For several days this spring, trapped inside a Texas immigration detention center, Luis made frantic phone calls, one after the other, to everyone he could think of.
Could anyone help him find his 11-year-old son?
He’d last seen Andrés, a sensitive boy who likes to draw and paint, at an ICE holding facility near Camp East Montana, the sprawling detention center on a military base in El Paso where Luis now found himself.
Luis and Andrés had come to the United States from Venezuela in 2023. They were taken into custody together this past April after Luis, a construction worker, was arrested by federal agents outside his home. For hours, he and Andrés sat alone in a cell that felt to them like a dungeon. Around midnight, ICE officers showed up and ordered the boy to come with them.
No, Luis had pleaded. Andrés was just a kid—he needed his dad. But the officers seemed unmoved, he said, slipping on gloves and tugging on the boy’s arms as father and son clung to one another. Luis recalled that the officers promised Andrés would be in touch with him, so he let go and watched them take him away.
The administration’s goal in detaining these children, a former ORR official says , is “to make sure no one ever sends their kids to the US again.”
Three days had since gone by without a word, and Luis was in a state of panic. Neither he nor his family on the outside—Andrés’ mother and stepmom—could get any information on the child’s whereabouts. Worse, there was no sign of Andrés in ICE’s online detainee locator. Where had they taken him?
“Since he was little he’s been with me,” Luis told us later from detention, his voice filled with anguish. (Luis and Andrés are pseudonyms, and other family members’ names were changed to protect their privacy. Some attorneys who spoke with us also requested anonymity, in order to describe cases without exposing their clients.)
Finally, after about five days, Luis learned that ICE had transferred Andrés to the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that cares for “unaccompanied” migrant children. Federal law defines unaccompanied minors as kids younger than 18 with no lawful immigration status and no parent or guardian in the United States available to care for them.
In the past, most unaccompanied minors in ORR custody were children who had recently crossed the US-Mexico border by themselves—not kids who arrived with a parent and had been living in the country for years. Andrés was never unaccompanied, but ICE confusingly labeled him that way. As a result, Luis learned, ORR would place him in temporary foster care with another Texas family.
Andrés felt betrayed, as a lawyer who later took his case recalled to us. “He was saying, ‘The government lied to me. I asked them to be with my dad, and they took us to a place, and we were separated.’”
Luis, stuck in detention, could not believe it. “You tricked me!” he thought angrily of ICE.
“You kidnapped my son.”
If this sounds familiar, it’s because something similar happened during the first Trump administration. In 2018, under the so-called zero tolerance policy, immigration agents tore families apart as they crossed the US-Mexico border, detaining parents and transferring their children to ORR custody. One of ORR’s responsibilities is to place unaccompanied kids in shelters, group homes, or foster care until they can be released to sponsors, who are often relatives. Historically, these arrangements were never intended for children who arrived with parents, but Trump’s advisers wagered that separating families would deter new migrants from making the trip. The zero-tolerance policy made national headlines and was denounced on both sides of the political aisle as inhumane, and a federal court eventually ruled it illegal.
Yet now, eight years later, the Trump administration is again separating families, except this time it’s doing so more quietly, and away from the border: Federal agents have picked up hundreds of immigrant children in the interior of the country and sent them to ORR, a vast departure from prior administrations, when interior referrals to the agency were rare. Anywhere from 500 to more than 700 of these kids, according to sources familiar with the cases, had previously crossed the border alone and spent time in ORR custody, but were living with their sponsors when ICE returned them to the agency. These “re-referrals” are the subject of lawsuits and investigations.
But there’s another group of kids that has received less attention—kids like Andrés who were sent to ORR even though they were never unaccompanied. It’s unclear how many children fall into this category, because ORR doesn’t systematically track them, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) ignored our questions about them. But a source with knowledge of federal immigration data told us they now make up a “huge chunk” of ORR’s caseload.
We spoke with more than a dozen attorneys for this story who confirmed this trend, and were alarmed by it. “It’s confusing why those kids are being deemed unaccompanied,” says Diane de Gramont, also with the National Center for Youth Law, who recently raised this concern in court.
“We’re talking about kids who have a mom, a dad, and siblings who want them to be living with them,” says Jessica Richardson, an attorney who works with The Door, a New York nonprofit that helps detained minors. “They don’t want them to be in the shelter, and there’s absolutely no reason why they can’t go home to their families.”
