Thank you A. Eevie Bateman, LeftieProf, Lisa Gonzalez, PJ Schuster, Stuart Cohen, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.
Donald Trump is fighting a war against immigrants that he claims are the worst of the worst. You know, unaccompanied children who come across our borders seeking safety. Chances are you’ve heard these stories. Chances are even better that you have forgotten them or not been able to see the war through the battles. The firehose of ICE stories from the last two weeks have left my brain with a cloudy coating of malaise. When this happens, I often find narrowing the focus of ICE’s criminal activity helpful. So, I’d like to focus on unaccompanied children this week.
To hear ICE talk about unaccompanied children is to expose yourself to some of the most performatively empathic bullshit you will ever hear. This was demonstrated most recently by Border Czar Tom Homan when he recounted how he forced a child to recount her rape and how hearing it traumatized him. They are completely unwilling to accept that it is their own closed asylum policies who put these children in cartel hands, instead insisting that they are the white knights riding in to save them. The truth is that the federal government has a long history of putting unaccompanied children into shelters that always seem to be crawling with predators. And when it comes to placing them with family or sponsors, there have been some terrible reports of forced labor and sexual violencethat extend back to the Obama era in 2015. Here is the link to various reports by the Office of Inspector General over the years covering presidents from both sides. And let us not forget that the first Trump Administration’s policy of taking asylum seeking children from their parents and labeling them as “unaccompanied” that led to at least six Indigenous children dying within their facilities:
· Carlos Gregorio Hernandez Vasquez
· Wilmer Josué Ramírez Vásquez
Currently, the Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche are claiming that the Biden Administration placed nearly half a million unaccompanied children with sex and labor traffickers. All this hoopla over how the Biden Administration placed unaccompanied children is not unwarranted but is also not a new phenomenon created by the Biden Administration as the current Trump Administration would like you to think. While most unaccompanied children have been well placed with family and sponsors, administration after administration have consistently failed to properly screen all caregivers. Add to that failure the large increase in unaccompanied children seen by Trump’s shuttering of the legal asylum system that was continued erroneously by the Biden Administration, and it’s a not unreasonable to believe that there were failures that led to children being trafficked.
This consistence in failing unaccompanied children goes deeper than whomever is president at any given time and begins with the culture of the immigration enforcement agencies and how they teach and train their agents to think of unaccompanied children. As you can imagine, it’s not good. Immigration agents are trained in the academies and in the field that immigrant children are simply just small criminals; criminals like their parents. I was told in the Border Patrol academy in 1995 that migrant children are “not like our children. They grow up faster. They are just baby criminals.” They literally say this to agents and anyone who claims this is not true is lying to you.
To back up my claim, here is former Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott in June of 2018 when he was the chief of San Diego Sector during the Trump child separation policy that led to the deaths of children in custody saying that training out loud to the press:
“I would like to remind people too, what we look at as a child in the United States and say ‘oh that 14 year-old young man,’ that’s an adult in a lot of other countries, that kid’s been working for years, may or may not have been associated with the gangs. People get the picture in their head that it’s the kid who lives next door to you and it’s not. Some of these kids are hardened adults.”
It is important to note that the man who made this statement, former Chief Rodeny Scott, is now the commissioner of CBP and running the mass deportation. Publicly, these officials will shed a tear. They will vilify anyone who calls out their performative concerns about the children dying in their custody, for those lost within their own systems, for the ones their systems give to predators and labor traffickers. They will blame the last president in office and never, ever accept any responsibility themselves. And they will use their failures of the very systems they designed and controlled to continue playing politics with people’s lives and with national security.
So, let’s look at the politics under this second Trump Administration that now purports to be rescuing and saving unaccompanied children brutalized by the Biden Administration. What is the system they have created during the last eighteen months?
Wellness checks.
From the outset, the second Trump Administration and immigration officials declared that they would find all the unaccompanied children from the previous administration and conduct wellness checks because they were so worried for their safety. In May of 2025, the L.A. Times reported that ICE agents were going to homes and schools. Advocates, parents and sponsors believed these checks were not about children’s safety but a guise to find people to deport because the agents were dressed for drug or terrorist raids and not child wellness checks. Some of those checks did in fact lead to deportations.
A year later in April of 2026, Russell Payne of Salon reported that ICE was looking to hire cops to do their wellness checks for them. Local sheriffs were encouraged to use 287(g) ICE program authorities meant to locate the worst of the worst to identify where unaccompanied children were living and to identify what schools they were attending. This information was then passed onto ICE. According to Payne, “Local officers are given ‘prioritized case lists’ that lay out likely targets for deportation and are tasked with ensuring the ‘smooth facilitation of transfers when ICE determines that [an unaccompanied minor], sponsor or other aliens encountered should be placed into ICE custody for the next steps in their case.’” Note that none of those statements address the wellbeing of the child.
