In Trump's Deportation Machine, Children Are Fair Game

The Atlantic

16-07-2025

In the Trump administration's 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.
'Would you like some candy?' the judge asked.
'No,' the boy said, his voice barely above a whisper.
'Do you speak French?' the judge said, reading the boy's last name.
'No, English,' 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.
What was supposed to be happening—according to ORR's legal mandate, child-welfare experts, and a long-standing bipartisan consensus that all children deserve special protection—was 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's advocates often pursue some form of relief from deportation.
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. 'No nation can have a policy that whole classes of people are immune from immigration law or enforcement,' Miller had said.
From the September 2022 issue: An American catastrophe
Six months into Trump's 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's 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.
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 'inmates,' 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.
Instead of being reunified with sponsors, children are being held for longer and longer periods of time, ORR figures show—an average of 35 days in January had become 191 days by May, when Brian was summoned to court.
The judge turned to a video screen, where a child advocate explained that the boy was still 'pending reunification' with a known relative in the U.S.
'They still need ID verification and a DNA test,' 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.
'That lady on the screen? She is trying to reunify you with your sponsor so you can be released,' the judge explained.
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.
A teenage girl with a long braid: 'The child is pending placement,' the advocate said.
A young boy videoconferencing in from a shelter in upstate New York: 'Angel is awaiting reunification,' the advocate said.
A girl in jeans and a T-shirt who spoke only the Guatemalan Indigenous language K'iche': pending reunification. The judge addressed the girl through an interpreter.
'Here is a list of low-cost attorneys,' the judge said as the clerk handed her a sheet of paper with names. 'Maybe you can contact them.'
'Okay, very good,' the girl said.
The judge gave a hearing date.
'Okay, very good,' the girl said.
'Any questions?' the judge said.
'Nothing,' the girl said, and then she and the other children walked out of the courtroom and out of public sight.
What is Donald 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?
Many attorneys told me that the emerging picture reminds them of the early days of Trump's 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. 'We noticed it in El Paso first, then it came out a year later that that was the official policy,' Imelda Maynard, the director of legal services for the group Estrella del Paso, told me. 'Right now you have a lot of practitioners saying, 'Yeah, I'm noticing this.' But there's nothing officially out yet.'
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.
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 'family detention' center—a 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.
Leecia Welch, a lawyer for the advocacy group Children's 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 'promoting family unity,' which involves detaining children with their parent for the duration of that parent's removal proceedings—or, as the budget language reads, 'detaining such an alien with the alien's child.'
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—a means of ramping up psychological pressure on immigrant families to leave the country.
'The message is 'We can take your children,'' Andrew Rankin, an immigration attorney in Memphis, told me. 'The message is 'We have the power.' They want to scare the daylights out of people.'
Last year, as 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 'lost' migrant children—a 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.
'We're going to rescue those children,' Tom Homan, Trump's border czar, told Fox News in January, describing their lives in the U.S. as 'hell.' 'No one's going to stop us.'
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 'lost' in the sense that Trump claimed. A 2023 New York Times 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's 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.
But instead of taking steps to address the problem of child labor in the U.S., the administration is using the 'lost children' narrative as a pretext to transform ORR, a protective agency, into an enforcement tool for ICE.
Echoing Trump, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose Health and Human Services Department oversees ORR, claimed in May that the refugee office had become a 'collaborator in child trafficking' and pledged full cooperation with the Department of Homeland Security to 'find' 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 'wellness checks' across the country, showing up at children's homes and schools.
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 'flight risk' and whether they are 'public safety' or 'border security' 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 'gang-related' tattoos and 'other gang-related markings.'
The lost-children narrative is also the administration's 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's license to prove their identity. The administration criticized those standards as too lax.
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.
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.
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. 'Our policies are designed to protect the safety and well-being of the children in our care,' the agency said. 'The new verification requirements are about safeguarding minors—not separating them. Every sponsor is vetted to ensure a child is being released to a safe and appropriate environment.' (ICE did not respond to a request for comment.)
Immigration advocates are challenging many of the new rules in court, arguing that they violate ORR's mandate to reunify children with relatives regardless of their immigration status.
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.
'The case managers have no concerns with this sponsor,' the specialist told me. But ORR supervisors 'want him to answer more questions—who paid for the transport, who brought him, is it trafficking.'
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 'national security' 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.
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—a Honduran girl, seven Mexican boys, and one Mexican girl—detained 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.
'This is just another form of family separation,' Jane Liu, the director of policy and litigation at the Young Center, which advocates for immigrant children, told me. 'These requirements are not about safety or other legitimate concerns.'
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—which effectively freezes removal proceedings—are 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.
The lawyers, advocates, 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.
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.
'It's like a perfect storm of state-sanctioned child abuse,' Leecia Welch, the Children's Rights lawyer, told me. 'We are treating children like criminals, essentially.'
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.
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.
Read: Trump loves ICE. Its workforce has never been so miserable.
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's license. She said that when she told ICE agents that her 3-year-old son was with a babysitter, they drove to the sitter's house, went inside with guns drawn, and retrieved the child; they were transported to Dilley together.
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.
Welch said she met one family who had been at Dilley for 42 days, and another who'd 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 'like dogs.'
Welch also took declarations from children. 'I had planned to take the SAT and go to college,' a 16-year-old girl told Welch. 'I 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.'
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.
'I feel really sad and angry all the time,' the girl declared. 'I hate it here.'