ICE Turned Family Reunification Into A Deportation List
A program created to place migrant children with relatives has become a pipeline for deportation arrests.
Note: video for paid subscribers follows article.
In a friend’s home in California, a six-year-old girl wakes at night and cries because she thinks she is still inside an immigration detention center, while her mother, Aurora, sleeps nearby with the ankle monitor ICE put on her after their release. They have no home to return to in Mississippi: while mother and daughter were detained in Texas, Aurora’s landlord evicted them and threw away their belongings.
By the time officials reunited them in late March, the girl had spent more than six months in a federal shelter after arriving at the border alone, while Aurora submitted documents and a DNA test to prove she was her mother, despite having no criminal record. Their reunion lasted only a few days before ICE detained them both.
Reuters reported that Aurora and her daughter were among more than 12,000 people arrested after a federal child-welfare agency shared information with immigration authorities. That agency, the Office of Refugee Resettlement, is responsible for children who arrive at the border without a parent. It finds adults—usually parents or relatives—who can take them out of government shelters.
Since Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025, the agency has sent ICE more than 460,000 leads about children, the adults seeking to care for them and other people in their homes. Disturbingly, a process meant to reunite families has become a source of names, addresses, fingerprints and family relationships for the deportation system.
The administration says sharing this information protects children. And, to be clear, there have been serious failures in the placement system. The Justice Department has prosecuted adults accused of pretending to be relatives, smuggling minors, and exploiting them. In June, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced charges in several such cases and said children had been exposed to “sexual assault, trafficking, and other exploitation.” Those crimes should be investigated and punished to the fullest extent of the law.
However, Trump’s policy reaches far beyond suspected traffickers or abusers. Another mother interviewed by Reuters gave the government tax records and fingerprints because she believed she and her partner had nothing to hide. ICE agents arrested the couple at gunpoint as they left for work, leaving their 17-year-old son to care for his six-year-old brother while trying to make sense of what had happened. In the confusion that followed, the teenager missed an immigration hearing and was ordered deported.
The government has a duty to investigate abuse. However, it has used a process that families must follow to get children out of shelters to generate hundreds of thousands of immigration leads. Perversely, agreeing to care for a child can now put every adult in the home on ICE’s radar.
The Trump administration is not exploiting some new loophole. Congress deliberately separated the care of migrant children from immigration enforcement when it created the Department of Homeland Security in 2002 by giving responsibility for unaccompanied children to the Department of Health and Human Services. A 2008 anti-trafficking law later instructed officials to place children quickly in the safest home available, usually with a parent or relative. Undocumented relatives have long been allowed to take custody when they can provide a safe home.
ICE enforces immigration law. The Office of Refugee Resettlement is supposed to care for children and place them with families. Turning that office into another source of ICE leads makes both jobs harder. Families stop trusting caseworkers, children remain in shelters longer and immigration officers begin relying on information people provided for a different purpose.
I was serving in Congress when the first Trump administration began sharing sponsor information with ICE in 2018. By that December, immigration agents had arrested 170 people who came forward to care for children. More than 100 had no criminal record. Relatives became afraid to claim children, and the shelter population rose above 14,000. Congress eventually barred the government from using sponsor information simply to find people to arrest.
Trump’s second administration has brought the policy back on a much larger scale. It put a former ICE official in charge of the refugee-resettlement office, gave immigration officers greater access to its records and demanded more information from sponsors and other adults in their homes. The average stay in federal custody quickly rose from 30 days to 194 days. The administration calls the added scrutiny a safety measure when, in reality, children are now spending months longer in government facilities. Any parent should feel deep anger and suspicion toward a government that would make such a claim.
This is how Trump uses federal agencies. He pushes them away from the jobs Congress assigned them and toward the policy results he wants. The refugee-resettlement office was created to move children out of federal custody and place them in safe homes. Trump is using it to help ICE find people to arrest, even when that frightens relatives away and leaves children in shelters for months. Producing more deportations now takes priority over the agency’s mission and the welfare of the children in its care.
Aurora’s case shows how that works. She gave the government the information officials demanded so she could recover her daughter. ICE used it to find and arrest her.
Child-welfare records are not the only government data now available to immigration authorities. ICE has gained access to personal information about Medicaid recipients. Agents conducting “welfare checks” have asked children and sponsors where they work, which banks they use and which schools they attend.
People provide this information to obtain medical care, legal assistance or custody of a child. When they believe it could be handed to ICE, they become less willing to answer questions or approach the government at all. That happened in 2018, when relatives feared that taking a child out of a shelter could lead agents to other undocumented people in the household. Some stopped coming forward, and children remained in federal custody longer.
Aurora complied with every request. She proved that the girl was her daughter, waited more than six months and appeared when ICE ordered her to report. Her daughter had been home for only a few days when they were detained again.
Officials should tell parents when information they provide to recover a child may be shared with ICE. Aurora thought she was completing the steps required to bring her daughter home. The information she provided gave ICE what it needed to arrest her.
ICE will count Aurora’s arrest as a success. The lasting result will be a child-welfare system that families no longer trust. When parents believe that every form, fingerprint and interview may lead agents to their door, even honest caseworkers lose the ability to persuade them to come forward. Trump will have increased deportation numbers by making it harder for the government to return children to their families, leaving more children to spend months in shelters while their parents and relatives remain frightened, separated and unsure whether they will see one another again.
Video discussion for paid subscribers: (I discuss some of my experience working the border, and what this does to our soul…our moral standing as a nation…spoiler… it ain’t good.)