It’s “family separation,” says Becky Wolozin, another attorney from the National Center for Youth Law, who notes that some of the children are as young as 8.
The administration is, in effect, creating unaccompanied minors. “They’re kidnapping people’s kids and keeping them in government custody,” says Jen Smyers, who served as ORR’s deputy director during the Biden administration. And why? It’s part of a “longer-term vision,” she suspects, “to make sure no one ever sends their kids to the US again.” And, other attorneys add, to deport those already here.
Andrés had been separated from his dad for days and was trying to be brave when an ORR social worker handed him the phone. It was his stepmom, Mariana.
She’d been searching for the 11-year-old all week, worried sick, when the agency finally let her know his whereabouts. “How are you?” she asked Andrés in the recorded call, which we translated from Spanish. “How are they treating you? Have you eaten?”
“It’s a particularly heartbreaking conversation,” says Michelle Brané, a renowned immigration expert who tried to help the family locate Andrés, “more for what he doesn’t say than for what he does.”
Andrés didn’t tell Mariana he was scared, for example. And he didn’t ask the kinds of questions one might expect, like “Where’s Dad?” or “What’s going on?” He didn’t talk much at all beyond reassuring her, that yes, he was behaving, and yes, they gave him food, and he had showered. When she asked if he had been crying, he said no.
“I feel imprisoned and very closed in here,” said a 16-year-old girl in ORR custody in Texas. “We cannot touch each other, we cannot hug, we cannot share food.”
“You’ll be with us soon,” she told him.
“He’s in survival mode,” says Brané, “a sweet little 11-year-old’s voice saying he’s strong and he’ll do what they tell him.”
Mariana wondered why Andrés hadn’t called sooner, and he said he wanted to, but they wouldn’t per let him. “They told you that?” she asked. He confirmed it, without specifying whom he was referring to. He did have one question: Could he see his baby brother? Mariana switched to a video call and pointed the camera toward the baby. “He doesn’t recognize me,” Andrés said quietly.
Andrés had met Mariana after he and his dad came to the United States and settled in El Paso. She was a recent immigrant from Colombia and had started dating Luis, who’d fled Venezuela, she said, because he supported the political opposition and faced threats. Luis was one of more than 600,000 Venezuelans with Temporary Protected Status, a humanitarian designation for people whose countries the government deems too dangerous to return to. (Andrés’ mom lives in Colombia.) Luis found a construction job, and he and Mariana had a baby in 2025. But that fall, the Supreme Court let President Trump revoke TPS for Venezuelans.
Luis and Andrés were at home the afternoon they were arrested. The boy was playing outside with friends, and Luis was just heading out to give an estimate on a construction job when SUVs blocked him in the driveway. Mariana walked out to see what was happening and saw masked ICE agents with guns.
She demanded a warrant, but the officers would not show her one. Luis had missed an immigration court hearing, they claimed, an allegation the family denies. Then, she recalls, an officer looked at Andrés and the baby in her arms, and asked whether Luis was their dad. When she said yes, the officers said they couldn’t take an infant born in the United States. But they loaded Andrés into a vehicle with his father as Luis cried for help.
And then they drove away.
Andrés and Luis were arrested together, but Trump’s ICE agents often deem children unaccompanied after encountering them alone in the community. In one case in Texas, a 15-year-old boy with an intellectual disability wandered away from his mom’s fruit stand to find a bathroom. When he didn’t return, she searched for him all over before reporting him missing. Authorities found him the next day but didn’t realize he was the same boy and failed to locate a legal guardian. They contacted ICE, which sent him to ORR. He stayed in the agency’s care for 48 days, even as his mother pleaded for his release, and even after he developed appendicitis and was rushed to the hospital for emergency surgery.
Some kids are sent to ORR simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. That was true for a 13-year-old girl in Pennsylvania who, after law enforcement encountered her at the scene of someone else’s arrest, was placed in ORR custody in New York and Texas for more than a year, even though she’d been living with her family when she was detained, according to an attorney who worked on the case.
