On Thursday, May 26, 2016, the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights at the University of Chicago Law School released the Framework for Considering the Best Interests of Unaccompanied Children, the result of a multi-year dialogue between federal agencies and nongovernmental organizations. This year the government projects more than 70,000 unaccompanied children will arrive at our borders. These are children who come from all over the world. When they are apprehended at the border or present themselves to authorities, they are taken into federal custody, charged with violating immigration laws and placed in deportation proceedings. But unlike other systems for protecting and adjudicating the rights of children, where judges and other decision makers must consider the best interests of each child, there is no such mandate in our immigration law. Instead, children appear in adversarial proceedings, most often without their own attorney, before judges who are not obligated to consider whether there is a parent available to care for the child in home country or whether the child will be safe as a result of decisions made by immigration authorities.