Judges are deporting record numbers of young children under Trump
A far cry from the “bad, hard criminals” Donald Trump said his undocumented immigrants crackdown would focus on, record-breaking numbers of deportation orders have been issued to young immigrant children under the Trump administration, The Independent can reveal.
More kids aged 11 or under — 8,317 — received a removal order from an immigration court in April than any other month in over 35 years of data collection, according to court data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC).
Since Trump’s inauguration in January, judges have ordered removals for over 53,000 immigrant minors.
Those children are predominantly elementary school age or younger. Some 15,000 children were aged under four years old, and 20,000 of them were children aged four to eleven.
Teenagers are also experiencing climbing deportations, with 17,000 seeing a court-ordered removal, although that’s lower than their all-time peak in 2020 under the first Trump administration.
Some of these children being deported are unaccompanied minors, who do not have a legal guardian in the US; though the exact number is unclear, since immigration authorities stopped recording this data years ago.
Children, including toddlers, are required to show up at immigration hearings to be questioned by a judge – and many, unsurprisingly, do not understand what is happening nor the gravity of their situation.
In one case, a source tells the Independent, a young child from Haiti had his immigration court hearing remotely in front of a screen. The child, who had a learning disability, was fidgeting and running around the room. Finally, he pointed at the judge on the screen and asked – “Who’s that?”
In other cases, children are being arrested by ICE with their families, but held in detention and deported separately.
“A six year old child was picked up [by ICE] with his father, separated from his dad, and parked in custody for four months before being deported,” a lawyer familiar with children’s immigration cases told the Independent. The child was unable to receive legal assistance, as he was deported while federal legal funding had been cut.
The deportation outcome rate for immigrant children under age 11 is higher than in any other age group, latest figures show, and has jumped significantly since Trump came into office.
What’s more, under-18s account for one in four (26 percent) of all deportations ordered in immigration court since January – despite the fact that minors make up just 11 percent of the undocumented population.
The vast majority (76 percent) of children under 11 do not have legal representation, and cases are being sped through the system, according to sources close to the courts.
“This is pumping up the deportation numbers on the back of kids – their rights to safety and due process are not respected,” the immigration lawyer told the Independent.
