\n<\/p>\n
In the Trump<\/span> administration\u2019s escalating effort to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, next up was Brian, age 7, who took a seat alone before a judge in a Manhattan courtroom recently. His shirt was pressed, his posture slumped.<\/p>\n \u201cWould you like some candy?\u201d the judge asked.<\/p>\n \u201cNo,\u201d the boy said, his voice barely above a whisper.<\/p>\n \u201cDo you speak French?\u201d the judge said, reading the boy\u2019s last name.<\/p>\n \u201cNo, English,\u201d said the boy, who was among more than a dozen children in the early stages of removal proceedings that morning, most in court without lawyers, and nearly all of them stuck in the custody of a protective agency called the Office of Refugee Resettlement, or ORR.<\/p>\n What was supposed to be happening\u2014according to ORR\u2019s legal mandate, child-welfare experts, and a long-standing bipartisan consensus that all children deserve special protection\u2014was reunification. When a migrant child is unaccompanied, as Brian was, immigration authorities are supposed to refer them to ORR shelters, where caseworkers are supposed to quickly place them with vetted sponsors in the U.S., usually parents or relatives, at which point the child\u2019s advocates often pursue some form of relief from deportation.<\/p>\n On this Wednesday in May, though, Donald Trump was president again, the same Trump who had separated children from parents during his first term, with the same adviser, Stephen Miller, who had defended the practice even as the public was revolting against images of children penned behind chain-link fences. \u201cNo nation can have a policy that whole classes of people are immune from immigration law or enforcement,\u201d Miller had said.<\/p>\n Six months into Trump\u2019s second term, children are once again fair game, according to dozens of lawyers, advocates, shelter operators, case managers, and others I spoke with in recent weeks. More systematically than in his first term, Trump\u2019s administration is reaching into the federal immigration bureaucracy to roll back an array of protections for undocumented children, not only recent arrivals but also those who have only ever known life in this country. More and more, children are being picked up on family vacations, at traffic stops, and at worksites, and winding up in detention.<\/p>\n Since March, at least 150 children have been sent to a newly reopened Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in Dilley, Texas, whose staff sometimes refer to them as \u201cinmates,\u201d according to two lawyers who visited recently. Another 2,400 children are currently stranded in the ORR shelter system, a situation becoming more distressing to families by the day.<\/p>\n Instead of being reunified with sponsors, children are being held for longer and longer periods of time, ORR figures show\u2014an average of 35 days in January had become 191 days by May, when Brian was summoned to court.<\/p>\n The judge turned to a video screen, where a child advocate explained that the boy was still \u201cpending reunification\u201d with a known relative in the U.S.<\/p>\n \u201cThey still need ID verification and a DNA test,\u201d the advocate told the judge, referring to an array of new sponsor requirements, including U.S. identification and income verification, that the administration says are meant to keep children safe from traffickers but are blocking even biological mothers and fathers from claiming their children. At this point, parents are submitting library cards, baptismal records, family photos, and whatever else they have in an attempt to get their children out. The judge turned to Brian.<\/p>\n \u201cThat lady on the screen? She is trying to reunify you with your sponsor so you can be released,\u201d the judge explained.<\/p>\n She gave the boy a new court date, a few months later, and this is how it went all morning as a parade of children faced the bench alone.<\/p>\n A teenage girl with a long braid: \u201cThe child is pending placement,\u201d the advocate said.<\/p>\n A young boy videoconferencing in from a shelter in upstate New York: \u201cAngel is awaiting reunification,\u201d the advocate said.<\/p>\n A girl in jeans and a T-shirt who spoke only the Guatemalan Indigenous language K\u2019iche\u2019: pending reunification. The judge addressed the girl through an interpreter.<\/p>\n \u201cHere is a list of low-cost attorneys,\u201d the judge said as the clerk handed her a sheet of paper with names. \u201cMaybe you can contact them.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOkay, very good,\u201d the girl said.<\/p>\n The judge gave a hearing date.<\/p>\n \u201cOkay, very good,\u201d the girl said.<\/p>\n \u201cAny questions?\u201d the judge said.<\/p>\n \u201cNothing,\u201d the girl said, and then she and the other children walked out of the courtroom and out of public sight.<\/p>\n What is Donald<\/span> Trump planning to do with undocumented children? Not just those who recently crossed the border but the hundreds of thousands more who are going to school, working jobs, and otherwise living versions of American lives in cities and towns across the country?<\/p>\n Many attorneys told me that the emerging picture reminds them of the early days of Trump\u2019s first family-separation policy, when shelter operators and others close to the system were not sure whether the children coming into their care represented a one-off situation or a pattern. \u201cWe noticed it in El Paso first, then it came out a year later that that was the official policy,\u201d Imelda Maynard, the director of legal services for the group Estrella del Paso, told me. \u201cRight now you have a lot of practitioners saying, \u2018Yeah, I\u2019m noticing this.