Stephen Miller leads multi-agency push to accelerate migrant child removals

Removal orders for undocumented children doubled since January 2025

Stephen Miller, the deputy chief of staff at the White House focused on immigration policy, is leading what the Guardian described as an unprecedented and intense drive across multiple government departments to accelerate the removal of undocumented immigrant children from the United States, using tactics that critics say are cruel and racist and, in some cases, flout federal law, according to the Guardian’s investigation published Saturday.

The whole-of-government approach, which has been ramping up throughout Trump’s second term, has harnessed personnel and authority from at least five cabinet-level departments, as several sources briefed on the initiatives told the Guardian, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. Those include the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which oversees the care of migrant children in the country without a parent or guardian; the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), where Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) are based; and the Department of Justice (DoJ), which houses the immigration courts — with the State Department and the Department of Defense playing more subsidiary roles.

Miller frequently confers with subordinates, daily at times, pressing them to maximize removals of immigrant children from the US, according to a number of sources familiar with the White House plans. “The folks that have to do the implementation are told, ‘These instructions came directly from the White House,’ or ‘These instructions came directly from Stephen Miller,’ as a way of conveying, you know, the importance of implementing them in a timely fashion and doing it in the way that they were instructed to do it,” one source told the Guardian.

The White House did not deny that Miller is orchestrating a multi-agency effort to speed up the removal of undocumented children but claimed the effort was not new. The White House and some other agencies that responded framed their endeavors as an anti-trafficking initiative rather than as enforcement. “The Department of Homeland Security, the US Department of Health and Human Services, and the Homeland Security Council are working to locate and rescue these children. We are ensuring these children are reunited with their parents and families in their home countries,” White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis told the Guardian. The Homeland Security Council, under Trump, now answers directly to him within the executive office of the president of the United States and is led by Miller.

But there is no certainty that deported young people end up reunited with family and safe in their home countries, as many of them left in the first place because of threats to their wellbeing, including from their own family, or in order to reunite with parents in the US, the Guardian reported.

One source told the Guardian: “This administration has shown time and again that it has no plan for children other than to disrupt their lives and endanger them … they have no credibility to claim that they are acting with children’s safety as their priority.”

Claire Trickler-McNulty, an immigration policy fellow at Hyphen, a nonprofit intermediary focused on racial equity, said: “A facade of trafficking is sort of a convenient, feel-good cover that has nothing to do with trafficking and everything to do with reducing the program [of federal care for undocumented children], getting rid of services, getting rid of things they don’t like, and then removing kids.” Trickler-McNulty was previously an assistant director at ICE and a senior counselor at USCIS during the Biden administration.

“What is my biggest fear? A lot of it is [already] happening,” Trickler-McNulty said. She said she is concerned by the administration gutting legal services and due process for children, closing down higher-quality facilities, and having ICE officials take on senior roles in immigrant child welfare at HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). “Stephen Miller is incredibly involved in the whole immigration side, he has his daily calls, he reaches down into the agencies,” she said.

Another source told the Guardian: “They are weaponizing that narrative [trafficking] because it makes them out to be the good guys, and everything else makes it really clear that they’re not.” Critics told the Guardian that while there are some genuine instances of exploitation within the US that were exposed during the Biden administration, including by the New York Times, the Trump administration and other rightwing politicians and commentators are using extreme, and relatively rare, examples to justify their drastic intervention.

Many unaccompanied children are facing the prospect of a forced return to dangerous situations in their countries of origin, particularly in Central America, including Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, or even places as unstable as Afghanistan. Many have relatives in the US whom they could live with, who are vetted by the government and are known as sponsors. But the second Trump administration has severely restricted this from happening, either through new bureaucratic methods that keep children in custody until they can be deported, or by making prospective sponsors too scared of ICE to come forward. Yet, as in other policy areas, this White House is prepared to break norms, the Guardian reported.

The acceleration in the Justice Department’s immigration-court orders is among the operation’s most measurable effects. Removal orders rose from 7,366 a month in January 2025 to 16,200 in June, 16,750 in July and 14,744 in August, according to Mobile Pathways’ research shared with the Guardian. Of the more than 200,000 children ordered removed under the second Trump administration, 70% were under the age of 13. The percentage of hearings ending in a removal order also more than doubled over the 20 months covered. Mobile Pathways, the California-based advocacy organization that conducted the analysis, said the total is likely an undercount because it focused on children appearing in immigration court, regardless of whether they arrived alone or with family.

