CILA Celebrates 10th Anniversary!

This September marks the 10^th anniversary of the Children’s Immigration Law Academy (CILA). To celebrate, CILA hosted a reflection webinar, “Ten Years Pursuing Justice for Unaccompanied Children,” on September 23^rd to discuss how far we’ve come in the last ten years, recent setbacks, and what we can work towards for the future of the unaccompanied children’s program. View the webinar recording here.

We are also seeking sponsors to help us fund CILA’s in-person celebration event in Houston, Texas on November 6^th. We are offering 5 different sponsorship tiers, each with benefits that range from tickets to the celebration to shout outs at the event.

As part of our celebrations, we are reminiscing on our origins and how we got where we are today. CILA’s story starts in 2015, a year when nonprofit legal service providers working with unaccompanied children and youth saw a large increase in the number of children entering the care of the Office of Refugee Resettlement and being placed in removal proceedings. At that time, while many legal resource centers around the country addressed the needs of children, none made serving unaccompanied immigrant minors their exclusive focus.

To bridge that gap, Dalia Castillo-Granados and Yasmin Yavar drafted a plan for a legal resource center – not to represent child clients – but to serve advocates at non-profits and pro bono volunteers working with unaccompanied children, thereby improving organizational capacity and sustainability. Enthusiastic about the idea, which aligned with their own goal of increasing pro bono representation, Meredith Linsky and the ABA Working Group on Unaccompanied Minors garnered support from the American Bar Association (ABA) and worked to establish CILA as the ABA Commission on Immigration’s newest immigration project by the Fall of 2015. Throughout these 10 years, CILA’s commitment to our mission has guided us to ensure more immigrant children and youth are represented well by providing the resources and expertise needed to support those who endeavor to assist them.

CILA recognizes that the work that legal service providers do to support unaccompanied children has never been easy, however 2025 has proven to be an especially difficult year. Earlier this year, CILA and countless other organizations faced funding instability when a decades-long unaccompanied children’s legal services program was abruptly terminated, impacting access to legal services for thousands of immigrant children. CILA’s work was directly affected, and although funding was eventually restarted as the result of litigation, our financial security remains uncertain. You can help by donating to CILA here and sharing our Way To Get Involved handout to your community.

Over the last 12 months, CILA has seen increased demand for technical assistance as well as increased use of CILA’s resources. As a small but mighty team, we are proud to work to address challenges experienced by our network nationwide and create resources and trainings to meet the current needs of legal and social services staff.

For your trust and support, thank you! Thank you to all of our partners, Advisory Committee members, listserv members, newsletter subscribers, and all folks that make up our network.

Additionally, we thank all of our previous partners, staff members, event attendees, donors, and all of the family members that helped grow CILA.