Despite a sharp drop in unaccompanied child arrivals, new Trump-era policies are prolonging their detention and making it nearly impossible for many families to reunite.
A new form of family separation has been quietly engineered at the Office of Refugee Resettlement’s Unaccompanied Minors program, the HHS office responsible for the care and custody of immigrant children who enter the U.S. alone. Under President Donald Trump’s border closures, the number of unaccompanied children entering the United States has dropped significantly, and yet, on average, each child is remaining in government custody weeks longer—even when a parent is available to reunite with their child.
Children are being detained for longer periods of time, as the government increases the requirements for releasing them to parents or other family members—often with heartbreaking consequences.
The numbers are startling:
- ORR reported an average of 6,212 children in custody during October 2024, but only 2,173 during March 2025.
- Despite the drop, the average length of time in custody increased sharply: While children released from ORR’s custody in October averaged 35 days in care, by March 2025, the average had jumped to 112 days.
Molly Chew, director of the ReUnite Project at VECINA, a pro bono legal services organization, has been keeping careful track of the damage inflicted on families. Since 2021, her job has been to work with parents and other family members who are having trouble applying to sponsor children in ORR custody—assisting with the reunification of over 1,400 children to date.
Under long-standing policy, legal settlement requirements and regulation, parents and close family members are the preferred sponsors for unaccompanied children, but the government still requires rigorous documentation to ensure that the child is released safely. It can be difficult at times for some families to meet all the requirements, especially if the parent or other relative does not have legal status.
Chew said a lot of parents come to her project through legal service providers of detained children who recognize that a family is struggling with the reunification process. Sometimes the parents just need help with translation, or in securing the right documents. Sometimes, there are questions about living situations or more complicated issues that require the help of a pro bono lawyer.
Since the Trump administration came into office, however, the calls she receives are often from terrified family members who don’t know why the government has suddenly told them that their application isn’t good enough.
It’s an endless moving target, and it’s breaking families apart.
Molly Chew, ReUnite Project at VECINA
Chew said nearly all of the cases she has overseen under the new administration have been dramatically affected by recent policy shifts. She can quickly tick off the changes:
- Feb. 14: The government significantly expanded mandatory fingerprinting requirements to include every adult residing in the household and any alternative caregivers.
- March 7: ORR issued new guidelines on acceptable documents for proof of identification, eliminating foreign-issued documents (such as a passport), limited documentation that could be used to show proof of address (including eliminating procedures allowing a case manager to mail a code to an individual and then have them verify the code), imposed new requirements for denial of applications if any evidence of falsified documents by any member of the household is present, and required case managers to report any suspicion of fraud to the HHS inspector general and to ICE for criminal prosecution.
- March 14: The government instituted mandatory DNA testing of any family relationship. Prior policy required DNA testing in limited situations where the relationship could not otherwise be clearly established, or other vulnerabilities existed.
- April 15: ORR clarified that an applicant must establish proof of income but limited the list of acceptable documents that can be submitted.
Chew said that any of these requirements make it harder for people who may not have legal status or may have limited access to identity, income or other documents.
For example, now that foreign passports and other foreign identity documents will no longer be accepted, many families will not be able to apply for sponsorship of their own children. In only 19 states and the District of Columbia, people without legal status may obtain a driver’s license or state ID, but there is often a long wait for such documents.
Because the new requirements are retroactive, even families in states that issue government identification will wait longer to reunite with their children as they get in line for state issued documents, and individuals without lawful status living in the other 31 states are likely unable to meet the new ID requirements altogether.
The expanded fingerprinting requirements are particularly disruptive. Even if the parent has legal status or can produce approved identity documents, they often live in mixed-status families or other mixed housing situations.
“One family was forced to uproot their lives and move because their housemates were too afraid to come forward and be fingerprinted due to their immigration status,” Chew told Ms. “After the family had finally resettled and were told their children’s release had been approved, the government abruptly changed the rules. Despite everything they had already done to meet the government’s demands, they were suddenly told it still wasn’t enough. They had to scramble to meet new documentation requirements that are challenging—or even impossible—for undocumented individuals to meet. It’s an endless moving target, and it’s breaking families apart.”
Families have no idea that the new requirements changed the playing field for all families seeking to reunite with their detained children, Chew said. Instead, “They worry that they must have done something wrong.” And the children—unable to comprehend the complexities of these policies or the reasons they are still detained—often blame the parents for delays.
“One 7-year-old boy in custody now refuses to talk to his mother, saying that she just isn’t trying hard enough to get him out of custody.” Children feel abandoned and parents are distraught.
That kind of misunderstanding and resentment is likely to affect the relationship between parent and child for years to come.
Trump officials claim that the new requirements are necessary to protect children from trafficking and yet they have offered no justification for applying the new rules to parents, in particular, where proof of relationship can be established through less extreme means.
Neha Desai, managing director of Children’s Human Rights and Dignity at the National Center for Youth Law, has tracked unaccompanied children’s treatment for years. “The recent policy changes do nothing to increase children’s safety, but instead dramatically prolong detention, separating children from their families in furtherance of a political agenda.”
This agenda is apparent in the realignment between the relationship between DHS and HHS. At the same time that the administration is making it more difficult for parents to retrieve their children, it is making it easier for ICE to have access to sensitive data about children and their sponsors. Not only have ICE officials been installed to lead ORR (which also addresses refugee issues), but ICE and ORR have created a joint task force for rooting out “fraud,” which primarily seems to mean identifying people in the country unlawfully. Trump has even ordered ICE to seek out and arrest unaccompanied children. Long-standing limits on ORR’s ability to share information with ICE and other law enforcement officials have been lifted in violation of laws protecting sensitive data, according to a letter sent to DHS and HHS by Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) and seven other senators.
FBI and DHS agents are conducting wellness checks on released children, a task ordinarily assigned to child welfare professionals.
This transformation of the Unaccompanied Minors program into an arm of ICE is taking place at the same time that the administration has terminated contracts providing know your rights presentations, legal screenings and legal services to unaccompanied children. The Unaccompanied Minors Ombuds office, designed as a confidential resource for raising concerns of children, families and other stakeholders, has been decimated by the drastic cuts to the civil service and prevented from visiting shelters or talking with stakeholders.
Children in government care are now isolated—from their families, from lawyers and other professionals who can help them navigate the immigration system and from oversight investigators who could shed light on problems.
Policies that traumatize and isolate kids just can’t be the best we can do—and the administration needs to revisit its approach before more families are harmed.
