Your Patient and My Client: Perspectives from Legal Work with Unaccompanied Children

This short article offers a lawyer's perspective on working with immigrant youth, with three goals in mind. The first is to outline key features of the legal landscape immigrant children navigate in the United States, in order to provide contextual information of practical value in serving the young client/patient. The second goal is to use that context as guidance for effectively serving young immigrants: for eliciting information, interpreting information, and supporting progress toward positive outcomes. The third overarching goal is the hope of developing more mechanisms for communication and collaboration across the professional disciplines serving immigrant youth. The article concludes with a short starter list of further readings and resources.