Trump administration funnels most unaccompanied children to Texas courts

ORR seeks 3,000-bed emergency facilities despite low border encounters

Federal immigration officials have redirected the overwhelming majority of unaccompanied migrant children in federal custody into Texas-based shelter networks and immigration court proceedings, with nearly all children placed in court in July and August sent there, according to analysis shared exclusively with The Guardian.

The analysis, from the immigration data insights platform bklg.org, found that almost 80% of unaccompanied children in federal custody placed in immigration court proceedings in July, and more than 90% in August, were funneled into shelter networks somewhere in Texas — a sharp increase from June, when fewer than half were in the state.

The shift amounts to 925 children in the custody of the Health and Human Services Department’s Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) who currently have open immigration court proceedings based in Texas, with 651 of those sent to the state in July and August alone, according to bklg.org’s research. There were more than 1,800 kids in ORR’s care nationally at the end of July, scattered among shelters, foster care and secure facilities across the country. More than 60% of those still detained with ongoing immigration court proceedings are now believed to be living in Texas, compared with fewer than half in June.

Unaccompanied immigrant children, who often come to the US fleeing abuse, neglect, abandonment, trafficking or other harms, regularly cross the US-Mexico border and enter ORR custody. ORR is legally tasked with their welfare, not the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency.

Experts who spoke to the Guardian fear the advent of a mass apprehension campaign — forcing immigrant children from their communities within the country’s interior to gather them in Texas to ultimately pack them onto repatriation flights, which often leave from areas along the US’s southern border.

The redirection has occurred despite Texas’s Republican-dominated government refusing to provide state licensing for ORR care providers — a policy that has not stopped the facilities from operating but has meant reduced child welfare oversight.

“Texas is very sympathetic to the Trump administration, at least the governor and the Republican legislature. And so I think the Trump administration knows that not only will there be no pushback from the state government and from the governor, but that people like Governor Greg Abbott are willing accomplices,” Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Texas) said in a phone interview.

Children placed in Texas are also navigating the immigration system with far less legal representation than those elsewhere. Nationally, only 31.7% of children in ORR custody with active immigration court proceedings have had a notice of legal representation filed, bklg.org found. In Texas cities, the rates fall further: 17.2% in Houston, 18.6% in El Paso, and 8.7% in San Antonio.

“There needs to be far more oversight and representation, for children especially. These kids deserve lawyers,” Escobar said.

Separately, ORR officials have alarmed advocates by seeking multiple contracts for “emergency influx facilities” of up to 3,000 beds each. Plans for such facilities were first reported by the Independent last month. Such facilities can only open when the agency’s operational capacity reaches 85% or higher for multiple days, but ORR’s shelter and foster care network is operating at about 27% capacity, according to the agency’s own count. Encounters with unaccompanied children at the southwestern border have been “exceptionally low over the last year and a half,” according to The Guardian.

At a recent roundtable presentation attended by roughly 120 stakeholders, ORR officials said the contracts would potentially give the administration “the capability to rapidly respond to any surges at the border of unaccompanied alien children,” according to a transcript of the meeting shared with The Guardian. Although officials did not specify a location for such emergency influx facilities, many of the stakeholders closed in on Texas while asking questions. Officials pushed for an aggressive timeline requiring a facility to become fully operational within 90 days of a contract being awarded.

“That’s fast and you’re like: ‘I don’t know if I can do that.’ I think it’s very feasible. That is the intent of where we need to be,” said Tony Canales, a branch chief at ORR’s division of acquisition requirements, according to the transcript.

“We’re looking to see whatever you got. I mean, if it’s a permanent facility, if it’s temporary buildings, if it’s a site that is blank that you plan on building on, whatever the case may be. We will definitely look at it and take [it] into consideration,” Canales told attendees.

The presentation specified that any shelter would require an 8-foot-high perimeter fence. Officials also said the chosen contractors would be responsible for providing legal services, which could present a serious conflict of interest given that attorneys tasked with representing kids would now be dependent on ORR.

Roxana Avila-Cimpeanu, deputy director at the Arizona-based Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, raised concerns about the pattern of placements.

“We’re thinking about congregating children in facilities in Texas, where there are less attorneys, where it’s one of the harshest jurisdictions, you know, in the country with regard to immigration judges and how they handle cases. And it’s close to the border, where they can just get planes,” Avila-Cimpeanu said. She warned that the facilities could become “a deportation churn out factory that has attorneys in name but not real representation.”

“Who are they planning to fill those facilities with?” Avila-Cimpeanu asked. “Our fear is huge mass internal apprehension of children.”

For critics of the second Trump administration, the emergency influx facilities raise the spectre of a worst-case scenario, with large-scale detentions for immigrant children in communities across the country, given that there is no apparent current need for the massive shelters otherwise.

“The way that a country and a government treats its children and children in their custody is a direct representation of the level of morality or immorality of that government and those individuals,” Escobar said. “And so it is shameful the way that this administration has chosen to treat children.”

The Office of Refugee Resettlement did not respond to a request for comment from The Guardian.