Targeting Foster Children for Deportation
This is also state-sponsored kidnapping.
Under the second Trump administration, undocumented and asylum-seeking children are, once again, being targeted in new, awful ways. Two reports that came out within the last week reveal the scope of it.
Priscilla Alvarez reported at CNN on June 4 that around 500 children have been taken into custody by ICE after “well checks” conducted in their homes. According to Alvarez, the Trump administration set up a “makeshift ‘war room’ to pore over sensitive data and deploy federal authorities to children’s homes nationwide.”
They’re taking the children away from safety and putting them into government facilities. According to Carol Marbin Miller, Ana Ceballos, and Syra Ortiz Blanes at the Miami Herald on June 11, teen migrants are being removed from foster care across the state. (Aaron Parnas at the Parnas Perspective is reporting that Florida is actively turning the young people over to ICE.) A Florida State Senator, Ileana Garcia, co-founded Latinas for Trump, and was a staunch supporter of Trump who has changed her views on his policies. She told the Herald: “Somehow they are collecting these records because they are going to their houses…What really bothers me is that these are victims of human trafficking. You would think they would have more protections.”
Normally, well checks are undertaken by child welfare experts, whose job it is to ensure the safety of children who are in foster care or in the home of relatives (who are usually their legal immigration sponsors). These children have gone through a thorough vetting process; their care is being tracked by appropriate agencies in each state. It’s not a perfect system—not by a long shot—but everyone involved has long understood that the children who end up in need of care, whether with foster parents or sponsors, have endured significant trauma already.
That trauma is only elevated by immigration officials, not child welfare workers, now completing these well checks. Laura Nally, the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights Children’s Program, told the Miami Herald: “It’s scaring people, and it’s unnecessary.”
The first Trump administration targeted undocumented and asylum-seeking children in new ways as well. The family separation policy was a sharp deviation from past practices with the goal of deterring families from crossing the border by separating parents from children. I wrote about that policy a few weeks ago for the Injustice Report. Wider understanding about that internal policy started exactly like this one: journalists reported about what they were seeing in their own communities, and then connected the dots until we finally saw the whole picture of the inhumane federal policy.
That’s where we are now. The website for ICE is seeding the narrative with an article published on June 5 called “DHS initiative uncovers widespread abuse, exploitation of unaccompanied kids placed with previously improperly vetted sponsors.” They’re justifying this policy by making it sound like these children are being held by “improperly vetted sponsors”—as if being in government facilities is somehow safer for children.
At The Injustice Report, we haven’t shied away from calling these forced removals what they are: state-sponsored kidnapping. My colleague, Lauren Pinkston, is an expert on trafficking, and she has written extensively and well about the rhetoric of human trafficking vs. the reality of it, both for the Injustice Report and for her own Substack, The Mindful Middle. One of the things she is constantly pointing out are the moral and political discrepancies between the very people who claim to care about trafficked children and yet whose policies either open the door to more trafficking or are just blatant trafficking.
So let’s say it again: removing these children—many of them already trafficked—from safety is itself US state-sponsored kidnapping. On the levels we’re talking about, hundreds of kids, it’s US state-sponsored trafficking.
As protests against ICE rage across the country (all mostly peaceful, despite the Trump administration’s narrative that they’re “riots” for which they must call in the National Guard), we have to keep an eye on this new front in the unprecedented deportation policies. They’ve been targeting vulnerable children already, recently deporting undocumented children with intense medical needs, or separating children from their undocumented parents in horrific scenes that often go viral, or deporting citizen children with their undocumented parents without due process.
But to go to the homes of children who are in the system, remove them, and put them into government custody, as CNN and the Miami Herald (and other news sources) reported? This is a new low and, it seems, a new policy.
A few years ago, I produced a short documentary with Amy Bench, an incredible filmmaker in Austin and dear friend of mine, called “A Line Birds Cannot See,” which was distributed by The New Yorker. It’s the animated story of a young woman who crossed the border on her own. Her story is searing, and I am haunted by it still.
As I write this, I’m thinking of E. and her courage in telling about everything she endured. She arrived as a minor to the United States years ago, and the story of crossing the border on her own is profound. You should watch the short film; it’s well worth your time. But none of what she went through defines her: she had a foster family who gave her safety and helped her go to the University of Texas and she graduated with an excellent degree. She is now a DACA recipient, someone whose life and legal status remain precarious despite the many, many, many hoops she’s jumped through in order to be here in this country legally. She’s done everything right. And my heart is in my throat most days: will she be targeted at her next immigration appointment, as so many other people have?
She’s an adult now, but she’s one of so many people I’ve interviewed who came as minors, and who endured unimaginable trauma and a government with ridiculous, ever-shifting policies that keep them in limbo all these years later. The trauma goes on and on and on—and that’s under presidents of both parties in a country that uses immigration as a flashpoint for political stunts and will not actually implement the reasonable, commonsense policies we so desperately need.
These are the very children—who cannot consent to what is happening legally or morally because they are minors, who have endured so much already—that this administration is now targeting in this new, horrifying policy.
It’s one I expect we’ll hear much more about in the weeks and months to come.