Many others have been sent back to ORR after being accused of a minor crime like shoplifting, smoking, or fishing without a license. “If the child were a US citizen,” says Jennifer Vanegas, an attorney at the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights, “the police would call the kid’s parents and send them home.”
DHS lists these petty infractions as reasons to re-refer children to ORR, but the justification is often pretextual, according to another source with knowledge of the cases. Charges are usually dismissed once the child is transferred to a shelter. “You could see a pattern: They were trying to find literally any basis to force an encounter with the child, seemingly fabricate or exaggerate the encounter, use that as the basis to take them into DHS custody, refer them to ORR, and then dismiss that charge,” the source noted. (DHS directed all questions involving ORR to Health and Human Services.)
ICE has been arresting guardians who show up to complete sponsorship requirements: “They are using the children as bait.”
As in Andrés’ case, parents aren’t always notified promptly that their child was transferred to ORR. An Ecuadorian father in Minneapolis “was horribly distraught” after his teenager didn’t come home in January, according to his attorney, Claire Glenn. The teen had called to tell his dad he was being arrested by ICE, but the agency claimed it didn’t know where he was. “I did not know whether ICE was lying or mistaken, or whether I had a very different case on my hand of a child that had been abducted by people who were impersonating ICE and perhaps were trafficking children,” Glenn says. She asked an investigator to locate the kid. It turned out he’d been sent to an ORR shelter in Michigan, even though he, like Andrés, came to the United States with his dad and was never unaccompanied.
In another case, a teen told ICE officers he lived with his dad down the block, but that his dad was deaf. They didn’t try to contact the father before sending his kid to ORR, according to an advocate. “There is a parent down the road, waiting for their child to come home,” says Kara Finck, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania who was speaking about such cases in general. “To think that simply because your child is an immigrant, they can be declared unaccompanied and not returned to your care is a real assault on the very basic principles and tenets of family autonomy.”
Kids will say, “‘I told them my dad was at work a mile away or my mom was at home,” but the officers “don’t care,” former ORR deputy director Smyers told us.
When authorities do reach out, it can come with a risk. Last year, Mileidy Yamaly Contreras Flores got a call from the police department in Chelsea, Massachusetts. It was her 15-year-old son, who had immigrated with her from Honduras in 2019. He’d been in a fight and gotten arrested, and he needed an adult to pick him up at the station. Her husband went—and was detained by ICE after he arrived, according to a subsequent lawsuit. The teen was then sent to ORR in another state. By the time the suit was filed, he had been separated from his family for nearly seven months.
ICE initially sent Andrés out of state, too; he stayed in several hotel rooms in Arizona, according to a legal filing, before officers brought him back to Texas. It was determined he would live with a foster family but spend his days at an ORR shelter and attend school there.
Mariana could not understand why the government labeled her stepson unaccompanied. “The child was never alone,” she said.
DHS wouldn’t answer questions about how it makes such determinations or decides to separate immigrant parents and children instead of keeping them together in family detention. Asked about claims that the administration is “kidnapping” immigrant children, a spokesperson insisted: “ICE does not separate families.”
ORR said Andrés would remain in its care while officials carried out “the family reunification process,” but that process dragged on. In May, Andrés’ lawyer Kristin Etter asked a federal court to order his release, arguing that he was unlawfully detained. “[He] should not have been designated as an unaccompanied child because he was encountered together with his father and his stepmother,” she wrote in the petition. Family separation was unnecessary, Etter argued.
The boy and his family waited for the court to weigh in.
There are fewer unaccompanied minors in federal custody now than in the past. That’s largely because not as many kids have been entering the United States by themselves. ORR received just 3,500 referrals from July 2025 through May 2026, according to a source familiar with the data. But a record number of these children are being referred by ICE, an agency that in the past hasn’t sent many kids to ORR, at least compared with US Customs and Border Protection. As a result, the share of referrals from the nation’s interior, rather than the border—kids like Andrés who are already settled into American life—has increased dramatically.
Jonathan White, who managed ORR’s unaccompanied children program in 2017, says interior referrals represented between 3 and 5 percent of total referrals to the agency during the Obama administration and the first Trump administration. They were also “very rare” under Biden, Smyers says. But from July 2025 through May 2026, interior referrals were about 20 percent of the total, according to the source familiar with the data. Many of the attorneys we interviewed believe the shift from border to interior referrals has only grown more pronounced since then, and that interior referrals now make up about half of all new ORR cases.
