The Immigration and Naturalization Service jails children as young as 8.

Last year, the INS held two-thirds of the 4,607 minors it took into custody in children's homes, foster homes and hotels before releasing or deporting them.

But seven years after the INS agreed to hold children in the "least restrictive setting appropriate for the minor's age and special needs," the agency still holds an estimated 35 percent in jails and youth detention centers across the country.

Human-rights groups say, for about 80 percent of the children, their only crimes are immigration offenses but the INS treats them as if they had burglarized homes.

They are locked in cells or dormitories and made to wear prison uniforms. Their visits, telephone calls and movements are restricted. Sometimes they're housed with criminal offenders, subjected to body searches or disciplined with pepper spray. Few have lawyers or guardians guiding them as they would in criminal proceedings. Many face immigration proceedings without a single trusted adult.

The INS has the right to jail children in emergency influxes such as a flood of refugees in a boatlift; if they are suspected of being an adult, if they are charged with a crime, or if they are simply awaiting transfers within three to five days. But more than half those booked into secure facilities in 1999 stayed longer than three days.

Most of them, such as a 15-year-old Central American girl who says she was fleeing her abusive father, aren't charged with a crime. In March, the girl, who says her father raped and beat her, fled to Los Angeles seeking her mother and stepfather. She was detained by the INS at the Los Angeles airport and booked into Los Padrinos, a juvenile jail. She was held with other INS detainees for six weeks according to interviews with her, her mother and her attorney.

"I thought," she says quietly, "that I would never see my family again." She's now living with her mother, attending high school and seeing a psychologist.

She couldn't understand the seven Chinese girls she shared a cell with. The only person she confided in for 10 days was a Spanish-speaking guard.

The INS separates some children from their parents, such as an 8-year-old Czech girl whose mother was trying to enter with false papers. The girl was held for two days at Los Padrinos while her mother was held in another INS facility.

"No other country in all the Western countries that receive unaccompanied minors does this," says Jacqueline Bhabha, director of the Human Rights Program at the University of Chicago, an expert in international refugee law. "The U.S. is unique."

Half the world's 20 million refugees and displaced people are children, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reports, with more heading to the United States each year.

Agency renews efforts

Recently, the INS has aggressively tried to deal more humanely with the spiraling numbers of children arriving alone. It has boosted the number of beds it rents in nonprofit and religious youth shelters in the United States from 131 to more than 600.

The agency adopted guidelines for child-asylum seekers two years ago that are among the most progressive and protective in the world. The INS has trained more than 15,000 employees and hundreds of nonprofit and jail workers in children's rights. The first INS shelter in the United States for entire families should open next year.

The agency's juvenile detention chief, John J. Pogash, 43, is a former juvenile probation officer and an expert in exploited children. He says he is tired of his agency being criticized for what he sees as sensible precautions designed to keep kids safe.

"The kids we take into custody are under more scrutiny and have more review than any other case in the service," Pogash says. "I can tell you what that person has for breakfast, literally."

But much of that review is conducted locally by 36 district directors who don't necessarily follow INS policies.

Last December The Oregonian reported that a Chinese girl, 15, and five Chinese boys spent eight to 12 months with violent offenders in the Multnomah County's juvenile jail waiting for their asylum cases to be heard. The "girl who cries," as she was dubbed by fellow inmates, was kept in jail more than seven weeks after she was granted political asylum. Portland INS officials maintained that the threats to her from smugglers, paperwork delays in identifying an uncle and conducting a home study prevented her release.

Affidavits filed in federal court by Portland INS staff members and the Oregon congressional delegation since reveal that the INS failed for six months to find the uncle, never told the girl whether she would be released and misled members of Congress about the histories of the other teens.

Within 10 days of the political storm that followed, the girl was placed in a foster home, a boy was placed with an uncle and four other children were transferred to detention centers in California and Arizona.

Looking for alternatives

Some jail workers and local officials try hard to help. Staff members at Northern Oregon Regional Corrections Facility in The Dalles make repeated international calls to help detained children reach family members. Multnomah County leaders criticized the INS for using their juvenile jail for children not charged with any crime.

But jailing kids is the only option the INS says it has in the Northwest because the agency does not contract with any children's home. The agency is looking for alternatives, Pogash says. Advocates want detained children placed with child-welfare agencies, which they say are better equipped to deal with traumatized children and would move them into foster care or less restrictive settings more quickly.

Congress proposed three laws this year requiring the INS to give detained children more legal advice; none passed. Immigration judges and the American Bar Association are offering legal help to children such as Angel Avila.

The 15-year-old was abandoned by his parents and raised by his grandmother in Honduras. He says he survived Hurricane Mitch, swam across the Rio Grande and hitchhiked to New York City "where everyone wants to go -- it's famous." He was arrested trying to steal a Walkman and was taken into INS custody to be deported.

Angel Avila is nicknamed "The Cherub." The 15-yer-old from Honduras, arrested after he shoplifted, gave up his quest to live in the United States after two months in L.A. Central Juvenile Detention Center where he had been in fights, pepper-sprayed and held in solitary confinement. (Michael Lloyd/The Oregonian)

After four months in a New York children's home, he was abruptly transferred to Los Angeles' oldest and largest juvenile jail, L.A. Central Juvenile Detention Center, two months ago.

There, he fought with gang members, was pepper-sprayed by staff members and finally placed in solitary confinement. Facing more time in jail, Avila decided Nov. 8 that he'd rather be voluntarily deported. He is still in jail, waiting for travel documents.

"Nothing good has happened here," he says.

"That's where detention is troubling," says Wendy Young, director of government relations and U.S. programs for the Women's Commission for Refugee Women and Children. "Children are making life-altering and possibly life-threatening decisions just to get of jail."

Researchers Gail Hulden, Lynne Palombo and Lovelle Svart contributed to this series.