But lawyers around the country who work with unaccompanied children paint a remarkably different picture. They tell me that abuse by fake sponsors is relatively rare, and that most sponsors really are who they say they are: family members. The Trump administration, by and large, isn’t saving kids—it’s separating them from loved ones and putting them in detention for months on end.
Unaccompanied minors taken into custody at the end of the Biden administration were held by the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) for about 37 days on average. Under the Trump administration, the average is about six months, and many children have been detained more than a year. “A majority of the kids in our facilities today have biological parents who want them home, and there’s no reason the government shouldn’t be releasing them,” says Jessica Richardson, an attorney whose nonprofit, The Door, works with detained kids in New York...
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