Trump administration launches offensive to deport undocumented minors who entered US alone
Migrant advocates denounce the campaign against children and believe the real target could be the families who take them in
The Trump administration’s crackdown on undocumented migrants also extends to children who arrived in the country alone as one of its deportation targets. While the government claims that the priority of its campaign is to expel criminals, the directives coming from the executive branch contradict its rhetoric. According to a memo obtained by Reuters, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents will also track unaccompanied minors to determine whether to summon them to court or deport them, if they receive an expulsion order.
According to official data, more than 600,000 children have crossed the U.S.-Mexico border unaccompanied by their parents since 2019 amid a surge in illegal crossings in recent years. A report last year estimated that the authorities have lost track of some 32,000 of them because they missed court dates, although the real number is expected to be much higher because some 290,000 have not yet received a court date.
“As the administration announces a plan to expedite proceedings for hundreds of thousands of children whose documents appear to have been lost or misplaced by the Department of Homeland Security in the past, it should not undermine children’s right to participate in their legal proceedings by expediting their deportations or denying them legal representation. Depriving children of legal protection and expediting deportations only makes them more vulnerable to threats like exploitation or trafficking and the very harm they are meant to be protected from,” said Shaina Aber, executive director of the Acacia Center for Justice, an organization that represents some 26,000 unaccompanied children.
Preventing the risk of minors falling into the hands of human trafficking networks is one of the reasons the government has provided to justify the search for the children. Migrant defense organizations, however, see it as contradictory that if the goal is to protect children, initiatives such as last week’s — which removed legal representation for children in immigration courts — are adopted, a controversial measure that provoked strong criticism from childrens’ rights advocates and triggered a flood of protest letters to Congress. Three days later, the administration backed down and the order was revoked.
According to the new memo, ICE officers will determine “how to best locate, make contact, and serve immigration documents as appropriate for individual targets, when conducting enforcement actions” involving unaccompanied children.
ICE says it has compiled data from multiple sources and categorizes children into three groups: “flight risk,” “public safety” and “border security.” The order is for agents to focus on children considered “flight risk,” including those who have deportation orders for missing court hearings and those released to sponsors who are not blood relatives.
Once the minors are located by the U.S. Border Patrol, they are handed over to the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services.
From ORR, they are transferred to relatives or sponsors, if they agree to take them in. In many cases, those who take them in are also undocumented migrants, at the center of Trump’s mass deportation plans.
“Often, unaccompanied children are placed in homes where relatives or other people who do not have legal status live, they are unauthorized immigrants. Saying they are trying to find these children could actually be an attempt to locate other people in these homes,” said Kathleen Bush-Joseph, an attorney at the Migration Policy Institute (MPI).
On February 14, the administration ordered that all adults residing in foster homes be fingerprinted and their immigration status shared. Immigration experts say the move will hurt children by discouraging families from taking them in. It also discourages them from showing up for court dates, making it easier for them to be deported.
“During the first Trump administration, when they did the same thing, children ended up languishing in detention because their sponsors were afraid to come forward and pick them up,” Bush-Joseph explains.
In 2024, there were 98,536 children in ORR custody, down from 118,938 in 2023 and 12,904 in 2022, but far higher than the annual average during Trump's first term, which in 2019 alone exceeded 50,000.
Thirty-two percent of unaccompanied minors arriving in 2024 came from Guatemala, 20% from Mexico, 20% from Honduras, and 8% from El Salvador. Families send unaccompanied children to the United States to escape poverty and violence in their countries in the hope of a better future.
Thousands of deportation orders are issued for minors each year, but their deportation process is slower than that of adults because before reaching an immigration judge they must go through an administrative procedure at USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services). Due to the backlog of the courts, which have almost 4,000 pending cases, deportation proceedings take an average of 1,200 days and many of those who entered as minors become adults during the process. One third of the children who crossed the border last year were over 17 years old.
If minors are not taken in by relatives, they remain in public shelters. As soon as they turn 18, they can be transferred to ICE, which increases the chances of being detained and deported.
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