Soaring housing costs make life even more challenging for Oakland’s unaccompanied minors

El Tímpano by Cassandra Garibay and Ximena Loeza, February 26, 2025. Amid staggering cost of living and debt, young migrants’ mental health needs take a back seat.

Jorge arrived in the United States aged 16 and roughly $9,000 in debt to those who helped him make the harrowing journey from Guatemala to California.

The day after he arrived in Oakland, he found a job cleaning roofs and attics and eventually working in construction.

“I didn’t have the opportunity to continue with school or to go to school,” Jorge said in Spanish, though his native tongue is Mam, an indigenous language spoken in Guatemala. “When I came here, finding myself with such a huge debt, with pressure on me like that, [people] asking me to pay that debt, it affected me.”

An increasing number of young people like Jorge are arriving in Alameda County. While the exact numbers are unclear, between October 2023 and June 2024, more than 500 unaccompanied minors were released to a sponsor (an adult who takes responsibility for the child while they await immigration proceedings) in Alameda County, according to the latest Health and Human Services data. Alameda County is second only to Los Angeles County in the number of unaccompanied minors released to sponsors statewide. More than 64,000 unaccompanied children settled in California between January 2015 and May 2023, according to an analysis of federal data by CalMatters.

Unaccompanied minors’ journeys to the U.S. leave a lasting mark on their mental health, compounded by the economic demands on them when they arrive. Once here, they face a staggering cost of living fueled by the Bay Area’s housing crisis. Some, like Jorge, must also pay the debt they accumulated getting to the U.S. As the challenges build, so do the traumas, yet the need for mental health care is often lost behind basic survival.

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