Since the start of 2025, the federal office responsible for housing migrant children who arrive in the U.S. without a parent has passed along more than 460,000 pieces of information to immigration enforcement — details on the children themselves, the relatives trying to claim them, and other people living in those households. That's according to an internal-records review published July 28 by Reuters, which traces more than 12,000 arrests back to those referrals. The office at the center of it, the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), sits inside the Department of Health and Human Services and exists to care for unaccompanied minors until a vetted sponsor — usually a parent or relative — can take them in.
Where the Wall Used to Stand
Until recently, that vetting process operated behind a legal wall separating it from deportation enforcement. A federal law dating to 2008 required that unaccompanied children be moved into the least restrictive setting available and released to a vetted sponsor as soon as doing so was safe, no matter that sponsor's own immigration status — meaning a relative could step forward without handing ICE a reason to come looking for them.
Investigative work from the Texas Tribune, published a week earlier, found that the current administration eliminated the specific provision blocking ORR from passing sponsor information to ICE, alongside a broader tightening of who counts as an acceptable caregiver. Some advocates interviewed for that reporting describe the shift bluntly: the children in shelters have effectively become the lure that draws relatives out of hiding.
Slower Releases, Heavier Requirements
Sponsors now have to clear a longer list of hurdles: fingerprints from every adult in the home, a shrunken set of documents accepted as valid ID, and DNA testing to prove a biological tie to the child. The practical effect has been a dramatic slowdown in reunifications. ORR's own figures, cited by Reuters, show that a typical stay in custody during fiscal year 2024 ran about a month — close to 30 days — a number that grew to nearly 194 days by this past June. Tribune reporting adds a separate data point on the same trend: an average shelter stay of 117 days across fiscal year 2025, which it describes as double the figure from Trump's first term and triple what it was a decade ago.
ORR has pushed back on the idea that any of this amounts to enforcement, telling Reuters it has no involvement in apprehending children and directing arrest-related questions to the Department of Homeland Security. DHS, in turn, told Reuters that the leads exist to locate children who ended up with sponsors who were never adequately screened — including, the department says, some with criminal backgrounds. Tribune reporting adds specifics to that defense: DHS pointed the outlet to upward of a dozen instances involving sponsors with existing criminal records, spanning offenses from fraud to homicide to child pornography possession.
A Former Regulator Calls It Something Else
Not everyone buys that framing. Jen Smyers, who spent part of the Biden administration as an ORR deputy director, told Reuters that whatever protections once kept sponsor data walled off from ICE have been dismantled entirely. In her assessment, officials are "weaponizing a child welfare program for the purposes of more deportations." Attorneys representing affected families describe a recurring pattern: relatives get picked up not long after picking up a child. Alexa Sendukas, a managing attorney at the Galveston-Houston Immigrant Representation Project, told Reuters that sponsor arrests keep happening alongside the arrests of the people around them. In separate remarks to the Tribune, she rejected the government's stated rationale outright: "I do not believe for one second that this is about protecting children."
Six Months of Paperwork, Then Days of Freedom
Reuters' reporting follows individual cases that illustrate the pattern. A 24-year-old house cleaner identified only as Aurora spent roughly half a year assembling records — including a DNA sample — to win the release of her 6-year-old daughter, who had arrived at the border alone and spent months inside a shelter. The day before their reunion in late March, immigration agents came to Aurora's home asking about the girl and told her to check in at an ICE office the following week. When she showed up as instructed, agents detained both mother and daughter and sent them to a family detention facility in Dilley, Texas. DHS later confirmed the detention to Reuters, saying Aurora had acknowledged entering the country with the help of smugglers. Aurora, for her part, says she has no criminal history and came to the U.S. simply to work. Released after three weeks, she's now fitted with an ankle monitor, has lost the Mississippi apartment she was renting, and is bracing for the possibility of deportation.
Resolved Cases, Renewed Arrests
Other sponsors have been picked up well after their shelter cases wrapped up entirely. A Guatemalan mother named Marleny turned over tax filings and fingerprints to secure the release of her teenage son, Victor, following four months in ORR custody — he came out the night before turning 18. Two months afterward, agents arrested Marleny and her partner at gunpoint as the couple headed out to work; DHS told Reuters the operation stemmed from a criminal search warrant connected to the partner, though the department identified him to reporters only as her roommate. Victor, now facing his own deportation order after missing a court date amid the disruption that followed his mother's arrest, has been left to look after his 6-year-old brother alone. He says his focus now is simply on moving forward, one step at a time.
Beyond the Shelter System
This sponsor-data pipeline represents one strand of a much larger enforcement buildup — though the scale of that buildup has shifted considerably over time. Government figures reported early in the administration's tenure by ABC News showed more than 32,000 arrests in the first 50 days after Trump's second inauguration. That snapshot, however, is now well over a year old. A Department of Homeland Security document obtained by CBS News put the more current tally at roughly 393,000 arrests between late January 2025 and the end of January 2026, and reporting from NBC New York describes ICE hitting a pace of 10,000 arrests in a single five-day stretch this past June.
Whether ORR keeps feeding sponsor information to ICE remains an open question, and one that advocacy groups are actively pressing the administration to reverse. For families like Aurora's and Marleny's, the answer will decide something basic: whether getting a child back from federal custody can happen without also risking a trip to detention.