Two months later, Andrew Thrasher discovered and wrote about how ICE is hiding the contracts and payment schedules for local bounties on unaccompanied children deep within layers of 287(g) contracts. The program is called UAC (Unaccompanied Alien Child) Safety Verification Initiatives and in Thrasher’s words offers a “bounty-style rewards package.” Confirm a child’s address, and a deputy can collect a cool $500. Visit the house to conduct an inspection and an officer can collect another $2,000 once a report to ICE is filled out. For $15,000, your local cops are required to “verify the child’s safety and living conditions and ensure no signs of abuse, abandonment, neglect” exist. More taxpayer money is paid if they verify their schools, addresses and submit another report to ICE, for a total bounty of $22,500 per unaccompanied immigrant child.
That is the bounty system that your local police and sheriffs can claim for spying on unaccompanied children.
So, what happens to these children if they are taken by ICE for failing wellness checks? Is ICE providing these children with medical and psychological care and a safe place to live? We do not know. While ICE has claimed they have rescued children from horrible situations and can point to a handful of cases, the percentage of those cases is minuscule compared to the number of children they are deporting every month; a whopping 10,000 children a month according to a recent ProPublica report. Some of these children are not unaccompanied, some are but the numbers are not publicly available. 10,000 child deportations a month is triple the number of past administrations, even during Trump’s first go around. So, it seems the majority of these unaccompanied children are likely ending up held in ICE detention and then deported back to the countries they fled. Back into the arms of cartels and traffickers. Way to go, ICE.
Closing unaccompanied child shelters and denying legal counsel.
While the administration is breaking records detaining unaccompanied children through wellness checks, it has been closing shelters across the country. This last May, New York Focus reported that the federal government was ending its contracts with legal counsel for unaccompanied children and shipping them to facilities in Texas. Advocates and attorneys believe this is being done because the Texas courts are notoriously willing to support any immigration policy laws the Trump Administration desires. The administration claims this is simply because the number of unaccompanied children entering the country has dropped, but that statement fails to address the 10,000 children a month being deported by ICE in ProPublica’s reporting. The Trump administration is now saying those unaccompanied children who entered under Biden were not properly vetted, are being abused or have now become criminals. What this suggests is that the administration and ICE are deporting children without any legal representation.
This month the Texas Tribune’s Lomi Kriel reported that fifty shelters for unaccompanied children have been closed across the entire country, but hiring for shelter workers in Texas is on the rise. More kids in immigration detention in Texas must mean more legal counsel being hired, right? According to Kriel, a firm that normally handles criminal defense for indigent citizens is being told they will now provide legal counsel for the unaccompanied children in immigration court; something the firm has no experience in, cannot take on and says is not even legal. In other words, the Trump administration has not renewed the contracts for the firms experienced in representing unaccompanied children in immigration court and chosen a firm that cannot do the job. For a clear and concise report on this, I recommend John Carlos Frey’s podcast The Raid: Texas asked to defend migrant kids – It has no authority to do it.
The pattern is clear, use wellness checks tied to bounties as a pretext to locate and give data to ICE. Shut down the system designed by Congress to protect and provide legal counsel to unaccompanied children and then open shelters in court friendly Texas. Move the children to Texas and provide them inadequate or zero legal counsel. Create a deportation site specifically for families and children in Louisiana and then send them back to the countries and cartels they fled.
Then hold a press conference and claim you found the abused Biden kids and returned them to their families with no evidence or follow-through.
The old system which was inadequate and full of problems has been destroyed and this new one has been stood up in less than two years. It does not provide unaccompanied children with safety but instead is being used to quietly deport many of them back to the cartels and traffickers. So, the next time Homan and others claim to be rescuing unaccompanied children from sex traffickers, the next time he gives the media a sob story of how he forces sexual abused children to recount their assaults, ask them for the proof. Ask them what is happening to the unaccompanied children, to the 10,000 kids a month being deported.
Better yet, ask Homan why ICE refused to let asylum seeker Wendy Hernandez Reyes take her two-year-old American citizen son with her when she was deported and instead handed him over to an uncle, Samuel Maldonado Erazo, who then burned, sexually assaulted and stomped him to death. Ask Homan why they then gave the excuse of, “well he didn’t have a criminal record.” Ask why ICE is claiming the uncle was not properly vetted by the Biden administration when he entered the country but they still gave him custody of an American child. Point out that ICE under this administration is the one who failed to properly vet placing Orlin Hernandez Reyes and that is why he was tortured and is dead. When Homan responds with his bullshit excuse of how his agents are not responsible, remember what the Commission of CBP Rodney Scott thinks of immigrant children:
“I would like to remind people too, what we look at as a child in the United States and say ‘oh that 14 year-old young man,’ that’s an adult in a lot of other countries, that kid’s been working for years, may or may not have been associated with the gangs. People get the picture in their head that it’s the kid who lives next door to you and it’s not. Some of these kids are hardened adults.”
That is the truest answer you will ever get out of these people.
