July 16, 2025
More systematically than in his first term, Trump is rolling back protections for undocumented minors.
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.