This change matters enormously, advocates say, because the government’s shelter system wasn’t designed for children who are already settled in the United States. ORR staffers, too, are concerned, according to a source with knowledge of the situation: “I think most people agree that it’s only hurting kids and hurting families and not at all part of ORR’s central mission.”
Although federal law requires that minors be placed in the “least restrictive setting possible,” ORR’s shelters often have a carceral feel. The kids have to wear approved clothing, any valuables they have are confiscated, and they are allowed to eat and shower only at designated times. “I feel imprisoned and very closed in here,” a 16-year-old girl being held in a Texas ORR shelter said in a sworn legal declaration. “We cannot touch each other, we cannot hug, we cannot share food.”
“We’re putting them in prisons, essentially,” says attorney Richardson.
A young person who just crossed the border alone benefits from a bed and the chance to see a doctor, Smyers told us, but the “Americanized” immigrant kids experience a kind of culture shock when they’re detained. Instead of studying algebra or world history, as they would at their regular school, they might have to sit through ORR lessons on how to tell time, or how to name fruits and vegetables in English.
Children are also being held in custody longer. The average stay in ORR has increased from about one month under President Biden to roughly six months under Trump, according to the agency’s own data, and some kids are locked up for more than a year. ORR shelters are not equipped for long-term care, Smyers says, and children are struggling with their mental health. Suicidal ideation and behavioral problems are increasingly common, according to Smyers, attorneys who represent kids in ORR care, and other sources familiar with the agency’s work.
It is “the same routine every day,” says Alexa Sendukas, a Texas attorney who represents unaccompanied children. It’s “incredibly stressful and confusing, especially for the little ones. They don’t understand why they can’t get out.”
Attorneys blame Trump’s policy changes for the longer stays. Relatives can apply to sponsor the kids and bring them home, but the administration has made the application process more arduous, narrowing the types of accepted identification and proof-of-address documents, and requiring potential sponsors to attend in-person appointments. When children are re-referred, ORR requires their old sponsors—who were previously vetted and approved—to jump through these hoops too.
In a statement, ORR said the changes are intended to ensure that children are not placed with criminals. The Biden administration, “prioritized speed over safety,” a spokesperson said, resulting in “children being released to sponsors who abused, assaulted, or trafficked them.” DHS sent us a list of unnamed sponsors who it claimed had been arrested for domestic violence and other crimes. ORR is being “careful, not slow, because children’s lives are at stake,” the spokesperson added.
While some cases do raise legitimate welfare concerns, parents and guardians say the administration is depriving other children of homes that are perfectly safe.
Lawyers representing four children in shelters in Texas and New York who’d been re-referred to ORR sued the administration in February—the kids had been languishing in the agency’s care while their families tried, without success, to get them out. “These children have been forced to spend extremely long periods of time away from their family, friends, school, and community without justification,” their complaint reads.
It can be dangerous for guardians to try to get their children back. ORR shares information with ICE, which has arrested people who show up to complete fingerprinting and other sponsorship requirements. “They are using the children as bait,” Sendukas says. Fear can deter relatives from stepping up. The Acacia Center for Justice reported last year that releases from ORR to sponsors were “as low as they could possibly be.”
The new restrictions have “basically brought the entire [unaccompanied children] program to a halt,” says a source familiar with the situation. “Because sponsors can’t come forward, kids have nowhere else to go.” ORR, the source added, has become a “de-facto arm of DHS to facilitate their enforcement and detention mission.”
There’s a reason Congress placed ORR within HHS and not DHS. Namely, lawmakers didn’t think the agency overseeing the care of immigrant children should be the same one that handles enforcement and deportations. But those lines are now blurred.
Today, the administration offers teens it deems unaccompanied a payment of $2,500 or more if they’ll agree to leave the United States. Children also are given a handout that threatens lengthy detention and criminal prosecution of noncitizen parents should they take their case to court, as they are legally entitled to do. “You will be detained,” the memo promises, “for a prolonged period of time.”
The administration, Smyers says, is “scaring kids as a way to circumvent the law.”
“They are putting in place all of these different pressure points to force kids out of this country without due process and without any protections,” concurs Melissa Adamson, a senior attorney at the National Center for Youth Law.
