we have an office in harlingen, texas, where most of the kids are coming in. those cases are the most difficult and complicated. very young children. you know, situations of abuse. situations where we don't know who the parents are. and then we have an office in chicago. and i think the influx has affected a lot of what the government is doing right now. so although there was a provision in the law providing for expansion of child advocate programs, it hasn't happened until now. so the government has asked us to open offices in three locations, houston, new york and washington, d.c. so that's just one of the side things that have happened as a result of the influx. so our philosophy, though, is that best interests should be driven by children's rights. and so what this means is that what the child wants is very, very important. and in most cases, we will not go against that unless the child's safety is at issue. we can't just say that honduras is dangerous and he shouldn't go back. we have to have very fact-specific information about that child. we have to be

we have an office in harlingen, texas, where most of the kids are coming in. those cases are the most difficult and complicated. very young children. you know, situations of abuse. situations where we don't know who the parents are. and then we have an office in chicago. and i think the influx has affected a lot of what the government is doing right now. so although there was a provision in the law providing for expansion of child advocate programs, it hasn't happened until now. so the government has asked us to open offices in three locations, houston, new york and washington, d.c. so that's just one of the side things that have happened as a result of the influx. so our philosophy, though, is that best interests should be driven by children's rights. and so what this means is that what the child wants is very, very important. and in most cases, we will not go against that unless the child's safety is at issue. we can't just say that honduras is dangerous and he shouldn't go back. we have to have very fact-specific information about that child. we have to be

. >> i've had the pleasure of working with one of your child advocates out of the office in harlingen. you make a great difference. i'm so excited you're opening new offices because we need more of your work. >> thanks. >> but barbara, you mentioned there's expanded training for the immigration judges. can you speak a little bit about that? and also maybe generally about what kind of training, if any, is required for immigration judges around issues relating to these unaccompanied minors. >> so we have done some training with the immigration judges, you know. some of you know because of budgetary issues, we've had to have our conferences on dvd for our judges. we had planned a conference actually this summer, a live in-person conference that we had to postpone in part because of the surge, and we didn't want to take all the judges off the dockets for a week. but we are planning on having a conference at some point where we expect to have a full day of a kid's track for -- for the judges that handle kids' cases. and, you know, like maria's a frequent appearer at all of those. you know,