Obama administration spokeswoman Cecilia Muñoz has called it the result of "misinformation" about U.S. immigration law, and the mistaken belief that once over the border they might be allowed to remain with their families.  She is referring to the 52,000 unaccompanied children that have been apprehended along the southwest border between Oct. 1, 2013 and June 15, 2014.

While the Obama administration has said that the number of detained unaccompanied children — most of them from violence-wracked Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador — poses a humanitarian crisis, in large measure our national response has been less than humanitarian. 

Predictably enough it has been cast in popular discourse as part of an ongoing "immigration problem," and so Obama has announced that he will be increasing security and court personnel at the border, along with repatriation efforts. Republican House Speaker John Boehner has urged deployment of the National Guard.

These are, lest we forget, children we are talking about. Children.

The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees stated in March that 58 percent of the children arriving from Central America were eligible for some sort of humanitarian protection under international conventions, given the situations in their home countries. Likewise, a Vera Institute of Justice study found that about 40 percent were eligible for asylum or special immigrant juvenile status. 

But as with any other undocumented immigrant, the children are not permitted legal counsel during removal hearings, and are hardly to be faulted for not knowing that they may have some recourse to inadequate detention or solitary deportation back to dangerous conditions.

A group of Democratic legislators introduced a bill on June 23 that hopes to address that.

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., along with Lucille Roybal-Allard, Judy Chu and Karen Bass, all D-CA) announced that the Vulnerable Immigrant Voice Act of 2014 (VIVA) they proposed would afford unaccompanied minors some legal representation. 

"Under our laws, we give the right to legal counsel to the most dangerous, hardened criminals in America. Murderers, drug dealers and gang members are all guaranteed professional legal assistance," Roybal-Allard said during the press conference. "Our bill simply gives vulnerable migrant children the same rights to counsel because tragically today, as you have heard, small children facing the prospect of deportation don't have this basic right. This is unfair, it is unjust, it is un-American."

For her part Rep. Bass cast it in terms of a shared crisis, and echoing the U.N., a humanitarian concern: "The crisis of tens of thousands of undocumented children crowding into detention centers across the United States is quickly turning into a disaster for Americans and for countries around the world where these children are from, and how we respond is a question of our humanity."

Regardless of immigration status, we must be willing to help children — most especially those already subjected to the traumas of family separation, harsh immigration conditions,  detention and the prospect of deportation — avoid further trauma. According to the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma (which has explored immigration trauma and stresses in children and adults during its workshops), "Children are not miniature adults, and they deserve special consideration," especially in situations that inflict or exacerbate trauma.

We know that traumatized children do best when they get reassurance from adults and resume or maintain normal routines — none of which happens in the existing detention centers set up for unaccompanied minors, nor in the judicial system they will face alone and without legal guidance.

We urge the legislators who represent our state — a commonwealth named after William Penn, whose profound religious conviction was that "all persons are equal under God" — to support the VIVA legislation introduced Monday, and its provision to afford immigrant children even just a little of the legal help we would want for our own.