These immigrant children were once protected. Under Trump, their deportations have tripled.

For the first weeks after arriving at the Winnfield, Louisiana, immigration detention center, Brother Chavez, 18, was wide awake most nights, listening to the creaking of bunk beds and the voices of dozens of men, also insomniacs, around him. He suffered from terrible headaches and would finally doze off around 4 a.m., just as the guards began summoning the inmates for breakfast. Then he slept most of the day.

He had worked out an owl’s schedule. And he said to himself that the dark circles that had appeared under his eyes made him look like one.

He landed at Winn Correctional Center after Alabama State Police caught him in December going 15 mph over the speed limit and driving without a license. He was returning home after buying his favorite sandwich, carne asada, when he was arrested. Once agents realized he was an immigrant, they called U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Chavez offered to show them documents proving he was not living in hiding. Immigration authorities had granted him special juvenile immigrant status because, as a child, he was abandoned by his parents in Honduras and arrived in this country alone at the age of 14. His sister, who had emigrated years earlier and was living in Alabama, had offered to help take care of him. A lawyer helped him obtain permanent residence.

“I am legal in this country,” Chavez pleaded with the officers. But the officers, he said, didn’t understand. One of them said to him: “Your papers are of no use to me. »

And just like that, an otherwise law-abiding high school student — who loved his welding and carpentry classes, had braces and a girlfriend, and spent weekends playing soccer at the park with his nieces and nephews — was thrown into detention and put on the path to deportation.

“I’m just waiting here,” he said in a video call from detention. “I really don’t know what’s going to happen to me.”

Chávez is not alone. A first-of-its-kind analysis of Immigration and Customs Enforcement data has found that unaccompanied minors living in the United States are being detained and deported at a rate roughly three times higher than the last time President Donald Trump was in office. Additionally, a ProPublica analysis of court data found that immigration judges, who report to the Justice Department, issued more than 10,000 deportation and voluntary departure orders each month for immigrant minors who migrated alone or with relatives, a rate nearly four times higher than during Trump’s last term.

The vast majority of unaccompanied minors deported last year had no criminal history in the United States, ProPublica’s analysis of ICE data showed.

Before Trump returned to power last year, Chavez likely would have been ticketed and allowed to return to his sister. But as part of the president’s mass deportation campaign, his administration has decided to systematically roll back the clock. policies that allowed immigrant minors to access legal counsel and be exempt from deportation while they sought permission to stay permanently in the country. These policies were based on laws implemented over more than two decades, with bipartisan support, because both parties believed that unaccompanied immigrant minors – ill-prepared to navigate a new country on their own, much less a legal system intimidating to most adults – are particularly vulnerable to trafficking and other types of exploitation.

Congress created SIJ specifically to protect immigrants, like Chavez, who are under 21 and able to prove in family court that they were abused, neglected or abandoned by at least one parent in their home country.

Trump administration officials have long argued that not only are programs designed to help unaccompanied minors riddled with fraud, but their very existence has encouraged hundreds of thousands of children to take dangerous journeys to the border, increasing their risk of falling into criminal hands. To make his point, his administration points to the record number of 450,000 unaccompanied minors who arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border and were released into the country under President Joe Biden.

Neither these children nor the people to whom they were released were properly vetted, Trump administration officials say. As a result, administration officials say, some children were victims of abuse or exploitation. An alarming number of them were found working illegally in factories or in other jobs that put them at risk of trafficking, injury, and wage theft.

Other minors, according to the administration, have become criminals. He published a Government report from July 2025 That said, since 2013, some 19,000 SIJ petitioners had criminal records, including hundreds with serious charges like murder and sexual offenses. The administration says the best way to stop such abuse and crime is to deter immigrant children from coming to the country.

White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said Trump is “undoing the damage done by Biden.” Responding to questions about ProPublica’s data analysis, which was based on data provided through Freedom of Information Act requests and was validated by external experts, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said the agency “could not verify the veracity” of the data.

Supporters argue that the administration is using exceptional cases to portray all immigrant minors and the adults who sponsored them in a negative light. They say some of their clients who have lived in the United States for years, including those like Chavez who have since turned 18, face serious risks if they are returned to their home countries. The majority of unaccompanied minors arriving in the United States over the past decade were fleeing Central American countries crushed by economic crisis, violence and political upheaval. Some came from families torn apart by poverty and domestic violence. Some, like Chavez, have no parents to return to.

“These children have had incredibly painful and traumatic experiences,” said Michael Lukens, executive director of the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, a legal advocacy organization. “And ICE is retraumatizing them.”

To the administration’s assertions that its policies are intended to protect minors, he responded: “If you are concerned about the well-being of children, stop rounding them up and trying to deport them.” »

Sometimes deportation orders issued by immigration court arrive so quickly that lawyers say they even have trouble explaining them to their clients. In the span of three hours on a single April morning in a downtown New York immigration courtroom, Judge Jem Sponzo issued deportation orders for 25 minors, with almost everyone on her docket appearing virtually that morning. Some hearings lasted only a few minutes and some minors were too young to understand what was happening to them.

