They're minors.

They're unaccompanied as they're being housed.

In other words, somebody's housing unaccompanied minors. Consider this to be the compositional meaning of the phrase, what you get when you simply plop the words' meanings together. Sort of like the MAGA hats are red. If you own one, you own a hat. You own a hat that's red. Somebody sold and somebody uses that red hat, so English lets us put the words in a phrase "a red hat seller
and a "red hat user."


At the same time, the chunk "unaccompanied minors" also has a very much non-transparent meaning as "minors crossing the border not in the company of a parent or legal guardian." Once placed with a legal guardian in the US, they are still "unaccompanied minors" as far as their classification goes. The current presence or absence of a guardian doesn't matter. Strictly speaking, if an unaccompanied minor is 17;8 when she immigrates and is 18;8 when her case is heard with her court-appointed guardian next to her, she's still going to be classed as an "unaccompanied minor" for immigration proceedings. The word isn't compositional at that point--it has a definition somewhat at odds with what you get when you take "unaccompanied" + "minor" and compose them into a phrase.

In the same way, my BIL was a Red Hat owner, but couldn't legally sell his Red Hat. He hates Trump, however, and owns not a single red hat. He's both a Red Hat owner and resolutely not a red hat owner. The difference is that somebody took the word "red" and joined it with "hat" to produce the non-compositional phrase "red hat" which has precious little to do with red or hats, but is a variety of Linux. The matter with "unaccompanied minors" is less butt-obvious, but similar.

English communication assumes cooperation and a certain measure of good will. As soon as that's gone, the usual ways of speaking have to change. Think about the adversarial kind of language in court proceedings or that should obtain in a used car lot with the salesman. That lawyer, that salesman is not on your side. He is not cooperating with you for a common objective, he's trying to coopt you for his objective. He assumes you're language-stupid at that point and don't see how the rules shift.

When a person eavesdrops on a conversation that presupposes good will or at least cooperation--which is the neutral, default state--he's eavesdropping on something with one set of locutionary rules, rules on how the conversation and communication are to go. If that eavesdropper brings a conflicting set of parsing instructions, there's not going to be communication or understanding. This time it's the eavesdropper who goes all language-stupid because he's shifted the terms of communication and resolutely insists that his is the One True Way. We know these things when nothing depends on it; as soon as something depends on it, we go willfully dumb.

Just as if my BIL said "I love my Red Hat" and some Trump hater immediately misconstrued his speech to mean he loves showing his fictive support for Trump. Start will ill will, and all you get is ill will and self-produced fake news.


By the way, if the group *did* give details, it would be violating federal laws regulating the handling of private and personal information of minors. It could probably give numbers, but anything past that would start to provide identifiable information and that could get their contract rescinded and a lot of kids'-rights groups on their collective legal ass.

One of earliest American instances of 'speaking in tongues' phenomenon.

NB WWJD is What would Jesus do? The 1896 book is very interesting. Sees saloons as destroying poor families, opposes Sunday papers, coverage of boxing matches, etc. Book offers a glimpse into a very different era in US history.

The man who starts the minister on his soul-searching journey is an out-of-work typesetter whose family is starving. He speaks at the close of one of minister's sermons and says words to this effect "You sing and talk about 'I will follow Him', but what are you actually doing to help real people who are suffering?"

I believe when book was rewritten and pushed by Evangelicals in 1990s this concern for the suffering of actual people was covered up with tribal markers of anti-abortion and anti-LGBT stances. (I did not read rewritten book; my info is based on what I heard from adoring fans of new book.