Jonathan P. Baird

Publicity about ICE has left out one important component of ICE’s activities. They are targeting for detention and removal immigrant children who entered the United States unaccompanied by a parent. These children were often fleeing persecution, trafficking and abuse. They were trying to achieve safe harbor and asylum here in the U.S.

Since early in 2025, the top immigration official in the Trump regime, Stephen Miller, has made it clear that arresting and deporting immigrant children was the regime’s high priority. He has repeatedly been explicit about that. Yet, the vast majority of unaccompanied minors being removed from the U.S. have no criminal history. They are often trying to escape criminals.

What we are seeing is an effort to dismantle all legal protections for those children. Under the federal court consent decree in the Flores case, children received legal assistance. They also had limits placed on the length of their detention.

The Trump regime is shredding their legal obligations under Flores and is actively fighting to terminate that consent decree. That settlement had established nationwide minimum standards governing the treatment, placement and release of children held for prolonged periods in detention facilities. Flores gave counsel access to detention facilities and it allowed lawyers the ability to monitor conditions in which children were held.

ICE and its sister collaborating agency, the Office of Refugee Resettlement or ORR, have been trying to scuttle the right to counsel established by Flores. ORR has refused to pay the lawyers representing 25,000 immigrant children for services already rendered. The government owes these lawyers $65 million. ORR let the contract with lawyer non-profit groups representing minors expire. The lawyers have appealed and the case is now before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

The Trump regime is trying to make legal providers hand over confidential client data in order to get a contract renewal. They wanted to make legal providers submit information that would allow ICE to track down unaccompanied minor children living in the U.S. It puts the lawyers in a compromised situation. They would have to sell out their clients to continue representation.

Imagine trials where the government has a lawyer and toddlers en masse appear without counsel on the other side. That is a scenario the Trump regime loves. There would be no lawyers to report when kids are deported from the U.S. on secret midnight flights. Many of the children being deported are too young to understand what is being done to them.

This scenario happened on Labor Day last year and only the fact that the flight was leaked to lawyers saved the kids from deportation to Guatemala. The lawyers filed an emergency motion and a federal judge stopped the flight The government wanted to swiftly deport 600 unaccompanied children. The government woke the children in the middle of the night, put them in vans and took them to the airport. The judge saved them. The government wants lawyers out of the way as they blocked and impeded their deportation schemes.

Adam Sendukas, a lawyer at the Galveston-Houston Immigration Representation Project has said:

“We know that without a lawyer, unaccompanied children win the right to stay in the U.S. less than 1% of the time.”

The government has done everything to stack the deck in immigration court, including firing over 100 immigration judges. The Trump regime has advertised to hire “deportation judges” in place of immigration judges. The quality of justice immigrant children are receiving is beyond an embarrassment, It is kangaroo court where so-called “judges” give cursory examination to valid asylum claims before ordering deportation for masses of children.

Fast tracking deportation is the plan. Since the start of Trump’s second term, deportations are triple the rate they were during the final years of Trump’s first term. ProPublica says the federal government has been deporting 10,000 immigrant minors a month.

They gave a small Houston-based law firm with ties to Trump $150 million to represent unaccompanied children. The firm has no discernible experience in immigration law or child welfare. The contract covers the 1800 children being held in shelters. It doesn’t cover the 22,000 children who are not in Health and Human Services-connected shelters.

Instead of competent, experienced lawyers, the government is using Trump-friendly lawyers who have never demonstrated any commitment to the interests of immigrant children. Why would anyone give a contract like this to lawyers with no relevant background?

Detention is dangerous for children. Under Flores, children were not supposed to be held for prolonged or indefinite periods in incarceration. Much evidence shows that such detention inflicts toxic stress that damages mental health and long-term well-being. Detention for kids is not supposed to be carceral but ICE and ORR are leaving children alone in jail for months.

The Trump regime is looking to build a new mass deportation facility for kids in Alexandria Louisiana that is located on a toxic waste site which contains high concentrations of PFAS “forever chemicals” in its groundwater.

ICE is paying bounties to local police to track down and find children they can then deport. This is a Faustian bargain. Once kids are found, they are being sent back to the cartels and traffickers they had tried to escape.

The harm toward children that ICE is doing has been under-reported. They are literally destroying the lives of thousands.. Our much vaunted free press has failed to highlight this story. You might think an immigration system would feel some compulsion to protect the most vulnerable and allow viable legal claims an opportunity to be heard.. That is not the case in America in 2026. The government agenda is deportation for as many as possible as quickly as possible.