rhetoric and fear. It does create even more barriers for them to be able to access the services that they need.”

Despite this, Lovato said many of the immigrant youth she has spoken to have developed and relied on social networks and mutual aid in their community for emotional, mental health and basic needs support.

Informal networks of care

Despite the lack of readily available services, some unaccompanied youth not only survive but thrive by drawing connections to the area’s immigrant community.

“When they’re unable to access support because of barriers, let’s say because of their [immigration] status, these youth are so resilient,” Lovato said. “I think what’s working well is the ways in which youth find incredible, insightful ways to reach out to one another and be of support to one another, and that’s happening through mutual aid,” she said.

Lovato said oftentimes people rely on word-of-mouth and it is a friend or community member of unaccompanied minors and young adults that serves as a connection point to services.

While Jorge didn’t seek out mental health services when experiencing immense stress, he said finding a community meant finding support for goals that once felt out of reach.

Now 20, Jorge is a student at an alternative high school where he said he is on track to graduate in May. Jorge said a member of his church introduced him to a community-based nonprofit, where he now works two days a week and is encouraged to attend school, a dream that he had not been able to start for several years living in Oakland.

“I never gave up on being in school, maybe at some point I thought about it but I didn’t give up,” Jorge said. “To this day I continue studying, I continue learning new words [in English], I continue meeting more people through school. It has opened more doors for me.”

Attending school has not come without its challenges, however. Since he began attending school two days a week, he’s had to give up some work hours and at times has struggled to afford life in Oakland. When he is not in school or working with the nonprofit, he is still working in construction and landscaping. But, Jorge adds, he is committed to finishing school and continuing his education in college, studying either biology or architecture, he hasn’t decided yet. “Biology because I want to help my community,” he said, “and architecture I want to [study] because I have the ability to work in construction, so I want to use my skills.”

El Tímpano is part of the Mental Health Parity Collaborative, a group of newsrooms that are covering stories on mental health care access and inequities in the U.S. The partners on this project include The Carter Center and newsrooms in select states across the country.