Sudden decision to stop funds triggers genuine worry

For most of this century, large numbers of unaccompanied children have been landing in the US in need of services. They are a varied group. Some are fleeing violent gangs in their home countries and are desperately in need of sanctuary. Others are seeking economic opportunity or reunification with family members in the US, neither of which is a basis for asylum. Since 2014, apprehensions of unaccompanied children at the southern border have ranged from as few as 30,557 during the pandemic in 2020 to as many as 149,093 in 2022. In recent years, about two thirds come from Central America’s troubled Northern Triangle of El Salvador, Guatemala or Honduras. Most are between 15 and 18 and male, but one quarter are age 12 or younger.

For years, a vast network of nongovernmental organisations has helped these children navigate our byzantine immigration system. This month, arbitrarily and without warning, the Trump administration cut off congressionally authorized funding to that network. On Feb. 18, the Trump administration sent a memo to the Acacia Center for Justice, a government contractor that serves roughly 26,000 children, telling them and their subcontractors to stop providing services.

“We immediately convened our leadership team and started to plan for what this would look like,” Wendy Young, the president of KIND, which provides legal services to migrant children, told me in a telephone interview. KIND gets two-thirds of its budget from Acacia. “We immediately decided we would have to furlough staff,” Young said. Three days later, the administration just as abruptly reversed course, rescinding the order. As the Trump administration, spearheaded by its extralegal Elon Musk brigade, continues its slapdash destruction of government capacity, no one knows what comes next.

The legal structure that governs US dealings with unaccompanied children is not a ticket to luxury. It requires that US officials provide food and water, medical assistance in emergencies, bathroom facilities, temperature control and ventilation and adult supervision. In practice, children with viable, credible guardians are generally released to their care. However, vetting guardians is at best a flawed exercise.

Many children end up working. States such as Arkansas have undermined child labor standards in recent years, making it easier to exploit migrant children. Some working children send remittances home to impoverished families. Others are just easy prey. A New York Times investigation in 2023 found children as young as 13 and 14 working night shifts, some in dangerous jobs. The report described children with limited language skills and insecure home environments working at full-time jobs that were “grinding them into exhaustion.”

Unaccompanied migrant children pose vexing policy problems even for those who don’t share the color-coded obsessions of the Trump administration. Kids have varied education levels, family support and capacities to cope with what is often an extremely traumatic experience. Children who reach the US require far more care, attention and safeguards than adults. What should the US do with those who don’t qualify for legal residence but fear returning to broken societies? Such questions don’t have easy answers, even for people working in good faith.

But as immigrants have become a focus of demagogy and propaganda — the president and vice president of the U.S. both promoted flagrant lies last year about Haitian immigrants eating pets — good faith is frequently absent. Many proposals seek not to help unaccompanied children so much as make them disappear. A House Republican proposed the B-Verify Act, which would prohibit the use of government funds to provide legal counsel to unaccompanied migrant children and make it harder for guardians in the US to sponsor them. The attack on legal representation is astute. Almost half of children without lawyers receive removal orders, compared to just 1 in 5 with a lawyer.

The first Trump administration relied in part on a policy of sadism to deter migration. In its most egregious act, which was described as “torture” by Physicians for Human Rights, some children were taken from migrant parents. The goal was to make transit to the US so terrifying — risking the loss of children — that migrants wouldn’t attempt it. But desperate people sometimes take desperate gambles. More than 5,000 children were separated from their parents in what was effectively a campaign of state kidnapping. (At one point during the crisis, KIND represented a four-month-old client who had been snatched from parents.) According to a 2024 report by the Department of Homeland Security, more than 1,000 families were never reunited.

The question of how the US sank to that degraded level is, of course, one that extends far beyond issues of unaccompanied children or immigration. The current Trump administration’s attack on the federal bureaucracy is unlikely to produce the kind of heart-rending spectacle that ultimately forced Trump to reverse his family-separation policy.