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I was back in Immigration Court this week, this time for the hearing of a sweet little three-year-old girl, I’ll call her Estrella. She’s been in federal custody, separated from her family for more than 10 months – even though her mom lives here in NYC. The cruelty is truly mind-boggling.
Thanks to The Door, JFREJ, and her child advocate, Estrella had people speaking up for her – and I did so, too, pleading with the judge that we should not keep this little girl separated from her mom.
The judge gave Estrella 21 days to file an asylum application, but I don’t know how that’s going to work, since she doesn’t have a lawyer, she’s separated from her mom, and again, she’s three years old.
I wish I could tell you this was an isolated incident, but it is not. The Trump administration has gutted policies that were designed to give immigrant kids access to legal counsel, relief from deportation, and the ability to be reunited with their families while they apply to stay in the U.S.
As a result, children are being detained and removed at about three times the rate as during even the first Trump administration. [ [link removed] ]
Since last year, ICE and the Office of Refugee Resettlement have made it much harder to be designated as a sponsor for a child, even if you’re related. They’ve added all kinds of new bureaucratic and paperwork requirements – proof of income, identification, backup caregiving, and more. And they now require sponsors to attend ID checks where ICE agents are present. In many cases, ICE has abducted potential sponsors from these interviews, essentially using their kids as a trap.
Meanwhile, the federal government has cut funding for the lawyers who are contracted to help these kids file for asylum or other humanitarian protections – at the same time that they’ve accelerated the court docket aggressively. So removals are up, detentions are up, and the time kids are spending separated from their families is up. Average time in ORR custody has jumped from one month to six months, and some kids have been in detention for more than a year.
You don’t have to be a dad to know how devastating that is, or how long term the consequences will be. All done by our government, with our tax dollars.
We’ll keep pushing for Estrella to be reunited with her mom. As always, huge thanks to the amazing organizations supporting these kids. Please support them, and join the movement of thousands of people working to protect our neighbors from ICE, in our courts and everywhere else.
But if you were wondering about the impact of Trump’s genuinely evil immigration policies, or why we need to abolish ICE, thousands of kids needlessly separated from their families for many months is one more hideous reminder.

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