Fuck ICE

Six immigrant children spent as long as 505 days in federal custody as their families waited

Immigrant children now spend an average of more than six months in federal custody nationwide— triple the previous peak of the last decade — after the administration of President Donald Trump imposed stringent new requirements for their release.

During the three months CT Insider spent reporting this story this spring, more than two dozen immigrant children sat in federal custody in Connecticut — some in group homes, others in foster care. Court records show many had parents or close family ready to take them in. But the federal agency responsible for vetting those sponsors, the Office of Refugee Resettlement, has kept children in custody for months by imposing requirements no federal regulation or law demands and restarting vetting it already completed, a CT Insider investigation found. One child was held more than 500 days, most of it in a program in New Haven.

In at least six cases, all filed since December, families won their children’s release only by suing.

Federal rules require the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to transfer unaccompanied immigrant children within 72 hours to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement — a child-welfare agency, not an enforcement one, charged with care for children who arrive alone. For these six children, that part worked. They were moved within days.

What came next didn’t work as well. Families answered every demand — birth certificates, DNA tests, home studies, background checks. But the children stayed in custody as the government kept adding requirements for their parents' applications to be considered complete.

Once a parent or guardian applies for a child’s release, ORR regulations require it to decide within 10 days, absent unexpected delays.

Only when lawyers went to federal court did anything change.

Each child was released shortly after a lawsuit was filed — before the government ever had to defend the delays in court.

The federal government would not answer any questions about these cases and declined to comment for this story.

The delays these children face trace to last year, when the Trump administration overhauled how the office of Refugee Resettlement vets the parents and relatives seeking custody of these children — changes the administration says protect them from being released to unsafe sponsors.

In a sworn declaration filed in one of these cases, a top ORR official wrote that, unlike law enforcement or state child-welfare agencies, the agency has no way to monitor children once they’re released or take them back if a sponsor turns out to be unsafe. So, the federal government argues, it must “front-load” its safety checks before release. The federal government would not answer questions about the length of detention, including whether it considers the delays appropriate or if they are doing anything to shorten these children’s stays.

Here are the stories of those six children drawn from court records in lawsuits where the children’s detention was challenged as illegal. CT Insider changed the names of the children to protect their identities. Most families declined interview requests, saying through their attorneys that they fear retaliation from the federal government.

Jean, 12 years old — 505 days in custody

 
Jean was 12 when officials detained him at the U.S. border. He spent his 13th birthday in federal custody — and went on waiting.

The phone at the ORR shelter in California where he was staying would ring, but he refused to take the calls, according to records filed in a federal lawsuit challenging his detention. On the other end was his family — his father, his stepmother, his two sisters. Talking was too painful, a reminder that he could not be with them.

It was "not normal," he told his caseworkers, to be this alone. What he wanted — he said again and again — was to go home with his family in Fort Lauderdale.

By the spring, his family had answered every question the government raised, their lawsuit alleges. A corrected birth certificate. A favorable home study. Background checks that came back clean. In April, ORR released Jean’s two sisters to his stepmother — a sponsor it had already vetted and approved.

The agency kept Jean after a required DNA test showed his father was not his biological parent – a fact court records say his father didn’t know until the test came back His father said it changed nothing: the boy would always be his son. The government kept Jean detained anyway.

Average number of days the government held unaccompanied minors
National data from October 2024 to April 2026.

Then ORR asked for a record no one could obtain, according to the lawsuit. Jean's mother had died when he was three months old, and her death certificate sat in a Haitian government office the gangs now held — records the State Department itself had declared unobtainable. When his stepmother could not produce it, ORR pressed her to withdraw. She did — and ORR transferred him from California to a long-term foster care program in New Haven.

Then she applied again from the beginning. ORR ordered another home study — the first had come back favorable — and denied her by telephone, with nothing in writing, citing the birth certificate she had corrected 10 months before — the original, issued in Haiti, had listed his stepmother, the only mother he had ever known, rather than his biological mother, who died when Jean was three months old.

Two hundred days became 500.

It took a federal lawsuit to end it.

