Children & the Law Blog

The politics of immigration - so often long on moral indignation and short on practical evaluation - often obscure the unique plight of immigrant children. The University of Chicago Magazine highlights Maria Woltjen’s work with such children in the Law School’s Mandel Legal Aid Clinic in Nobody’s child.

Woltjen remembers one boy from India who was picked up at the Canadian border. He couldn’t have been older than five or six. “He was a mystery,” she says. “There was almost zero information.” Carrying no identification, the boy couldn’t say exactly where he was from and didn’t know his parents’ full names. He stayed in government custody for eight months while Woltjen and Mary Meg McCarthy, director of the National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC), a Chicago-based nonprofit that provides pro bono legal assistance to refugees and asylum seekers, scrambled to decipher the scant clues to his origin.

• University of Chicago Magazine: Nobody’s child