The Department of Homeland Security is “kidnapping people’s kids”

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche gave a press conference on Thursday to tell reporters about 300,000 supposedly “missing” immigrant children. These were unaccompanied minors who’d crossed the border alone during the Biden administration, before being apprehended by the government and then quickly released to sponsors—typically adult relatives.

Mullin and Blanche claimed the Biden administration lost track of these children, and that many ended up with adults who purported to be family but were actually criminals who abused them. “Kids now have been paying for it,” Mullin said. “They have been getting raped over and over and over again because the previous administration chose not to enforce our nation’s laws and protect the most vulnerable.”

The claim that 300,000 unaccompanied minors went missing has already been thoroughly and repeatedly debunked. Still, over the past year, the Trump administration has used this misleading narrative as justification to go out and find these kids. Officials have gotten back in touch with nearly 150,000, whether calling or visiting their homes or encountering them in the community. Hundreds have been re-detained. Their sponsors must then be re-vetted before the kids can be released.

The administration says it’s doing this for the good of the children. “We are going to rescue as many kids as we possibly can,” Mullin said. And it’s true that there have been some horrific cases: The press conference was pegged to the indictment of three people who allegedly lied about their identities to gain custody of minors; a fourth man was sentenced for raping a girl in his care.

But lawyers around the country who work with unaccompanied children paint a remarkably different picture. They tell me that abuse by fake sponsors is relatively rare, and that most sponsors really are who they say they are: family members. The Trump administration, by and large, isn’t saving kids—it’s separating them from loved ones and putting them in detention for months on end.

Unaccompanied minors taken into custody at the end of the Biden administration were held by the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) for about 37 days on average. Under the Trump administration, the average is about six months, and many children have been detained more than a year. “A majority of the kids in our facilities today have biological parents who want them home, and there’s no reason the government shouldn’t be releasing them,” says Jessica Richardson, an attorney whose nonprofit, The Door, works with detained kids in New York.

“Family separation under the first Trump administration got so much attention, and DHS is doing it again, but with everything else they’re doing it hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves,” says Jen Smyers, who served as ORR’s deputy director under Biden. “DHS is kidnapping people’s kids.”

At the press conference, Angie Salazar, Trump’s acting ORR director, touted more stringent vetting requirements for sponsors—families must jump through many more hoops than before to prove they’re worthy of getting their kids back. The process, Salazar said, “should mirror the standards of the American foster care system,” with “rigorous background checks, vetting of caregivers, financial stability verification, and home visits before a child is turned over.”

Several families are now suing, arguing that the new requirements have led to detention periods that are too lengthy and violate the Flores agreement, a court settlement requiring kids to be released from government care “without unnecessary delay.”

The Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act also requires ORR to “promptly” place unaccompanied minors “in the least restrictive setting that is in the best interest of the child.”

“These children have been forced to spend extremely long periods of time away from their family, friends, school and community without justification,” notes the families’ complaint, which was filed by Democracy Forward and the National Center for Youth Law.

“It is not right that I have to stay here for so long when I have someone to take care of me who knows me and loves me,” a child told the court in another similar lawsuit. “I don’t know if I can tolerate it much longer.”

Under Biden, says Michigan-based attorney Ana Raquel Devereaux, who works with unaccompanied minors, parents could “receive the child in a relatively swift manner. Now, the barriers to sponsor reunification are so significant that, from our perspective, sponsor reunification is essentially nonexistent.”

Acting director Salazar said at the press conference that ORR is “prioritizing child safety over placement speed.”

But is holding kids for months, or even a year or more, really good for them? ORR facilities are often called shelters, but they are “essentially prisons,” says attorney Richardson. “They have specific times they are allowed to shower and use the bathroom. Specific times they are allowed to go to get food.”

Some of the detained kids are having suicidal ideation, depression, and anxiety because of the lengthy detention, or are acting out or running away. “ORR is meant to be a very, very short-term place for unaccompanied children,” notes Smyers, the former ORR official.

Among the plaintiffs is Diego N., a 14-year-old who’d been living with his father in Texas. Since being re-detained, “he has little privacy,” the complaint states. “He misses being able to go outside for fresh air when he wants to and being able to talk to his friends.” Detention has interrupted his schooling—ORR classes are primarily focused on basic language skills: “He is being taught how to name fruits in English when he should be a freshman at his public high school.”

Younger kids are confused about why they’re detained at all, says Alexa Sendukas, an attorney in Texas. “It’s incredibly stressful and confusing, especially for the little ones. They don’t understand why they can’t get out.”

Rather than saving these kids, she says, the administration is using them “as bait.” Last year, ORR began requiring sponsors to attend in-person meetings to verify their identification documents—and sometimes ICE arrests them when they show up. “We’re seeing family members detained,” says Sendukas. (This week, federal agents raided the offices of organizations that provide legal services to unaccompanied minors, to gather more information.)

Kids are so terrified for their parents that some decide not to go through the sponsorship process at all. Mario C., a 17-year-old plaintiff who’s been detained for months, wants to live with his mom, but he’s considering foster care instead because he doesn’t want to risk her arrest. Other kids are so desperate to get out of detention that they self-deport, returning to countries where they haven’t lived in years, even though their parents are in the United States.

Trump officials remember the public outrage that ensued after they split up kids and parents at the border in 2017. Now they’re splitting them up in the interior and holding press conferences about saving missing children to justify it. They want to make their activities more palatable to the public.

But even rebranded, family separation is still just family separation.