Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s federal agents have been accused of threatening migrant children with a dog and a stun gun to force them to give up their legal right to stay in the U.S., a court filing reviewed by the Daily Beast shows.
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) thugs have been systematically deploying threats of violence, misinformation, and fear to pressure unaccompanied kids from foreign countries into signing “voluntary return” paperwork, according to the legal motion, which was filed Tuesday.
The filing alleges a series of deeply troubling encounters.
In one case, an indigenous Guatemalan boy was allegedly told he could sign “voluntary return” paperwork or face indefinite detention, as agents “shouted, cursed, and threatened [him] with a dog and a stun gun,” according to a sworn declaration filed with the motion. They are said to have refused to let him speak with his family before he signed.
A Honduran girl injured in a van crash was allegedly denied medical care while still bleeding, screamed at by agents, and given a stark choice—that she agree to immediate removal to Honduras, where she had no parent to care for her, or wait in detention until her 18th birthday and face deportation then.
A pregnant teenager was told that if she refused to sign, her undocumented parents living in the United States would be arrested.
ProBar, a legal services organization representing roughly 200 class members, has since identified at least 13 children from Guatemala, Honduras, Ecuador, and Nicaragua who signed under what lawyers describe as duress, each requiring emergency intervention to prevent removal.
Central to the contempt motion is a government form called the “UAC Processing Pathway Advisal,” which lawyers say fundamentally misrepresents children’s legal rights.
The document tells children that signing “voluntary return” carries “no administrative consequence” and that they can “apply for a visa, through legal means, in the future”—claims the motion says are false.
Children who decline are warned of “prolonged” detention, the arrest and deportation of family members living in the U.S., and a permanent bar on future visa applications.
This, the suit states, is in apparent violation of a court injunction the government itself declined to appeal.
Under the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, unaccompanied children from non-contiguous countries must be transferred to the Office of Refugee Resettlement within 72 hours and given access to counsel. But the motion alleges CBP has been racing to deport them before that window closes.
The stun-gun and dog incident occurred on or around October 14, 2025—nearly a month after the injunction took effect. The boy was later transferred to an Office of Refugee Resettlement shelter only because agents couldn’t secure a deportation flight in time. Once there, he told lawyers that “he believes his prayers were answered.”
The contempt motion has been brought by Georgetown University’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection alongside the National Immigration Law Center and the National Center for Youth Law, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, before Trump appointee Timothy J. Kelly.
It comes as Noem, 54, faces mounting judicial pushback over the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) treatment of detained migrants elsewhere.
Trump appointee Eric Tostrud this week found the administration in civil contempt for transferring Fernando Gutierrez Torres from Minnesota to Texas in late January and releasing him without his belongings—ordering the government to repay the $568 cost of his flight home, according to the Star Tribune.
Days earlier, U.S. District Judge Laura Provinzino held special assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Isihara—an Army lawyer detailed to the Department of Justice—in contempt and ordered $500-per-day fines until Rigoberto Soto Jimenez’s IDs were returned. Biden appointee Provinzino lifted the order after the documents were produced and said no fines would be issued.
The confiscation of documents has become a pattern across the Minneapolis crackdown, reports Mother Jones. Maria Miller, chair of the Minnesota and Dakotas chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, estimates roughly 35 of her clients left ICE detention without their work permits, Social Security cards, and other identity documents.
“I can’t think of a client I’ve had detained that did not have their documents taken,” she said. Minneapolis attorney Graham Ojala-Barbour was more blunt: “As far as I can tell, it’s the practice of ICE to throw everybody’s documents into a black box and then lose it.”
Among those caught up in the document confiscation is a 41-year-old Honduran single mother-of-two, identified by Mother Jones only as Isabel, who was detained last month after attending what she believed was a standard immigration appointment in Bloomington, Minnesota.
Despite a federal judge ordering her release—with all her property—after she cycled through three facilities over four days, an agent at the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building returned only a portion of her belongings.
Missing from the bag were her work permit, state ID, two uncashed checks, and her daughter’s U.S. passport. The checks came back, but the identity documents have not. She told Mother Jones she is now terrified to leave home for work.
“The government not returning these documents to folks is essentially forcing them to walk around without this document that the government itself says these folks are supposed to carry with them,” Julia Decker, policy director of the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota, told the outlet.
The Daily Beast has contacted DHS for comment.
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