The Message Is ‘We Can Take Your Children’

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.

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.”

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.”