Our Impact | Children's Rights

Children’s Rights holds government systems accountable for protecting kids and keeping families together.

We don’t protect children one child at a time. Our job is to protect thousands of children over time and over generations by exposing the dysfunction and deep roots of racism inside child welfare systems.

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Key Facts

Listening to Lived Experts: Centering Youth Voices in the Fight for Justice

The Issues

Children are Being Detained in Dangerous Facilities

As co-counsel in the highly publicized Flores v. Garland case, Children’s Rights is one of only three organizations in the country allowed to speak directly with immigrant children inside federal facilities. The Flores lawsuit established the only set of national standards for the detention, treatment, and release of all immigrant minors detained in the custody of the federal government. The children on whose behalf we advocate have all faced tremendous hardships, which often include a mixture of poverty and violence.

Child Mental Health Is Too Important To Ignore

Through legal action and advocacy Children’s Rights improves the mental health of kids trapped in systems that isolate them from their communities, deny them adequate care, and causes grave harm and trauma.

Warehousing Kids In Prison-Like Facilities Causes Lifelong Trauma

Children’s Rights launched a nationwide campaign to educate the public and policymakers on the harms of placing kids in dangerous group homes and facilities and adopt recommendations from lived experts on how to end this practice once and for all.

Demanding Explicit Protections and Resources for LGBTQ+ Youth

Children’s Rights uses a blend of strategic advocacy, training, public awareness initiatives, and coalition building to address the discrimination and abuse that LGBTQ+ youth face in government systems and beyond.

Racial Injustice in Child Welfare is an Urgent Human Rights Issue

Children’s Rights advocacy is bringing national and international attention to how racist structures contribute to the disproportionate involvement of Black and Indigenous children and families in US child welfare systems—and bringing strategies to address and end the unnecessary surveillance, investigation, and separation of Black families.

Defending The Rights Of Incarcerated Youth And Young Adults

Through our litigation and advocacy work, Children’s Rights is working to ensure that as many youth as possible are able to stay within their communities and that the rights of all those caught up in the criminal legal system are protected.

Children’s Rights has a proven model of using litigation to get to the very root of injustice and create transformative social change. Children’s Rights fights for systemic change. And wins.
-Ryan Barker, Missouri Foundation for Health

Current Report

2025 Impact Report

For 30 years, we've stood with children facing injustice—and we're not looking away now. As immigrant children face unsafe detention and vital community supports families rely on come under attack, we met urgency with action. Our 2025 impact report highlights the victories we achieved through strategic litigation and relentless advocacy. We see what happens when decision-makers fail children. And what's possible when we act together.

Discover Our Impact on Kids

Children’s Rights is relentlessly and unapologetically bringing pressure to systems that have for far too long been complacent. They are bringing power back to the people who have felt powerless.
Bobbi Taylor, Lived ExperienceEngagement Consultant

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