The sweeping inter-agency effort has left more than 1,800 undocumented immigrant children stuck in the custody of federal health officials after often having previously experienced abuse, neglect, abandonment, trafficking or other harm in their countries of origin or on the way to the US, according to sources briefed on the operations. Sources told the Guardian that many of those officials are collaborating with immigration enforcers while sharing children’s confidential files in what the sources described as an unparalleled and legally dubious dismantling of bureaucratic safety firewalls.

Adults and families embroiled in the immigration system are subject to potential detention by DHS, while unaccompanied children are supposed to be quickly transferred from that department’s agencies into the custody of ORR, a divide by congressional design, in recognition that children in the country alone should not rely for care on the same agency that is trying to deport them, experts told the Guardian. Sources said federal rules prohibit ORR from sharing children’s welfare files with ICE, and that wall had typically been effective but is now being routinely disregarded.

“There was a rollback of that really important firewall, and there was a lot more information sharing” that began in Trump’s second term, one source told the Guardian. “It’s clear from who leadership is and Miller’s influence and the power dynamics of this administration that, you know, if DHS wants access to a child, they’re going to get access to a child,” another source said. “If ICE wants access to literally every single child’s identifiable information, mental health records, behavioral records, all of that, they have it. I mean, it’s not about sharing at this point. They just have access to it.”

Half a dozen experts and government staff have detailed to the Guardian, as one put it, “an unprecedented level of collaboration between agencies like USCIS, ORR and ICE and the immigration courts.” Two sources described being briefed on the White House putting together a group of officials, known as “a tiger team” in government parlance, to coordinate policy around unaccompanied children, involving DHS, ORR, the DoJ and the State Department.

Among the measures experts interviewed by the Guardian described as part of the inter-agency effort: an influx of immigration and criminal enforcement officials joining ORR in key roles, with the likely effect of shifting the agency’s priorities further away from child welfare and toward mass deportations; ICE officers present — and sometimes waiting to detain people — at new in-person sponsorship appointments, with ORR and ICE appearing to share information so that prospective sponsors are detained just before or shortly after a child is set to be released from federal custody, which critics believe is not a coincidence; ORR appearing to collaborate with USCIS to schedule and rush through asylum adjudications for children in custody, sometimes through unorthodox, virtual interviews that did not give the children enough time to truly prepare or consult with attorneys; ORR receiving feedback from the White House that its policy ideas were not sufficiently punitive, with Miller forcing the agency to implement new tactics with the express purpose of increasing deportations among children and their family members; immigration judges allegedly being told by supervisors to rubber-stamp some of ICE’s attorneys’ requests to deport immigrants — including these children — in court, with the White House watching closely; State Department officials warning some countries of origin to expect increases in deported minors; and the Pentagon being asked by HHS to supply forensic auditors to scour for fraud among legal services organizations representing the children.

These practices are being implemented in tandem with other policies that are keeping children in foster homes, shelters or even secure lockups, away from family, for very long periods, where many lose hope and choose to self-deport, the Guardian reported. Hundreds of undocumented children are currently being sent to Texas, where it is easier to deport them.

Several of the officials who have moved from ICE into senior ORR roles include Angie Salazar, now the acting director of ORR; John Fabbricatore, now a senior advisor at HHS; and Dawnisha Helland, the assistant principal deputy director of the unaccompanied alien children’s bureau at ORR. Their roles at HHS give ICE a potential communication channel on issues involving unaccompanied children. “All these folks used to work together,” one source told the Guardian.

In one case a source suspected of involving inter-agency collusion, enforcement agents located and detained a small child’s parent one day before the child was scheduled to be released from ORR custody and reunited with the parent. USCIS then quickly asked the child’s attorneys if they wanted to withdraw their client’s asylum application — given that the child no longer had a relative available to care for them. The family agreed to be deported so they could finally be together, the source told the Guardian.

Sources warned of the White House pushing each department to boost efforts individually and by working together in new ways to dismantle inter-agency communication safeguards, hurrying children in vast numbers, without lawyers, in front of asylum officers and immigration judges who are either inclined or are under pressure to take a hard line and remove them, the Guardian reported.

