Trump is using a program for unaccompanied children to separate families

This is an adapted excerpt from the Oct. 10 episode of “Connect with Jacob Soboroff.”

The government uses the term “unaccompanied minors” to refer to kids who arrive in the United States without a parent. But what do you call a child who had a parent until immigration agents took them away? Rendered unaccompanied? Separated? Kidnapped?

According to new reporting from Mother Jones, those children now make up a “huge chunk” of caseloads inside one government child welfare organization. Like one 11-year-old who was ripped away from his father and sent into a system meant for children who arrive in this country all alone.

As Mother Jones reported, Andrés and his father, Luis, came to America back in 2023 from Venezuela (the outlet used pseudonyms for the father and son to protect their privacy). This past April, the two were taken into Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody when federal agents apprehended them outside their home.

They were initially sent to a holding facility in El Paso, Texas. But one night, around midnight, as they were sitting in their cell, ICE agents entered and pulled Andrés from his father. Luis told Mother Jones that the agents said he would hear from his son soon.

But it would take days for him to learn where Andrés was, according to the report. It turns out he had been transferred to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, or the ORR, which is operated not by the Homeland Security Department but by the Department of Health and Human Services.

ORR is meant to care for unaccompanied migrant kids. As Mother Jones noted, “In the past … most unaccompanied minors in ORR custody were children who had recently crossed the US-Mexico border by themselves — not kids who arrived with a parent and had been living in the country for years. Andrés was never unaccompanied, but ICE confusingly labeled him that way. As a result, Luis learned, ORR would place him in temporary foster care with another Texas family.”

A lawyer who represented Andrés told Mother Jones that the 11-year-old felt betrayed.

“He was saying, ‘The government lied to me. I asked them to be with my dad, and they took us to a place, and we were separated.’” And Luis felt like ICE tricked him, telling Mother Jones he believed ICE had “kidnapped” his son.

Asked about claims that the administration is “kidnapping” immigrant children, DHS did not respond to MS NOW, and a spokesperson told Mother Jones that “ICE does not separate families.”

But Jen Smyers, who served as the ORR’s deputy director during the Biden administration, disagreed. She told Mother Jones that the Trump administration was “kidnapping people’s kids and keeping them in government custody.” She said she believed it was part of a “longer-term vision” to “make sure no one ever sends their kids to the U.S. again.”

Rather than stay in foster care, Andrés eventually asked an immigration judge to let him go back to Venezuela to be with his biological mother.

Andrés and Luis’ story shows that, yet again, the cruelty is the point — it always has been. And their experience isn’t unique; it’s a repeated nightmare for families across the country right now, one that is quietly becoming a supersized version of what I saw firsthand during Trump’s first term.

In the 2024 film “Separated” (based on my book of the same name), Capt. Jonathan White, a career civil servant who managed ORR’s unaccompanied children program during the first Trump administration, reflected on how the program had been taken over, he said, by Trump and his adviser Stephen Miller to carry out their immigration crackdown.

“Family separation, though, was not about unaccompanied children; it was about accompanied children — children with their family,” he explained. “And the unaccompanied program for children, which I worked in, was essentially hijacked for a purpose for which it was never intended nor authorized in law. It was a program designed to be a program for children who entered the United States without parents and it was instead used as a tool to take children from their parents.”

Now it’s happening all over again. This time not at the border, but in communities all across this country.

Allison Detzel contributed.