\u2019 But there\u2019s nothing officially out yet.\u201d<\/p>\n So far, the administration is rushing children into removal proceedings, blocking paths they have had to legal status, and trying to cancel what federal funding exists for their legal representation. The Department of Homeland Security is sending investigators to their homes. And the Justice Department has moved to end a decades-old legal settlement that establishes standards for the care and release of children held in ICE detention centers, which is where more and more children are heading.<\/p>\n In recent weeks, ICE agents have been picking up children when their parents are arrested and sending them either into the ORR system or to the ICE detention facility in Dilley, which reopened in March, nine months after the Biden administration had shut it down. The 2,400-bed facility, run by a private prison company, is called a \u201cfamily detention\u201d center\u2014a government euphemism for what is happening. A boy may be detained with his mother at Dilley but separated from his father and siblings, for example.<\/p>\n Leecia Welch, a lawyer for the advocacy group Children\u2019s Rights, visited the facility in June. She told me that out of the roughly 300 detainees there at the time, more than half were children, including some who had begun exhibiting distressing behaviors: a toddler who kept throwing himself on the floor, a young child who had lost eight pounds, others who were expressing suicidal thoughts. Although the number of children in federal custody is still relatively small, the administration is planning for it to rise: The new budget for ICE sets aside $45 billion to build more detention facilities across the country, including ones for family detention. The budget includes additional funding for something called \u201cpromoting family unity,\u201d which involves detaining children with their parent for the duration of that parent\u2019s removal proceedings\u2014or, as the budget language reads, \u201cdetaining such an alien with the alien\u2019s child.\u201d<\/p>\n Whether the administration is willing to conduct large-scale deportations of children remains to be seen, but lawyers and others are coming to believe that large-scale detentions may be the goal\u2014a means of ramping up psychological pressure on immigrant families to leave the country.<\/p>\n \u201cThe message is \u2018We can take your children,\u2019\u201d Andrew Rankin, an immigration attorney in Memphis, told me. \u201cThe message is \u2018We have the power.\u2019 They want to scare the daylights out of people.\u201d<\/p>\n Last year, as<\/span> Trump campaigned for a second term, he insisted that he was going to save migrant children. In addition to blasting the Biden administration for allowing millions of people to enter the country, Trump began falsely claiming that the administration had \u201clost\u201d migrant children\u2014a number that started out at 80,000, then doubled to 150,000 before Trump settled on 325,000. He repeatedly said that they had been trafficked and raped, and that some were dead. The narrative fed into a broader set of conspiracy theories among Trump followers about an underground child-sex-trafficking ring involving high-profile Democrats.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re going to rescue those children,\u201d Tom Homan, Trump\u2019s border czar, told Fox News in January, describing their lives in the U.S. as \u201chell.\u201d \u201cNo one\u2019s going to stop us.\u201d<\/p>\n In reality, more than 300,000 children who crossed the border without a parent or guardian during both the Trump and Biden administrations were processed by ORR. They were never \u201clost\u201d in the sense that Trump claimed. A 2023 New York Times<\/em> investigation did find that thousands of those children wound up working in chicken plants, cereal factories, slaughterhouses, and other dangerous jobs. A 2024 Homeland Security inspector general\u2019s report found that ORR had in some instances failed to thoroughly vet sponsors or follow up with children, leaving them vulnerable to trafficking, among other lapses that the Trump administration seized upon.<\/p>\n But instead of taking steps to address the problem of child labor in the U.S., the administration is using the \u201clost children\u201d narrative as a pretext to transform ORR, a protective agency, into an enforcement tool for ICE.<\/p>\n Echoing Trump, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose Health and Human Services Department oversees ORR, claimed in May that the refugee office had become a \u201ccollaborator in child trafficking\u201d and pledged full cooperation with the Department of Homeland Security to \u201cfind\u201d the lost children, obliterating a firewall that has existed between protective and enforcement agencies, and opening up a huge trove of data on migrant children and their sponsors. A former DHS official now heads the refugee agency. And DHS investigators who specialize in combatting crime, not addressing child welfare, are now conducting surprise \u201cwellness checks\u201d across the country, showing up at children\u2019s homes and schools.<\/p>\n Federal officials say the visits are meant to ensure children are being properly cared for, but the checks are also turning up older children and adults who are more easily deportable. An ICE memo leaked earlier this year instructs investigators to sort children into priority groups based on \u201cflight risk\u201d and whether they are \u201cpublic safety\u201d or \u201cborder security\u201d threats; the memo also outlines criminal charges that might be applied to adults and other minors living in the same home. Under a new budget provision, investigators are supposed to inspect children as young as 12 for \u201cgang-related\u201d tattoos and \u201cother gang-related markings.