{"id":6429,"date":"2025-03-13T06:48:18","date_gmt":"2025-03-13T06:48:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/compliance\/?p=6429"},"modified":"2025-03-14T03:03:04","modified_gmt":"2025-03-14T03:03:04","slug":"regulating-childhood-mass-deportations-of-unaccompanied-minors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/compliance\/?p=6429","title":{"rendered":"Regulating Childhood: Mass Deportations of Unaccompanied Minors"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jessica Rios<\/em><\/p>\n

Associate Editor<\/em><\/p>\n

Loyola University Chicago School of Law, JD 2026<\/em><\/p>\n

Undocumented minors are children, and the federal government should treat them as such. The attitude and justifications for harsh immigration policies are deeply rooted in the United States\u2019 history along the Southern border and remain all too prevalent in today\u2019s \u201ctough on crime<\/a>\u201d approach to immigration. The Trump administration has repeatedly referred to undocumented immigrants as \u201ccriminals,\u201d even though more than half<\/a> of the 43,759 people held in ICE detention facilities have no criminal record. Yet, undocumented children appear to be the latest target of the president\u2019s anti-immigrant crusade.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

ICE under the current administration<\/strong><\/p>\n

In a recently leaked internal memo, ICE outlines an unprecedented<\/a> push to target undocumented children who crossed the border as unaccompanied minors. The plan to deport unaccompanied minors consists of four phases. Under the first Trump administration\u2019s \u201czero tolerance<\/a>\u201d policy, thousands of minors were separated from their parents at the border and sent to shelters fun by the Office of Refugee Resettlement while their parents were detained or deported. An \u201cunaccompanied<\/a> minor\u201d is a person with no lawful immigration status who is under the age of 18 and has no parent or legal guardian in the U.S. able to provide care and physical custody. The law refers to this kind of child as an \u201calien child<\/a>.\u201d This language is not only dehumanizing, but villainizing and promotes the American public\u2019s perception of undocumented children as an \u201cother\u201d to be feared.<\/p>\n

This memo is not the only step toward mass child deportations. On February 18, 2025, the Trump administration directed<\/a> government funded organizations that provide legal services to migrant children facing deportation to abandon their work. A few days later, Trump rescinded<\/a> the stop-work order that had abruptly halted federally funded work for unaccompanied migrant children. Such sudden shifts in circumstances give reason to believe there will be more unexpected turns to come, leaving the futures of unaccompanied minors on particularly unstable ground.<\/p>\n

Targeting a vulnerable population<\/strong><\/p>\n

Unaccompanied minors are particularly vulnerable in all aspects of interacting with the immigration system due to a plethora of factors, the most obvious being their stages of development<\/a>. Notably, the Department of Health and Human Services, not an immigration enforcement agency, supervises unaccompanied minors who enter the U.S. Within the Department of Health and Human Services, the Office of Refugee Resettlement serves unaccompanied minors through two programs<\/a>: the Unaccompanied Refugee Minors Program and the Unaccompanied Alien Children Bureau. The Unaccompanied Refugee Minors program specifically serves children from particular countries with refugee status and includes an application process<\/a>, while the Unaccompanied Alien Children Bureau encompasses all children who enter the U.S. without a legal guardian regardless of whether the child has refugee status. Unaccompanied minors are not automatically eligible for the Unaccompanied Refugee Minors program, meaning the default is to place them in the care of the Unaccompanied Alien Children Bureau. Therefore, they are less likely to gain access to the additional resources<\/a> the Unaccompanied Refugee Minors program provides since applying to the program does not guarantee admission.<\/p>\n

The Office of Refugee Resettlement is responsible for placing unaccompanied minors with sponsors in the U.S., and during the first Trump administration the Office of Refugee Resettlement began sharing identifying information about those children and their sponsors with ICE. After being discontinued under Biden, the practice now returns under a second Trump term as multiple ICE officers now have access<\/a> to a database of unaccompanied minors\u2019 identifying information that would bolster an already growing number of detentions. This partnership coincides with the administration\u2019s new guidance<\/a> regarding verification of sponsors for unaccompanied minors, including required fingerprinting for all adult sponsors and household members. The Trump administration claims that this increased surveillance is meant to \u201cbuild a culture of child safety and accountability\u201d is little more than a veneer of concern for child-welfare and has immigrant rights advocates rightfully concerned<\/a>.<\/p>\n

To actively target undocumented children who entered the U.S. without a legal guardian undermines the notion that the current administration is acting in the interest of national security. This recent call to locate and deport unaccompanied minors is a call to unnecessarily terrorize an inherently vulnerable group of people while also making an example out of those who dare begin a new life in the U.S., a self-purported \u201cland of immigrants.\u201d Not only do the continuous anti-immigrant rhetoric and detention efforts further rob thousands of undocumented minors of their childhood, but they also attempt to justify the administration\u2019s cruelty by making monsters out of mere children. An entire restructuring of the U.S.\u2019s approach to unaccompanied minors with new and more effective systems is ideal and should be the goal. However, this goal is a far cry from today\u2019s reality. One small but meaningful action the government could take is to simply stop referring to undocumented children as \u201caliens,\u201d either by enacting laws or new policy requiring this change. Improving on this dated language would be the start of a much needed shift in how the public discuss this population. By de-villainizing undocumented children, the hope is that one day no person is stripped of their childhood simply because of their immigration status.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Undocumented minors are children, and the federal government should treat them as such. The attitude and justifications for harsh immigration policies are deeply rooted in the United States\u2019 history along the Southern border and remain all too prevalent in today\u2019s \u201ctough on crime\u201d approach to immigration. The Trump administration has repeatedly referred to undocumented immigrants as \u201ccriminals,\u201d even though more than half of the 43,759 people held in ICE detention facilities have no criminal record. Yet, undocumented children appear to be the latest target of the president\u2019s anti-immigrant crusade.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":155,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,46],"tags":[392,597,1111,2017],"class_list":["post-6429","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-department-of-justice","category-regulation","tag-children","tag-department-of-health-human-services","tag-immigration","tag-trump-administration"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/compliance\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6429","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/compliance\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/compliance\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/compliance\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/155"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/compliance\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6429"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/compliance\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6429\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6430,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/compliance\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6429\/revisions\/6430"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/compliance\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/compliance\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.luc.edu\/compliance\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}