The Trump administration is targeting immigrant children who have been victims of abuse, neglect, or abandonment for rapid deportation, using new raids on schools and legal clinics alongside bureaucratic moves to strip the protection once offered by Special Immigrant Juvenile Status (SIJS).
As they speedrun cases through immigration court with new “mega master” hearings, this attack on SIJS is sending children to detention when they would not have previously, and in some cases deporting them to countries they’ve never visited, immigration attorneys and advocates said.
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“Everything they’re doing is harming children,” said Beth Baltimore, deputy director of the legal services center at The Door, a New York City nonprofit that offers free legal services to immigrants ages 12 to 24. In one recent instance, an immigrant from Guinea in his early twenties whom The Door had been working with was deported to Ghana, even though he had “withholding of removal” relief meant to protect him from deportation and had never been there.
“He had this protection and it didn’t matter,” Baltimore told the Prospect. “He doesn’t know anybody in Ghana.”
Special Immigrant Juvenile Status is a humanitarian form of relief for immigrant children who have been abused, neglected, or abandoned by at least one parent, and where a state’s juvenile court determined that it is not in their best interest to be returned to their country of origin. Congress established the status in 1990 as a way for vulnerable people younger than 21 to stay in the U.S. without the threat of deportation while they waited for a green card.
“Everything they’re doing is harming children.”
But a Board of Immigration Appeals ruling last year and four more in 2026 reversed instances where judges allowed someone with SIJS to follow past practice and simply wait in line for their green card to arrive, saying that it’s no guarantee that it will. One ruling terminated deferred action. Another, issued earlier this month, established that even if an unaccompanied child has SIJS, they are still subject to mandatory detention.
“They were really looking for cases to target kids,” Baltimore said. “All of these cases are allowing judges to say, ‘No, we can’t terminate [the case], we can’t do anything.’”
In the Matter of Julian Santiago Pinzon Rozo, for example, Chief Appellate Immigration Judge Garry D. Malphrus found that an immigration judge wrongly delayed the deportation case against a young man from Colombia last year while he waited for a visa to become available. Pinzon Rozo had just turned 20 when he applied for SIJS last May.
Several months later, DHS brought removal proceedings against him because he had overstayed the visa he’d been on seven years earlier. But then in November, the federal government approved his SIJS petition, so Pinzon Rozo asked an immigration judge to drop the deportation case against him pending the availability of an SIJS visa. The judge did not drop the case, but instead agreed to delay the proceedings until February 12, 2027, buying more time while Pinzon Rozo waited.
That was a mistake, said Malphrus, a former White House Domestic Policy Council staff member who participated in the “Brooks Brothers riot” in 2000. In this preview of January 6th, Malphrus and other besuited GOP staffers, including three current Supreme Court justices, stormed the Miami polling headquarters in 2000, chanting, “Stop the fraud,” to shut down a vote recount and steal the election for George W. Bush.
One reason it was a mistake, wrote Malphrus, is because visas for immigrants with SIJS are only available for people who had filed their visa petitions before July 15, 2021. “The amount of time the respondent would have had to wait for a visa number is highly uncertain and potentially lengthy,” he wrote, so Pinzon Rozo should have been forced to leave or made to apply for asylum.
Now, judges are ordering children to apply for asylum—still a lengthy process but much more difficult—or agree to a removal order. The federal government issues fewer than 10,000 SIJS visas annually, according to Volunteer Lawyers for Justice. Attorneys said the new tactic was fundamentally unfair and harms children.
“It’s not their fault there’s a backlog, it’s not their fault that the process is slow,” said Ramón M. Guerra, an immigration attorney and professor of immigration and history at City College of New York. “They’re not giving these kids enough time to wait for their priority date to come up, and they’re basically putting a gun to their head and saying, ‘OK, look you’re either gonna take a deportation order or you’re gonna file for asylum.’”
According to documents NBC News obtained, “ICE detained 265 and deported 132 young people” with SIJS last year.
The attack on protection for vulnerable children comes as the Trump administration is turning the immigration legal system into a Kafkaesque nightmare and using that dysfunction to justify deporting one million people a year. His administration has fired dozens of immigration judges while drastically increasing the number of cases those who remain must hear in a day. As the Prospect reported earlier this month, immigration judges throughout the U.S. are seeing as many as 121 cases in a single day, including in Boston, Chicago, Dallas, and New York.
Requiring young immigrants eligible for SIJS visas to apply for asylum means more strain on that system as well as on pro bono immigration services across the United States, which immigration attorneys said were already at capacity as the Trump administration pursues its deportation goal. Immigrants may take an attorney with them to immigration court, but the government will not pay for legal representation, as it does in criminal court. Legal aid groups fill in to represent unaccompanied immigrant children for free; the government deports about 90 percent of children who show up without a lawyer, according to Probono.net/ny.
Trump officials are attacking those legal aid groups, too. Federal law enforcement officers are showing up at legal services providers for immigrants, demanding specific information on clients, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) said last Thursday. He condemned what he said were “widespread raids” that broke the law.
“It is unacceptable for federal agents to show up unannounced at organizations that provide legal services to immigrants, including children in federal custody, and demand individualized information without cause,” Wyden said in a statement. “Every action taken by the Trump administration has been a pretext for gathering information to use to satisfy Stephen Miller’s white nationalist demand for higher deportation numbers—including treating children as disposable and disregarding anti-trafficking laws.”
Immigration attorneys said they have had to get creative to find ways to protect their clients. They’re worried about whether there are enough attorneys and services for vulnerable kids to make it through the Trump administration, and they’re worried how already traumatized children will cope with the additional anxiety and stress of the regime. There are already so many frightening aspects of immigration under Trump, especially for children, like witnessing raids and arrests, attending court, and all the chronic anxiety of not knowing what the future holds.
“People are so scared, and I think there are so many things that are scary,” Baltimore said. She used to be able to reassure young clients. “And now there’s so much uncertainty, so we can’t make people feel less scared, because we can’t honestly say it’s going to be fine.”