\u201d<\/p>\n The lost-children narrative is also the administration\u2019s pretext for revamping the requirements for sponsors trying to claim children in ORR custody. Historically, sponsors could use a foreign passport or a foreign driver\u2019s license to prove their identity. The administration criticized those standards as too lax.<\/p>\n New requirements adopted in January in the name of child safety are more closely tied to immigration status. Besides taking a DNA test, most sponsors must now produce a U.S. or state-issued identification, or else a foreign passport with a stamp indicating that they crossed the border legally. They must show proof of 60 days of income or a letter from an employer, both of which can be impossible to get for those being paid in cash.<\/p>\n The requirements are creating grave dilemmas for immigrant families. If you are an undocumented parent, coming forward to claim your child could mean exposing your status and risking deportation. If you are a parent with legal status but others in your household are undocumented, coming forward could put all of them in jeopardy because the new vetting process requires everyone in the household to produce documents. If you decide not to come forward, your child could wind up in the custody of an American foster family.<\/p>\n In a statement, the Administration for Children and Families, an HHS division of which ORR is part, denied that it is using minors to pressure undocumented families. \u201cOur policies are designed to protect the safety and well-being of the children in our care,\u201d the agency said. \u201cThe new verification requirements are about safeguarding minors\u2014not separating them. Every sponsor is vetted to ensure a child is being released to a safe and appropriate environment.\u201d (ICE did not respond to a request for comment.)<\/p>\n Immigration advocates are challenging many of the new rules in court, arguing that they violate ORR\u2019s mandate to reunify children with relatives regardless of their immigration status.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, children such as Brian are languishing in shelters. An ORR reunification specialist who works with a number of shelters around the country told me about a Guatemalan mother and father whose DNA test matched with their 6-year-old son but who have still been unable to get him out. The specialist, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of being fired, told me that the parents submitted a thick file including baby photos, a baptismal certificate, text messages, and other documents, but her supervisors have rejected them for three months and counting. Another case involves an Indian teenager in ORR custody whose sponsor, a relative, met the new requirements, but ORR still rejected the application.<\/p>\n \u201cThe case managers have no concerns with this sponsor,\u201d the specialist told me. But ORR supervisors \u201cwant him to answer more questions\u2014who paid for the transport, who brought him, is it trafficking.\u201d<\/p>\n Two ORR shelter operators in different parts of the country who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of losing their job told me that many children being referred to them from the border have been separated from their parents out of what immigration authorities are calling \u201cnational security\u201d concerns. They are also receiving children from the interior caught up in ICE enforcement actions. Neha Desai, an attorney with the National Center for Youth Law, told me that this practice is new.<\/p>\n People close to the ORR system told me that recent detainees include children who were passengers in cars pulled over for traffic stops; a teenager who was part of a landscaping crew that got pulled over by ICE; and a 17-year-old detained after an unrelated appearance in juvenile court. In many such cases, the children had already gone through the ORR shelter system and were living with vetted sponsors, who will now have to requalify under the new rules. Last week, nine teenagers\u2014a Honduran girl, seven Mexican boys, and one Mexican girl\u2014detained during a workplace raid in Los Angeles were sent to ORR care rather than returned to their families. Roughly 300 children have been referred to shelters following enforcement actions.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is just another form of family separation,\u201d Jane Liu, the director of policy and litigation at the Young Center, which advocates for immigrant children, told me. \u201cThese requirements are not about safety or other legitimate concerns.\u201d<\/p>\n Beyond imposing the new vetting requirements, the administration is also moving to dismantle protections that migrant children have used to avoid deportation. The administration canceled a grant that funds legal representation for more than 25,000 unaccompanied migrant children, even as those children are facing deportation proceedings. (A federal judge has ordered the funds reinstated, at least for now, citing concerns that the cancellation violated a 2008 anti-trafficking law.) Migrant children, who have routinely been granted deferred-action status\u2014which effectively freezes removal proceedings\u2014are being told that relief has been revoked or denied, and the administration has stopped processing more than 100,000 backlogged applications for the status. Student visas are being canceled. Government lawyers are being instructed that they can no longer use prosecutorial discretion to back-burner cases considered low priority, such as undocumented toddlers. They are on the docket.