“The Children Are Being Used as Bait”

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In early March, a 7-year-old boy in immigration custody received good news: He would finally be released to his mother’s care. Months earlier, he had been apprehended as an unaccompanied minor while crossing the US-Mexico border. Since then, he had been staying in a facility run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, waiting for his mother, who was already in the United States, to be approved as his sponsor. She had painstakingly jumped through the necessary hoops, submitting the required documents and undergoing a home study to show that she was a safe caregiver. But soon after the boy learned of his imminent release, a new federal policy abruptly made his mother ineligible as a sponsor.

Confused about why he is still in custody, the boy recently told his mother, through tears, that she must not want him after all.

Across the country, thousands of children are quietly lingering in ORR facilities, unable to reunite with parents or relatives because of new Trump administration policies limiting who can sponsor them. According to a class action lawsuit filed by immigration advocacy groups last week, children are “being separated from their loving families, while the government denies their release, unnecessarily prolonging their detention.”

Some of the kids in custody are appearing in immigration court alone, as a result of recent cuts to federal funding for legal representation for unaccompanied children.