Elder Chavez came to the United States alone at 14. His parents had abandoned him in Honduras when he was a toddler, so he crossed the border and moved in with his older sister in Alabama. He enrolled in high school. He loved his welding and carpentry classes. He got braces and a girlfriend. He played soccer on weekends with his nieces and nephews.

The government had already granted him legal protection. Then police pulled him over for going 15 mph over the speed limit, and now he's spent six months in an immigration jail in Louisiana, fighting to not be deported.

Chavez is not a rare case. He's the new normal.

Triple the deportations

A first-of-its-kind ProPublica analysis of ICE data found that immigrant kids who came to the U.S. by themselves are now being detained and removed at about three times the rate they were during Donald Trump's first term.

It gets worse. ProPublica also looked at immigration court records and found that judges — who answer to Trump's Justice Department — are now issuing more than 10,000 deportation and "voluntary departure" orders every month for immigrant minors. That's nearly four times higher than in Trump's last term.

And here's the part that blows up the administration's whole excuse: the vast majority of the unaccompanied minors deported last year had no criminal record at all. These aren't gang members. They're kids like Chavez — students, workers, churchgoers.

They tore up the protections first

For more than two decades, both parties agreed that immigrant children who arrive alone need special care. Congress created something called Special Immigrant Juvenile Status to protect kids who can prove in family court that a parent abused, neglected, or abandoned them back home. Chavez qualified because his parents left him as a toddler.

These protections existed because everyone understood the obvious: a scared teenager who doesn't speak the language can't fight a confusing court system alone, and is an easy target for traffickers and abusers.

The Trump administration went after those protections one by one. It:

• Cut funding for the legal-aid groups that represent these children.
• Ended a Biden-era policy called "deferred action" that had shielded kids with juvenile status from deportation while they waited — often for years — to get their green cards.
• Instructed immigration judges to stop giving minors the extra time their cases used to get.

Federal courts ordered the administration to restore the legal funding and the deferred-action protections. According to ProPublica, some legal groups say they still haven't been paid what they're owed — and that federal agents recently showed up at their offices asking to see client files without a warrant. The advocates called it intimidation.

25 deportation orders in three hours

What does this look like in a courtroom? On a single morning in April, in a downtown New York immigration court, Judge Jem Sponzo ordered 25 minors deported in about three hours. Some hearings lasted only a few minutes. Some of the kids were too young to understand what was happening.

One of them was an 8-year-old girl from Ecuador seeking asylum. Her mother had already won asylum in a separate case. The judge ordered the little girl deported anyway.

When a lawyer begged for more time to gather evidence for a Guatemalan child fleeing an abusive father, the judge said, "I empathize and thank you for your efforts" — and then ordered the child deported.

This speed isn't an accident. It's the policy. Trump has also fired more than 100 immigration judges since returning to office. Some say they were pushed out for not falling in line with the administration's agenda. Judge Sponzo herself was fired soon after that day in April.

The courts keep calling it illegal

The one check on all this has been the federal courts — the judges Trump can't just fire. And they are not impressed.

The National Immigration Project tracked 263 cases of immigrants who came as unaccompanied minors. Federal judges ordered releases or bond hearings in all but 12 of them. One judge, Gary Brown, wrote that the administration can set policy but "it is forbidden from trampling our system of laws." In another ruling he put it bluntly: "The laws of human decency condemn such villainy."

When judges keep ruling against you, the honest question is whether you're on the right side. The administration's answer was to call them "activist judges" trying to thwart the president.

What it does to a kid

Chavez has now spent six months locked up in Winn Correctional Center, a facility a Homeland Security watchdog found had leaking ceilings, dirty food areas, and a guard who put a detainee in a banned choke hold. Two migrants died there earlier this year.

He's missed half a year of high school — a required English test, a history project, the assignments he needs to graduate on time. His sister paid for braces he can't get adjusted. He missed the birth of his new nephew. He took a job in the jail barber shop that paid $1 a day and cutting 80 men's hair a shift wore him out.

"I had so many plans," he said, "but now everything is ruined."

The bottom line

The Trump administration says it's protecting children from traffickers. But as one immigrant-rights lawyer put it: "If you're worried about the welfare of kids, stop rounding kids up and trying to deport them."

Protecting abandoned and abused children used to be something Republicans and Democrats agreed on. This administration threw that out, defied court orders to bring it back, and tripled the number of kids it deports — most of whom never broke a single law. That's not border security. It's cruelty aimed at the people least able to fight back.

Source

Mica Rosenberg and Jeff Ernsthausen, ProPublica, Under Trump, deportations of once-protected immigrant kids have tripled, via Ohio Capital Journal, July 9, 2026. Lead illustration by Emily Scherer for ProPublica.