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The Trump administration has characterized immigration enforcement as a public safety push to deport "the worst of the worst.” Yet, in recent months it has taken several actions that specifically target immigrant children.
The federal government expanded monitoring and tracking of unaccompanied minors. It has made it harder for lawyers to represent immigrant children, putting them at increased risk of deportation. And children continue to be held in detention centers and shelters for long stretches. To escape confinement, families with children sometimes leave the country even when they may have a legal claim to stay.
The administration has denied that it’s targeting children. But Roxana Avila-Cimpeanu, who has represented children for about a decade and is the deputy director of the Florence Immigrant & Refugee Rights Project, said “This is the worst time that we have ever seen with regards to how our government is treating children and the concerted and specific attacks on children.”
Tracking unaccompanied children
This spring, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) hired the private security company and U.S. defense contractor, MVM Inc., to find undocumented children who arrived in the United States without a guardian. MVM has a troubled history and was accused of torture and cruelty in a 2024 lawsuit filed by immigrant parents, according to The Guardian.
In a previous immigration contract, MVM was accused of holding children in vacant office buildings. The company also held a contract to help run the controversial Guantánamo Bay immigration detention center, until a different company later took it over.
MVM has rejected the allegations of wrongdoing, including in the 2024 lawsuit.
The Trump administration has also partnered with local law enforcement agencies to track down unaccompanied children living with sponsors in what it called “welfare checks.” Government records show another recently signed federal contract, for a privately-run, 24/7 call center that local agencies can contact for help with immigration enforcement and track unaccompanied migrant children.
In an emailed statement, the Department of Homeland Security said that programs to track unaccompanied minors were created to protect those children. The statement added that children who crossed the border during the Biden administration were living with “smugglers and sex traffickers” and needed to be located. Former immigration officials said the sponsors of these unaccompanied minors were vetted, according to the Christian Science Monitor. And children’s rights advocates worry that these tracking efforts are an excuse to gather information on the children and their families, so they are easier to detain and deport.
Those advocates point to statistics that show a high number of immigrant children who have already been forced, or coerced, to leave the country. Immigration judges “have issued more than 10,000 removal and voluntary departure orders each month for immigrant minors who either migrated alone or with relatives, a rate that is nearly four times higher than in Trump’s last term,” ProPublica reported.
Lacking legal services for children
Because they are particularly vulnerable, immigrant children living in the United States without a guardian are supposed to be provided a lawyer in immigration court. Historically, those services have been provided by a network of legal-aid groups, under a contract with the federal government.
Last month, that contract expired. Instead of renewing it, the government said in court filings that it would be working with other organizations to fill the gap.
Burke Law Group, a Texas law firm with little immigration experience and deep ties to the Trump administration, was initially tapped to take on some of the work. After public backlash, the firm said it will not be taking the contract.
The government has also said it will be working with Our Rescue, a controversial organization best known for conducting sting operations against alleged sex traffickers. According to The American Prospect, the group's founder was forced to resign in 2023 after allegations that he “sexually abused and trafficked women himself.”
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which oversees the contract, said in a statement that Our Rescue “has been a premier organization focused on combating human trafficking globally” and that it is “perfectly positioned to understand and recognize if or when an unaccompanied child has been victimized.” Our Rescue and HHS did not respond to questions about whether the organization currently has immigration lawyers on staff.
The administration has also tapped a third organization, the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, to provide legal services through December 2026. According to an affidavit from a government official, the organization has 57 legal personnel to do child immigration work.
That’s a small fraction of the 800 attorneys and thousands of trained support personnel employed by the previous network of legal aid groups, said Michael Lukens, executive director of the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights. He said he was concerned about both the number of lawyers employed, as well as the expertise of these legal firms.
In its statement, HHS said it is committed to “ensuring eligible unaccompanied children have access to legal representation during immigration proceedings” and characterised the current arrangements as “bridge contracts” to meet immediate needs, but offered no details on future plans.
Lukens said that many of those formerly contracted legal aid organizations continue providing those services, even without compensation. But without funding, they won’t be able to continue forever, and he fears children will lose effective representation and due process. “We will see children deported back to harm and to death,” Lukens said.
In recent filings, a coalition of legal organizations described cases of children who are already facing immigration judges alone. They pointed to the case of a 1-year-old in Arizona who appeared without a lawyer. The judge ordered the toddler to file an asylum application by their next hearing. According to the filing, an attorney from the newly tapped Committee for Refugees was present, but said nothing. The committee did not respond to a request for comment.
New infrastructure for detaining and deporting children
The government is considering plans to build a new shelter to hold up to 3000 unaccompanied minors. Lawyers for children worry the infrastructure would make it easier to conduct mass detention and deportation.
The Trump administration has made it harder for family members to claim children at government shelters, sometimes even arresting relatives who attempt to pick up minors, according to The Texas Tribune.
In addition to unaccompanied children, the federal government has also targeted children without citizenship who are in the country with their parents, locking thousands in family detention since President Donald Trump took office last year.
Under a decades-old legal settlement, ICE is not allowed to keep children in family detention for longer than 20 days without justification. But court records show that the government has routinely violated the agreement.
Families and civil rights lawyers have regularly described poor medical care, inadequate access to education and inedible food while detained. The government has repeatedly defended the conditions and lengths of families' confinement. But earlier this week a federal judge appointed a monitor to oversee some aspects of child detention.
Most children who are detained with their families are held at the lock-up in Dilley, Texas, a troubled facility that many parents are desperate to leave.
The government announced earlier this summer it is building an immigrant camp at an airport in Alexandria, Virginia, for families who choose to “self-deport.”
Leecia Welch, chief legal counsel for the nonprofit Children's Rights and a lawyer for children in detention, is worried about that move. “My concern has been that the administration will continue to use Dilley to ‘break’ parents — essentially coerce them through the pain and suffering of their children into taking voluntary departure — and then they would go to the Alexandria facility for deportation,” she said.
Welch thinks the various ways that the administration is acting against children in recent months are connected.
“We can see them building the plane in midair. We're left to figure out where they intend to land it, but I feel confident it's somewhere horrible,” she said.