One source told the Guardian: “They’re taking norms that no-one ever thought needed to be legislated … because there was at least a general understanding of how harmful it would be if they were undone. And this administration just doesn’t care about harm, right? The cruelty is the intent of this.”

Federal officials have also defunded more than 20,000 unaccompanied children’s attorneys from nearly 100 legal-services organizations across the country while approaching firms and anti-trafficking organizations with little immigration-law experience but with ties to the administration or ICE to replace them, the Guardian reported.

A Department of Defense personnel manager also sent a recruiting request seeking lawyers from within the military to represent the children, touting an expedited hiring process, a $10,000 signing bonus and a competitive benefits package. The message was unusual, the Guardian reported, because it signaled Pentagon involvement in child welfare and immigration matters, and because it appeared aimed at recruiting military personnel who may have only the most rudimentary understanding of immigration law and little training in trauma-informed legal representation. “HHS considered recruiting and detailing military lawyers for temporary augmentation of capacity but is no longer pursuing this option,” an unnamed HHS spokesperson told the Guardian. The Department of Defense referred questions to the White House and HHS.

Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, told the Guardian that “the Trump administration has sacrificed every element of ORR’s child welfare mission on the altar of higher deportation numbers.” Wyden added: “Instead of protecting kids from human trafficking or helping them reunite with family, Trump and officials at HHS and DHS are violating children’s rights [and] flouting federal law to hit quotas and satisfy their ideological crusade against immigrants. The result is significant harm and trauma to innocent children.”

Azadeh Erfani, director of policy at the National Immigrant Justice Center, told the Guardian: “The erosion of due process, the dramatic attacks on both immigration courts and legal service providers, all of these feel like they are tools that are part of this larger project of essentially deporting these children by any means necessary.”

For some experts, Miller’s widely recognized leadership of the inter-agency effort is itself concerning because of his engagement with white nationalist ideology. Miller’s rhetoric frequently echoes the “great replacement theory,” a racist notion that nonwhite immigrants will overrun Western civilization, the Guardian reported. For his part, Trump has said that immigrants in the US from around the world are “poisoning the blood of our country” — a line that drew comparisons to Nazism. “There is little doubt that Stephen Miller’s influence on these anti-children policies comes with racial bias,” Erfani said.

Another source told the Guardian: “There’s some real animus towards the kids coming from Miller and his acolytes. And I think that it’s also very connected to the same reason that he wants to get rid of birthright citizenship. It’s about demographics, right? And he sees the kids as, like, the future generation that will, you know, continue a multiracial, multicultural vision of this country.”

At the same time, the administration has implemented changes to reporting child-trafficking concerns that could make it harder for survivors to win asylum and other immigration relief, the Associated Press reported.

Defenders of the administration’s approach argue that its custody and enforcement policies for unaccompanied children protect them from trafficking and being taken in by relatives who pose as safe and loving while preying on or exploiting them. “ORR is not involved in the enforcement of immigration law or in the removal process. ORR is, however, involved in an inter-agency effort to locate children that arrived at the border alone during the Biden administration, and who were then release[d] to poorly vetted sponsors. In some cases, these sponsors exploited the unaccompanied children in their care, including through trafficking,” an unnamed HHS spokesperson told the Guardian. DHS echoed that sentiment, saying that its officials were dedicated to locating children “who came across the border unaccompanied [and] were placed with unvetted sponsors who were actually smugglers and sex traffickers.” Critics reiterated to the Guardian that this perspective is exaggerated to the point of being disingenuous.

A State Department spokesperson said: “The United States expects every country to accept the return of its nationals expeditiously. The state department leads diplomatic efforts to ensure compliance with this basic responsibility.”

Meanwhile, one expert told the Guardian that they did not know how officials at ORR could ever again reassure a prospective sponsor that it was safe to apply for a child’s release, or tell a child that they were protected, given this administration’s track record. That expert fears that families across the globe whose children are fleeing gang conscription, violence and persecution will no longer look to the US for survival. They will be too afraid of the chances of a child being swiftly detained and deported, even in the typical case where the child aims to join other family members living and working in the US.

“If you’re that family and you have no option for your child to be safe except sending them to the United States, now that is off the table,” the source said. “And so what happens to those kids?”