unaccompanied

Oct. 3 (UPI) — The Trump administration will pay $2,500 to some unaccompanied migrant children ages 14 to 17 years old to self-deport from the United States to their home countries.

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Friday confirmed to Politico and The Washington Post that the agency, along with the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugees and Resettlement, are offering the “strictly voluntary” program.

It is called the “Family Assistance Reintegration,” and money will be given after an immigration judge grants their request. Those first offered will be 17-year-olds.

DHS is touting the plan as a way to help children return to their families.

“Many of these had no choice when they were dangerously smuggled into this country,” DHS posted on X. “ICE and the Office of Refugee and Resettlement at HHS are offering a strictly voluntary option to return home to their families.”

The payment will be offered to those who came to the U.S. by themself. They are in detention centers or placed with sponsor relatives or foster families.

Shelters were asked on Friday to notify the teens.

They will receive the payment in exchange for waiving their rights to pursue immigration relief as part of a law that protects victims of human trafficking and smuggling.

Under federal law, they can apply for protection, including asylum or a special visa for neglected or abandoned children. Those proceedings can take several years.

Immigration advocates and lawyers dispute calling the new program voluntary because some children may be scared into self-deporting.

An official with the American Immigration Council said U.S. authorities could threaten to arrest the person’s family with trafficking their children or threaten them with deportation once they turn 18.

“Those financial incentives have often been coercive, and they’ve often been presented as the only way for people to avoid punitive and terrorizing consequences even if they have legitimate claims to legal status in the United States,” said Nayna Gupta, policy director at the American Immigration Council advocacy group in Washington, told Politico. “Does failure to take the money and return to a place you fled mean that you will be detained once you age out of the unaccompanied minors status?”

“Safe voluntary departure requires legal counsel — not government marketing or what amounts to cash bribes for kids,” Melissa Adamson, senior attorney at the National Center for Youth Law told The Washington Post. “This administration’s actions again prove it cannot be trusted to protect children.”

The new program is being called Freaky Friday by opponents.

An ICE spokesperson told Politico that critics are trying to “instill fear and spread misinformation that drives the increased violence occurring against federal law enforcement.”

When Joe Biden was president, tens of thousands of unaccompanied children reached the United States, at times with the help of smugglers.

The Biden and Trump administrations have attempted to reduce the number of children in the custody of the HHS. The number in custody since Trump became president is lower with 2,000 minors in shelters in August.

When Trump was first president, more than 4,000 migrant children were separated from their parents after they crossed the border illegally.

District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan’s emergency order follows a legal complaint brought on behalf of 10 children.

A United States judge has blocked the administration of US President Donald Trump from deporting unaccompanied Guatemalan children for at least the next two weeks, in the government’s ongoing hardline anti-immigration push.

The order, which was issued on Sunday in response to a complaint filed by a pro-immigrant advocacy group, came as some Guatemalan children were reportedly already put onto planes at a Texas airport and huddled inside.

District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan’s emergency decree followed a petition from the National Immigration Law Center in relation to 10 children aged between 10 and 17.

After initially preventing the deportation of the group, Sooknanan, who is based in Washington, DC, widened the order to include all Guatemalan children who had reached the US without a parent or guardian.

Sooknanan also brought forward a hearing about the issue on Sunday due to reports that some of the children were in the process of being removed from the US during the country’s Labor Day holiday weekend.

“I do not want there to be any ambiguity,” the judge said on Sunday, noting that her decision applied broadly to unaccompanied Guatemalan minors.

The flurry of legal activity came days after reports in the US media that the Trump administration was preparing to start child deportations to Guatemala this weekend, following an agreement with the Central American country.

Such a move would constitute a “clear violation of the unambiguous protections that Congress has provided them as vulnerable children”, according to the National Immigration Law Center’s legal challenge.

Although the children should be under the care of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the US government was set on “illegally transferring them to Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody to put them on flights to Guatemala, where they may face abuse, neglect, persecution, or torture”, the complaint added.

On Friday, Guatemala’s Foreign Minister Carlos Martinez confirmed that his country was willing to receive hundreds of children who were in the US.

Since the start of his second presidential term in January, Trump has attempted to start deporting refugees and immigrants en masse.

His administration’s anti-immigration actions, which have included sending hundreds of people to a notorious prison in El Salvador, have been beset by legal difficulties.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the most high-profile face of the Trump administration’s crackdown and a Salvadoran man legally residing in the US state of Maryland, was mistakenly deported in March. He was severely beaten and subjected to psychological torture in prison there, his lawyers say.

Abrego Garcia now wishes to seek asylum in the US. His lawyers told a judge in recent days that he fears further persecution and torture should the Trump administration succeed in deporting him to Uganda, as it plans to do.

Nigeria’s Lost Children – The Crisis of Out-of-Sch | RSS.com

On The Crisis Room, we’re following insecurity trends across Nigeria.

According to UNICEF, Nigeria has the highest number of out-of-school children in the world, an estimated 20 million. That’s one in every ten children globally.

Many of them roam the streets of towns and major cities without guardianship or structured education. And behind those numbers are cycles of neglect, forced labour, trafficking, and recruitment into armed groups.

It’s a very quiet crisis, but one with consequences that could worsen insecurity, poverty, and instability for generations.

Today, we’ll hear from experts and advocates on how Nigeria got here and what it will take to break the cycle.

