I’ve spent decades listening to children—in border shelters, red-light districts, refugee camps, and quiet corners of the world where protection is often a whispered hope. Their voices have taught me to notice not just what laws say, but what they do. Especially when the law forgets what it means to be a child.
In the United States today, immigration policies are not just shaping borders. They are shaping childhood itself. Quietly and steadily, the architecture of enforcement has turned inward—into homes, classrooms, clinics, and shelters. Children, once protected as a special category under law, are now being drawn into systems of surveillance and detention. Some are alone; others live with a growing fear that by being with their parents, they may lose them.
Since January, new executive orders and enforcement memos have reshaped the U.S. immigration system. What emerges is a framework where children are not only overlooked, but repurposed—as tools of enforcement.
ICE now has access to personal data collected by the Office of Refugee Resettlement from its network of shelters—information that includes the names and locations of the adults who step forward to sponsor children. Those adults, often parents, siblings, or grandparents, are then fingerprinted, DNA tested and sometimes detained. For many families, the act of claiming a child now carries the risk of deportation.
As a result, sponsors are withdrawing. Children are waiting longer in shelters. Some kids, without anyone willing to come forward to care for them, are left adrift. They are no longer seen as children in need of care, but as links to unauthorized adults.
An internal ICE memo, titled the Unaccompanied Alien Children Joint Initiative Field Implementation, justified these actions as part of a strategy to prevent trafficking. But having advised the United Nations on anti-trafficking frameworks, helped rescue girls from brothels in India, and taught this very subject at New York University, I can say, this is not how we prevent trafficking. This is how we create the conditions for it.
Children who have fled danger, abuse, war, sex-trafficking, or forced labor, often arrive in the U.S. clinging to the hope of safety. When they learn that coming forward could expose their parents or relatives, many disappear into the shadows.
They drop out of school. They stop going to parks, clinics, and libraries. They stop asking for help. Cut off from services and trusted adults, they slip below the radar, into basement jobs, exploitative housing, and survival economies.
Children who are isolated, denied legal aid, and separated from family care are not protected from trafficking; they are primed for it.
Read More: The Long-Lasting Trauma of Family Detention Centers
The conditions we have created, months in shelters, the fear of claiming a sponsor, loss of school and safety, do not deter predators. They invite them. In some cases, deportation delivers children straight back into the hands of the traffickers they fled.
More than 600,000 unaccompanied children have entered the U.S. since 2019. Their stories vary. Some fled gang violence or forced labor, others came to reunite with a parent already here. But what they share is a legal system that, increasingly, treats them as a risk rather than refugees.
In recent months, family detention has resumed. Children now remain in federal custody for an average of seven months, while relatives weigh the danger of stepping forward.
In February, legal aid funding for unaccompanied minors was briefly suspended. Tens of thousands of children were left without lawyers. Even after services resumed, the disruption lingered. A missed court date, once a bureaucratic hurdle, is now enough to trigger a deportation order. Children, many of whom don’t speak English or understand the process, are left unrepresented, unseen, and unprotected.
This system doesn’t only affect those who arrive unaccompanied. It casts a shadow over millions of children already here.
Today, 18 million American children, one in four, live in households with at least one immigrant parent. Many of those parents may not have legal status, even if they’ve lived in the U.S. for decades. They raise children who recite the Pledge of Allegiance, play Little League, and win high school spelling bees. But these children now live with a double fear: that the country they call home may not protect them. That their very presence might bring harm to the people they love most.
A recent executive order sought to revoke birthright citizenship for children of undocumented or temporarily present parents. Though blocked by the courts, the signal was unmistakable: even those born here may no longer be safe.
Read More: Trump’s Attacks on Immigrants are an Attack on us All
It doesn’t have to be this way. U.S. law already contains the principles needed to protect children: due process, family unity, the best interest of the child. But those principles only matter when they are practiced in policy, in courtrooms, and in homes.
When we treat children as threats, we teach them to fear care. When we treat their families as liabilities, we unravel the very relationships that give children strength. What is lost in this system is not just safety. It is the sense of being claimed by a community, by a country, by the idea that a child’s worth is not measured by their paperwork, but by their presence.
Children are not enforcement tools. They are not risks to manage or data points to exploit. They are children. And in forgetting that, we risk losing something far greater than a policy debate. We risk losing who we are.
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