All this appears to be part of a broader crackdown on immigrant children. Last year, the government tried to fly dozens of Guatemalan children from ORR shelters out of the country in the middle of the night, but a court intervened. ProPublica reported that unaccompanied minors have been detained and removed from the United States at three times the rate they were during Trump’s first term.
A federal judge found that even if Andrés wasn’t unaccompanied when ICE separated him from his dad and stepmom, he was unaccompanied now.
Making matters worse, immigrant children are contending with an acute shortage in legal representation. The administration recently ended a long-standing contract with an experienced nonprofit network that represented unaccompanied minors in court, handing the job instead to an organization founded by a former ICE agent. Increasingly, young children have been appearing before immigration judges without a lawyer.
“Donald Trump and his accomplices have directed every element of the federal government towards meeting their deportation quota, even if that means tearing families apart and traumatizing children,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the top Democrat on the committee with jurisdiction over ORR, whose office is preparing a report about children in the agency’s care, told us in a statement. “Just like Trump’s first term, the cruelty is the point. The individuals responsible for flouting federal laws and harming children in the process will be held to account.”
In court last month, a Justice Department attorney said ORR has a responsibility to accept referrals from other federal agencies that have deemed a child unaccompanied. That determination, by definition, “means that the child has no parent available to provide care or custody in the United States,” the attorney said.
But ORR officials don’t always agree with those assessments. Angie Salazar, the agency’s acting director, who came to ORR from ICE, has on occasion objected to classifying minors with a parent in the community as unaccompanied, according to a source familiar with internal deliberations. In a few cases, she has intervened personally, the source claimed, and demanded the child be released to their parent. But, Smyers points out, when there’s a disagreement, “unfortunately DHS normally wins.” (ORR and Salazar didn’t respond to a request for comment on this.)
Andrés’ father was released from detention on bond a few months after his arrest. He would soon have to return to Venezuela. But Andrés remained stuck in foster care and was struggling. At one point, ORR caseworkers told the family he was unable to sleep, and screaming for his parents at night; a doctor suggested medication to help him rest, but Luis and Mariana didn’t want to approve pharmaceuticals because of his young age.
The caseworkers also told Mariana that Andrés had been acting out. Another boy who lived with the foster family complained that he wanted to be left alone, but that Andrés, lonely and looking for a friend, kept trying to hug him. “My son is suffering,” Luis told us. “He’s small. He needs his father.”
While Luis was still in detention, Andrés had called and “started crying, saying that he didn’t want to be there anymore, that he wanted to be with us already,” Mariana said. She’d tried to become his sponsor but couldn’t meet ORR’s new requirements because she lacked a taxpayer ID number, so she withdrew her application.
Eventually, Andrés took what seemed like the only route left: He asked an immigration judge to let him go back to Venezuela and be reunited with his biological mom, who said she could meet him at the airport. The judge granted him voluntary departure in July.
This didn’t mean he was free to leave ORR care right away. There had been earthquakes in Venezuela. It might take weeks or months to arrange his travel, and who would watch him in the meantime? A federal judge found that even if he wasn’t unaccompanied when ICE separated him from his dad and stepmom, he was unaccompanied now. He “does not have a parent or legal guardian in the United States who ‘is available to provide care and physical custody,’” the judge wrote in an order dismissing Andrés’ petition to leave foster care. “[W]ithout a sponsor, he cannot be released.”
And so, Andrés waited, counting the days until he could board a flight to Venezuela and be with a parent again. Finally, in August, more than three months after his apprehension, he was allowed to travel.
But when the plane landed in Barcelona, Venezuela, Andrés’ mother was nowhere to be found. The US government hadn’t told the family what time, or even what day, he would arrive. “We just had to give her our best guess,” says Etter, Andrés’ attorney.
After all the fanfare around vetting sponsors, supposedly for the safety of the children, no one in the administration had bothered to make sure an adult would be present to receive Andrés on the other end. He ended up waiting on the side of the road outside the airport until later that night, when Etter was able to help his mom locate him.
“They literally were gonna fly an 11-year-old boy by himself and just dump him in Venezuela,” she says. “They don’t really care who the kids are going home to, or what they’re going home to, just as long as they’re going home.”
