The Trump Administration Is Reducing Legal Pathways for Immigrant Kids to Stay In the US

The Trump administration is narrowing the options for undocumented children to stay in the United States — putting up procedural hurdles that make it increasingly difficult for them to get either residency or asylum.

In recent months, the Trump administration has issued administrative rulings preventing immigration courts, which are part of the executive branch, from delaying cases if children are waiting on in-process visas, and reassessing whether all children who came to the United States by themselves can be classified as unaccompanied minors.

While those moves have been public, immigration courts are now invoking these rulings particularly broadly as reasons for quick deportations. Lawyers for some of these children argue the application by the courts has been overly broad and essentially steamrolls over the children’s legal rights.

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The efforts in the aggregate seem poised to erode a long-held principle of the immigration system — that children are uniquely vulnerable and as such are entitled special rights and procedural safeguards.

The Department of Justice’s Board of Immigration Appeals, an internal body that reviews cases from the nation’s immigration courts, has prevented judges from pausing deportation cases while children pursue Special Immigrant Juvenile Status visas — which are given to children who have suffered abuse or neglect. The board argued that the multi-year State Department backlog in issuing those visas makes waiting unfeasible.

And broadly speaking, some immigration judges are beginning to reassess whether children immigrants who entered the country by themselves can be classified as unaccompanied minors if they were later reunited with their parents in the United States. Changing that would block them from a number of benefits, including the ability to have their asylum cases heard by staff at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services who are better trained to interview children. That alone could affect the adjudication of thousands of children’s asylum claims.

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Already, those rulings are affecting deportation cases working their way through the courts. At the Executive Office for Immigration Review courthouse in Annandale, Virginia, last week, a judge employed those jurisprudential limits in a number of cases. Judge Paul McCloskey, who held master calendar hearings in nearly 50 cases Wednesday and Thursday of last week, cited these recent legal changes as rationales not to issue continuances and in some cases used them to preliminarily deny asylum claims.

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The restrictions imposed so far affect a large swath of children. Adults have a series of paths to obtaining legal status — including marrying a U.S. citizen or permanent resident or finding an employer that will sponsor them — that children do not.

The Special Immigrant Juvenile Status Visa is available to unauthorized immigrant children who have a protective order from a state probate court affirming that they have been abused, abandoned or neglected by their parents. Lawyers have previously asked immigration judges to halt cases while their clients await those visas, which are capped under federal law.

The March ruling on delaying cases means that some children who were approved in 2023 for that visa may be subject to deportation, even though they could receive it from the State Department in the coming months, especially since the department has improved its pace of processing those applications. As of now, the State Department’s visa bulletin says that it is only dealing with approved visa applications dated on or before Oct. 15, 2022.

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