Among the children in court that day was an 8-year-old girl from Ecuador who was seeking asylum and SIJ. The girl’s mother had already been granted asylum in another case. But Sponzo still ordered the girl deported.

In another case, a lawyer asked for more time to prepare enough evidence to support an asylum claim for her client from Guatemala. The lawyer said his client’s home in Guatemala was dominated by an abusive father whose violence made it difficult to gather the information she needed for the case. Sponzo politely rejected the request, saying, “I sympathize and thank you for your efforts. » She then ordered the child’s expulsion.

A high school student from Guatemala who lives in Queens, with dark hair combed to the side and wearing a short-sleeved sports shirt, appeared on a video screen from a room with clothes piled on the bed and an American flag plastered on the wall. He remained silent while his lawyer requested additional time to process his SIJ and asylum applications. Sponzo said no and ordered his expulsion. His lawyer said in an interview that his client now fears being picked up by ICE at any time.

Ultimately, several lawyers said they felt blindsided by the judge’s quick denials. Although they all said they would appeal his decisions, which could buy their clients time to stay in the United States, one said the deportation orders would “hang over their heads like a loaded gun.” “.

Olivia Cassin, a former immigration judge who oversaw juvenile cases in New York, said that before Trump returned to office, it was widely recognized that it took time for immigrant minors’ SIJ and asylum applications to work their way through the backlogged system. For SIJ recipients, obtaining a green card often takes years. Judges generally granted minors this time. Officials charged with overseeing immigration courts have now asked them not to do so. Sponzo cited those instructions at the end of many of the cases she heard that day in April.

Cassin is one of more than 100 immigration judges who have been fired since Trump returned to office. Some of the judges who lost their jobs said they believed they were pushed out because the administration considered them not a good fit for its agenda. But they also claim to have received no official explanation for their dismissals. Sponzo was also recently fired. She could not be reached for comment.

The Justice Department did not respond to questions about the firings.

Since the start of Trump’s second term, immigration courts have averaged more than 10,000 removals of minors per month

It’s not just the overhaul of immigration courts that is having an effect on immigrant children. At the start of Trump’s second term, officials moved to cut funding for advocacy groups that provide legal services to unaccompanied minors. It also ended a Biden-era policy known as “deferred action.” which protected minors benefiting from SIJ from expulsion. SIJ alone does not confer legal status, and the deferred action policy was implemented to cover people with SIJ until they can obtain their green card.

After advocacy groups took the administration to court, federal judges ordered the government to restore funding for legal aid and access to deferred action for SIJ beneficiaries. Despite these rulings, some lawyers say they still have not received what they are owed. And earlier this month, several groups said federal agents showed up at their Washington-area offices, seeking to review their clients’ records, even though they didn’t have a warrant. Defenders said they viewed the move as an attempt to intimidate them..

As for granting deferred action, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said in a statement that the agency would only do so in “compelling circumstances on a case-by-case basis.” DHS, which oversees USCIS and ICE, emphasized in an email that having an SIJ “does NOT confer legal status,” adding that “any recipient may be subject to removal.” The agency did not respond to a question about which agents visited the attorneys’ offices.

Over the past year, the administration says it has tracked down 146,000 unaccompanied minors who entered the country under Biden to check on their well-being. The majority of all minors entering the country in recent years have been released to one or both parents in the United States or other close relatives.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said at a June news conference that some welfare checks found the minors were doing well with their families. But he said he also tracked down children who were in the hands of rapists and other criminals. “We start investigating these cases and you start hearing some absolutely horrible things,” he said.

When asked for verifiable details about some of the cases Mullin mentioned, DHS did not respond. A DHS spokesperson later sent a list of 16 people who had sponsored immigrant minors and who had previously been charged with crimes, including assault, drug trafficking or domestic violence. Meanwhile, Justice Department officials said they have indicted fewer than a handful of people for trafficking or exploiting immigrant minors.

No DHS or Justice Department official has explained what happened to the children linked to these indictments. As for immigrants who entered the United States as children and are now adults, Mullin said, “we are working on the removal process.”

Shortly after Chávez arrived in custody, one of the men in his cell recognized that the teenager’s habit of sleeping all day was a silent cry for help. Carlos Della Valle, who had emigrated to the United States from Mexico, was sympathetic to Chavez’s struggles because he had a son around the same age. Even in detention, Chávez, with his tousled black hair and big brown eyes, had an easy laugh and smile. Della Valle feared that Chávez was “wasting precious time that he will never get back.”

Earn it was a difficult placesaid the defenders and detainees. Two migrants died there earlier this year. One of the deaths was allegedly caused by cardiovascular disease, and authorities have not determined one cause for the other.

A recent report from Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General described unsafe and unsanitary conditions at Winn, including leaking ceilings, dirty food preparation areas and an incident in which a guard placed an inmate in a prohibited chokehold. A DHS spokesperson said the agency was working to address the issues raised in the report, adding, “our mortality rates are lower than those in most state prisons.”