<\/p>\n The lawyers, advocates,<\/span> and others I spoke with believe that the administration is planning for large-scale child detention as ICE prepares to hire 10,000 new agents and become the highest-funded federal law-enforcement agency in the country. The ORR system has a total capacity of roughly 15,000 beds, and advocates worry that the shelters are essentially becoming detention centers. But with billions of additional dollars about to fuel an expansion of prison-like private detention facilities, the administration may be going in a different direction.<\/p>\n In late May, the administration moved to end a landmark legal agreement, called the Flores settlement, which establishes basic standards for how migrant children are to be treated in federal custody. The settlement was named for Jenny Lisette Flores, a 15-year-old girl from El Salvador who was detained for months, strip-searched, and deprived of education while she awaited deportation. Reached in 1997, the settlement spells out basic requirements, involving everything from soap to medical care, and limits the length of time children can remain in ICE detention facilities. (That limit does not apply to ORR, an agency charged with caring for unaccompanied migrant children.) If the courts side with the administration, ICE would be free to detain children in facilities like Dilley indefinitely, and with minimal independent oversight.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s like a perfect storm of state-sanctioned child abuse,\u201d Leecia Welch, the Children\u2019s Rights lawyer, told me. \u201cWe are treating children like criminals, essentially.\u201d<\/p>\n When Welch and I spoke, she had just returned from Dilley, a 50-acre compound where detainees told her that they are under constant video surveillance and the lights stay on all the time. Welch is among a group of attorneys who monitor government compliance with the Flores settlement, and she visited Dilley to take sworn declarations that will be used in court to argue that the agreement should remain in force. She was also trying to find out exactly how the children had ended up there.<\/p>\n Some children told her that they had been detained at the border after crossing with their parents from countries around the world. But many more said they had arrived from Ohio, California, New York. They had been on football teams and cheerleading squads and taking standardized tests and now they were in lockup, some assigned to trailers with names like Yellow 2.<\/p>\n In a sworn statement, one woman told Welch that she had been driving to work in Ohio when she was pulled over, handcuffed, and detained because she did not have a driver\u2019s license. She said that when she told ICE agents that her 3-year-old son was with a babysitter, they drove to the sitter\u2019s house, went inside with guns drawn, and retrieved the child; they were transported to Dilley together.<\/p>\n Another woman told Welch that she had shown up for an immigration-court hearing with her son and daughter, ages 9 and 6, only to be told that her case was being terminated, at which point ICE detained her and her children. She told Welch that her son has leukemia, and that a week into detention, no one had explained how he would receive treatment. She said her daughter was not eating.<\/p>\n Welch said she met one family who had been at Dilley for 42 days, and another who\u2019d been detained for 52 days. Many parents reported that their children were getting diarrhea from the water or from stale food. A woman told Welch that the staff treated people \u201clike dogs.\u201d<\/p>\n Welch also took declarations from children. \u201cI had planned to take the SAT and go to college,\u201d a 16-year-old girl told Welch. \u201cI want to get back to my life. I want to go back home and see my aunts and cousins and all the rest of my family and friends.\u201d<\/p>\n A 13-year-old told Welch that she and her two sisters, ages 11 and 4, had been detained at Dilley for four months. She was worried that she had messed up during her asylum interview. She said that she had stopped eating and was having nightmares. Welch and others told me they have come to believe that this is precisely what the administration intends.<\/p>\n \u201cI feel really sad and angry all the time,\u201d the girl declared. \u201cI hate it here.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In the Trump administration\u2019s escalating effort to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, next up was Brian, age 7, who took a seat alone before a judge in a Manhattan courtroom recently. His shirt was pressed, his posture slumped. \u201cWould you like some candy?\u201d the judge asked. \u201cNo,\u201d the boy said, his voice barely above a<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11063,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[166,4280,3328,413,2993,71],"class_list":{"0":"post-11062","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-children","9":"tag-deportation","10":"tag-fair","11":"tag-game","12":"tag-machine","13":"tag-trumps"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11062","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11062"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11062\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/11063"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11062"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11062"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11062"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}