Hosts: Salma and Salim

Guests: Aliyu Dahiru, Dr Labo, Philip Dimka, Mohammed Sabo Keana,

Audio producer: Anthony Asemota

Executive producer: Ahmad Salkida

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is planning to remove nearly 700 Guatemalan children who had come to the U.S. without their parents, according to a letter sent Friday by Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, and the Central American country said it was ready to take them in.

The removals would violate the Office of Refugee Resettlement’s “child welfare mandate and this country’s long-established obligation to these children,” Wyden told Angie Salazar, acting director of the office within the Department of Health and Human Services that is responsible for migrant children who arrive in the U.S. alone.

“This move threatens to separate children from their families, lawyers, and support systems, to thrust them back into the very conditions they are seeking refuge from, and to disappear vulnerable children beyond the reach of American law and oversight,” the Democratic senator wrote, asking for the deportation plans to be terminated.

It is another step in the Trump administration’s sweeping immigration enforcement efforts, which include plans to surge officers to Chicago for an immigration crackdown, ramping up deportations and ending protections for people who have had permission to live and work in the United States.

Guatemalan Foreign Affairs Minister Carlos Martínez said Friday that the government has told the U.S. it is willing to receive hundreds of Guatemalan minors who arrived unaccompanied to the United States and are being held in U.S. facilities.

Guatemala is particularly concerned about minors who could age out of the facilities for children and be sent to adult detention centers, he said. The exact number of children to be returned remains in flux, but they are currently discussing a little over 600. He said no date has been set yet for their return.

That would be almost double what Guatemala previously agreed to. The head of the country’s immigration service said last month that the government was looking to repatriate 341 unaccompanied minors who were being held in U.S. facilities.

“The idea is to bring them back before they reach 18 years old so that they are not taken to an adult detention center,” Guatemala Immigration Institute Director Danilo Rivera said at the time. He said it would be done at Guatemala’s expense and would be a form of voluntary return.

The plan was announced by President Bernardo Arévalo, who said then that the government had a moral and legal obligation to advocate for the children. His comments came days after U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem visited Guatemala.

The White House and the Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the latest move, which was first reported by CNN.

Quoting unidentified whistleblowers, Wyden’s letter said children who do not have a parent or legal guardian as a sponsor or who don’t have an asylum case already underway “will be forcibly removed from the country.”

The idea of repatriating such a large number of children to their home country also raised concerns with activists who work with children navigating the immigration process.

“We are outraged by the Trump administration’s renewed assault on the rights of immigrant children,” said Lindsay Toczylowski, president and CEO of Immigrant Defenders Law Center. “We are not fooled by their attempt to mask these efforts as mere ‘repatriations.’ This is yet another calculated attempt to sever what little due process remains in the immigration system.”

Santana, Seitz and Gonzalez write for the Associated Press. Gonzalez reported from McAllen, Texas. AP writers Sonia Pérez D. in Guatemala City and Tim Sullivan in Minneapolis contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON, July 23 (UPI) — Thousands of unaccompanied migrant children went missing in the United States in recent years after they were released to their sponsors, the Department of Homeland Security inspector general told a congressional subcommittee Wednesday.

These children were among more than 448,000 unaccompanied migrant children transferred to the Department of Health and Human Services between 2021 and 2024, according to government figures.

Testifying before the House Subcommittee on Federal Law Enforcement, DHS Inspector General Joseph Cuffari said the government had not reliably tracked children after their release from custody, leaving them vulnerable to labor exploitation, human trafficking and other abuses.

“Our review found that DHS and ICE lacked the ability to monitor or reliably determine the location of unaccompanied children after transfer to HHS,” Cuffari said. “As a result, children have been released into situations where they are unaccounted for or placed at risk.”

According to his written testimony, some 300,000 of those unaccompanied migrant children failed to appear for their immigration court proceedings as of September. Nearly 58,000 of them were under 12.

Cuffari told lawmakers that Immigration Customs Enforcement and Department of Homeland Security lacked sufficient coordination with HHS, and said agencies released some children to sponsors with missing address information or no familial connection.

“In many cases, we found missing sponsor addresses, sponsors with no known relation to the child and some sponsors housing multiple children without adequate oversight,” he said.

Cuffari described a February 2025 enforcement initiative in which ICE reviewed approximately 50,000 sponsor addresses. Of those, only 12,347 children were located. Additionally,403 sponsors were arrested, many on charges related to immigration fraud or child endangerment.

Cuffari emphasized that the federal government lacks the personnel and resources to fix the problems with unaccompanied minor children, especially those who have been released to sponsors beyond the scope of federal monitoring.

Rep. Summer Lee, D-Pa, condemned conditions in child detention facilities. “We are detaining, warehousing and denying children basic human rights, food, clean water, attorneys, and then wondering why they disappear.”

Republicans on the panel used the testimony to fault the Biden administration for what they described as a breakdown in accountability.

“In 2021, DHS under [Alejandro] Mayorkas removed ICE vetting and handed the reins to HHS,” said Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz.

Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa., asked whether criminal charges should be considered. “What would it take to investigate Secretary Mayorkas for child endangerment? Thirty thousand missing kids isn’t enough?”

Democrats redirected criticism toward policies enacted under the Trump administration, highlighting the long-term effects of the children sent to detention centers.

“These children are shackled,” said Rep. Lateefah Simon, D-Calif. “The physical and mental health and long-term trauma will exacerbate their pre-existing conditions to the trauma of their detention by our government.”