How the Trump Administration Pushed Judges to Deport Children

For most of the past twenty years, immigration judges tended to offer minors a reprieve from deportation until their SIJ and asylum applications had run their course. They also gave them plenty of time to find a lawyer. “This goes hand in hand with the independence of judges, their independence to control their dockets, their independence in decision-making,” Amiena Khan, the former assistant chief immigration judge in New York City, who was fired in December, told me.

No longer. Late last year, the Justice Department’s Board of Immigration Appeals held SIJ to be a “speculative” form of relief. Judge Sponzo began to rule accordingly: SIJ and asylum, she said from the bench, were “collateral” to the question of removal. Immigrants and their attorneys felt unable to plead their case. It seemed highly relevant that “a state court has said these children are vulnerable and should not be returned to their home country, and U.S.C.I.S. has determined the same,” Meena Shah, the managing director of legal services at the nonprofit the Door, told me. Yet in a number of SIJ cases Sponzo recognized “no application for immediately available relief,” and ordered teen after teen deported. As one court employee observed, “She never continues cases ever at this point in the game.”

Throughout President Donald Trump’s second term, all kinds of changes have roiled the immigration courts. Every month, there has been some new directive or precedential case or mass firing that spins the heads of court staff and of lawyers on both sides. The goal is transparent: “to carry out the largest, lawful deportation operation of criminal illegal aliens in history,” as a White House spokesperson said. Adults, few of them with a violent criminal record, were hit first. Certain groups, such as Somali immigrants (whom Trump has called “garbage”), had their cases fast-tracked. Now unaccompanied kids are being treated like adults, despite laws and policies meant to give them extra consideration. (A D.O.J. spokesperson denied this, adding that U.A.C.s “are afforded all special consideration required by law.”)

This shift, which became widespread in early April, raises “a lot of serious concerns around due process and the plain well-being of children,” Benjamin Remy, a lawyer with the New York Legal Assistance Group, told me. The Department of Justice declined my request for an interview, but a spokesperson said that the agency “prioritizes the timely completion of all cases, including those of unaccompanied alien children.” Delays in immigration court, the agency added, “hurts both aliens with meritorious claims and the American public who wish to see aliens with non-meritorious claims removed as quickly as possible.”

Youth had been prioritized for deportation before, including during President Barack Obama’s second term, when tens of thousands of unaccompanied children began showing up at the U.S.-Mexico border. During Obama’s full tenure, around fifty per cent of U.A.C.s either were ordered removed or agreed to voluntarily depart, according to a study by Chiara Galli, of the University of Chicago, and Tatiana Padilla, of the University of Minnesota. That number increased to seventy per cent under the first Trump Administration. Then, under Joe Biden, when there were far more U.A.C.s than ever before, the figure dropped to thirty per cent. Judges were trained to grant adjournments for pending SIJ petitions, and the Department of Homeland Security revived an Obama-era program that screened Central American children for humanitarian relief before they made the journey north. “The idea was to interview them abroad, to determine if they were in danger and if they had a family member in the U.S. who had legal status,” Carmen Maria Rey Caldas, a former immigration judge who worked on that program, told me.

When Trump returned to office, in 2src25, he closed the country’s borders to asylum seekers, including children; shut down the Central American program; and cut funding for pro-bono representation. His immigration adviser, Stephen Miller, referred to U.A.C.s as the “children that Joe Biden trafficked into the country—that Democrats trafficked into the country.” There are now fewer than two thousand U.A.C.s in the U.S., compared with some seven thousand in late 2src24, a drop attributable mostly to the sealing of the southern border. The total number of children agreeing to voluntary departure has increased sevenfold, the Vera Institute of Justice found.