Migrant children face deportation

Migrant children face deportation | Daily Tribune

Roxana Avila-Cimpeanu, deputy director of a group that provides legal support for unaccompanied minors, described this scene, which she witnessed in August.

"This child is being expected to file her own application, also figure out how to file things for her one-year-old baby, while living through the distress of being a detained young mother," Avila-Cimpeanu told Agence France-Presse (AFP).

United States President Donald Trump's administration has choked off funding for organizations that have years of experience assisting unaccompanied minors, bringing in substitutes that are under-equipped and unqualified, advocates say.

"We are gravely concerned that ORR would entrust a vulnerable population with firms so plainly unqualified for the task," Democratic lawmakers said in a letter to the Department of Health and Human Services this week.

ORR is the Office of Refugee Resettlement, an agency traditionally tasked with the care of unaccompanied minor migrants.

The category describes children who arrive in the US without an adult, or whose parents were detained by immigration agents and are in shelters or government custody.

'Attack on children'

Since he returned to the White House for his second term in January 2025, President Donald Trump has mounted an aggressive and sometimes violent operation to deport undocumented immigrants from the US.

Last year, the administration tried to cut off funding that ORR used to support a national network of organizations that have for years provided legal services to unaccompanied migrant minors.

Following a lawsuit, the measure was blocked by a federal judge who ordered that the services, which were mandated by a 2008 law, be maintained.

Months later, the government stopped making payments, and in July 2026, it allowed a contract with the Acacia Center for Justice — which managed a network of about 100 organizations — to expire.

Avila-Cimpeanu told AFP that in late 2025 that the government made funding contingent on the release of confidential information about some 20,000 children represented by the network — "and we did not do so."

The government then announced plans to hand the cases over to the Burke Law Group, run by a former Trump administration official, but that firm withdrew its bid.

It then planned to deploy Our Rescue, an organization founded by a controversial anti-trafficking activist and led by a former investigator for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.