Abstract
This qualitative study sought to understand how a cohort of unaccompanied youth experience a refugee foster care program in South Florida. Unaccompanied youth are a vulnerable subgroup of migrants because they are under 18 and have migrated without a parent or family member. Youth are pushed to migrate without parents or family to escape war, persecution, violence, and extreme poverty and are vulnerable to violence at the hands of smugglers while en route to their country of resettlement. Upon apprehension, unaccompanied youth are placed in detention facilities and shelters before being released from the Office of Refugee Resettlement custody. Youth who do not have a family or a sponsor to care for them are placed in refugee foster care programs around the country. While the research suggests that unaccompanied youth benefit from foster care over other placements, there is limited research on such placements. As young immigrants transitioning into adulthood, in-betweenness of late-arriving immigrant youth caught between adult and child immigrant narratives was used as a sensitizing concept to make sense of my data. In this study, I sought how unaccompanied youth experience foster care in a South Florida refugee foster care program? How do the youth experience the support they receive relative to their needs for protection and autonomy? A total of nineteen people participated in this study, seven unaccompanied youth currently in the program, one former unaccompanied youth, nine foster parents, and two staff. Based on interviews with 19 participants, group observations, and document analysis, I propose the core category of the grounded theory be Growing up to be alone vs. independent: Navigating the tension between two paths. The tension results from unaccompanied youth being pulled to adult-like and child-like paths by forces around them. This includes the youth coming of age in the United States and growing up in refugee foster care as they try to salir adelante (pull-through). Lastly, the youth are expected to become independent or self-sufficient; however, they face this while being alone.