Della Valle began pushing young Chavez out of bed in the morning and putting him to work helping keep their cell block clean.

Inmates had one hour a day outside, sometimes less. Della Valle told Chávez that staying busy, in whatever constructive way possible, was the only way to get through the monotony with his sanity intact.

Chávez briefly took a job at a barbershop that paid the standard wage for a person in custody — $1 a day — but he said cutting the hair of about 80 men in a single day was so backbreaking that he only lasted a month. Instead, Chávez and Della Valle pored over passages from the Bible together. They sat together almost every meal. Chávez learned to mix powdered juice packets just the way Della Valle liked it.

Della Valle offered to help Chavez navigate the immigration system. He knew it well. In 1997, he entered the United States illegally twice. He was deported once, but re-entered illegally, soon after married an American citizen and settled in Pennsylvania.

Due to his re-entry, which constitutes an offense, he was unable to regularize his status. But he lived underground without worry. Immigration authorities generally avoided targeting immigrants who, like him, had long ties to their community. No more.

Authorities intercepted Della Valle as he and his wife returned from the Virgin Islands vacation, although they released him on bail at the time. However, a few months later, he was taken into ICE custody. By the time he met Chávez, he had spent months transferred between nearly a dozen detention facilities. He worried about the impact of detention on Chavez. Other men in his cell block, who nicknamed Chavez “El Niño,” were also worried.

“It was hard to see him, you know, because he’s just a boy. He’s not a grown man,” Della Valle said. “I had to do everything I could for him.”

Although the administration has made progress in bending immigration courts to its will, there is evidence that federal courts, where tens of thousands of immigrants have challenged their detention as illegalgrow back.

The National Immigration Project, a nonprofit legal advocacy group, tracked the cases of 263 immigrants who entered the country as unaccompanied minors and SIJ applicants. The group found that federal judges have ordered releases or bond hearings in all but 12 cases since the start of the second Trump administration. In March, U.S. District Judge Gary Brown issued a scathing rebuke in one such case, writing: “The laws of human decency condemn such wickedness. »

The administration can set policy, he writes, but he adds that “it is prohibited from trampling on our system of laws – a system that has protected this nation for nearly 250 years.”

Among those recently released was 20-year-old Fredy Martinez. Born in Honduras, he was a teenager when he crossed the border as an unaccompanied minor. He had graduated from high school in Texas and was delivering a DoorDash order on his bike when he was arrested, according to court documents regarding his case. He was held for eight months in a sprawling and deeply troubled tent detention camp in El Paso, Texas – which saw a measles epidemic And deaths of prisonersone of which ruled it a homicide — before a federal judge ruled his detention was unlawful and ordered his release. DHS did not respond to a question about the center.

Another teen named Carlos, from Guatemala, said in an interview that he was arrested on his way to work at a car wash in Rockland County, New York, when he was 18, although he was granted an SIJ and deferred action. He flew more than 1,000 miles to a detention center in Louisiana, but not the same one as Chavez. Carlos asked to be identified only by his first name due to his pending immigration case.

After his arrest, he said: “I just thought I would never see my family again. » Carlos was detained for more than two months before a federal judge released him.

The DHS spokesperson did not respond to questions about any individual cases. They said the Federal Court decisions co Our administration “should come as no surprise,” since “many activist judges have attempted to prevent President Trump from fulfilling the mandate of the American people.”

Six months after the start of his detention, Chavez found himself alone. He was deported but appealed the decision and filed a habeas petition.

Della Valle was releasedthanks to the frank support of his wife. His release was bittersweet for Chávez. But Della Valle has not forgotten him.

Della Valle and his wife, Angela Della Valle, helped Chavez’s sister, Mayuri Chavez, pay her unpaid traffic tickets and prepare her defense. The couple launched a letter-writing campaign for him. They handed out flyers with a photo of a chair Chavez made in carpentry class, asking people to color it and send him messages of encouragement.

Della Valle said he felt a sense of guilt about leaving Chavez behind. He still talks to Chavez most days and tries to keep the teen’s spirits up, but he worries his words won’t carry the same weight now that he’s gone. Della Valle tries to convince herself that Chávez will be fine, saying, “I think my absence might be good for him because he knows there is hope.”

During this time, Chavez was transferred several times to different cells. There was only one functioning shower for dozens of men. The video calling system often malfunctioned. Someone stole his little notebook in which he had carefully written down all the telephone numbers of the people he was in contact with outside. One night he dreamed that he was free. When he woke up and realized he was still in custody, he panicked and had trouble breathing.

He said he tries to maintain the routine he started when Della Valle was there, but each week that passes makes things more difficult.

In a series of interviews since his detention, Chávez feared losing half of his first year of high school. He missed a required English test and a deadline to turn in a history project, and now that the school year is over, he doesn’t know if he’ll be able to catch up on his homework and graduate on time. His sister spent a lot of money to get him braces, and without regular adjustments, he fears it will all be for nothing. He missed the birth of his new nephew and he doesn’t know if he will be able to meet him.

“I had so many plans,” he said, “but now everything is ruined. »