In a court filing responding to the petition for Jean's release, government attorneys gave a litany of reasons why the boy was still in custody — a translator had raised concerns about the family’s first birth certificate submission, his father’s DNA test came back with a 0 percent match and an initial home study found his father had used a belt to discipline a minor child. (Florida child protection officials declined to pursue the discipline issue, according to court filings, because it “did not meet their criteria for abuse or neglect.”)

Government attorneys also questioned Jean’s stepmother — saying they couldn’t confirm his biological mother was dead, or that the stepmother had a pre-existing relationship with him, and noted ORR policies bar sponsors who knowingly submit false information.

But just over two weeks after the government's filing, U.S. District Judge Vernon Oliver ruled for the family and ordered Jean's release.

In making that determination, Oliver called the government’s process in the case “arbitrary and capricious.”

"Every minute that someone is unlawfully denied freedom," Oliver wrote in his final order, quoting a different case "results in an injury that really can never be remedied."

Jean was finally reunited with his family after 505 days, court records show.

Benjamín, 16 years old — 143 days in custody

 
The arrests didn’t take long.

According to a federal lawsuit and a declaration filed in the case, two Buffalo police officers stopped Dennis’ car in August 2025 and collected his driver’s license. They also demanded proof that he and his passengers were in the country legally. Dennis and his brother Benjamin turned over their paperwork and their friend, a U.S. citizen, provided his passport.

They waited, terrified.

Twenty minutes passed and two cars pulled up. Officials from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security got out and approached. Dennis and Benjamin were arrested, handcuffed and transported to a nearby federal facility. Their friend was driven there in the other car.

“They said they were going to take all of us to the ICE station to fingerprint us and that if everything was clear, we could go home,” Benjamin wrote in the declaration. “I was so scared that I was shaking, and my skin felt prickly.”

For hours, he wrote, the ICE officers questioned them and told them America would pay them $2,000 to leave the country — even though the brothers explained they had Special Immigrant Juvenile Status and Deferred Action, protections from deportation. Since last year, the Trump administration has been paying immigrants to self-deport.

Then the officers told them to sign some papers, written in English. No one explained what they were, according to court documents.

"I didn’t think I had a choice to say no, so I signed," Benjamin wrote.

His brother, who had just turned 18, was put in handcuffs, and ankle chains and taken away.

“I cried and begged them to please let me go with my brother,” he wrote.

Dennis was deported home to Ecuador.

There's been a dramatic shift in the number of unaccompanied children processed by the government

The next day, Benjamin wrote he was flown to a shelter in Texas where he learned what he had signed: a form in which he agreed to leave the country on his own. Benjamin was held in Texas for two months, then moved to a shelter in Groton. He couldn’t understand why he was there. He had been through it once before.

Court records show Benjamin first came to the U.S. when he was 12 years old. He was detained then, too, and released to his dad within weeks after the government vetted him and approved him to be his sponsor.

When DHS arrested him this second time, ORR started the vetting process all over.

Weeks became months.

“I don’t understand why they have not let me go back to my papa,” he wrote. “I feel like I am never going to get out of here.”

In Groton, the days are identical, he wrote. The shelter is a house. Benjamin spends all his time in three rooms: his bedroom, the living room and dining room. Class happens at the dining table where children also eat — ages 13 to 17, one lesson for everyone. Showers are at 5 p.m. On Saturdays, nothing. He can’t go outside unless a staff member joins.

“I feel trapped,” he wrote. “I feel like a delinquent.”

Two days before Christmas, Benjamin was released from federal custody — 143 days after his arrest, and four days after lawyers filed a lawsuit over what they called an illegal detention.

With Benjamin released, his lawyers dropped the case — and the federal government never had to defend his detention, or the delay, in court.

Camila, 5 years old — 118 days in custody

 
Camila is five.

She paints. She dances. She runs. She likes being around other people. This is from court records, where her mother in a sworn declaration tried to describe who she was before the federal government detained her.

She was born in Atlixco, an agricultural city in central Mexico, and lived there for the first five years of her life, first with her parents, then after both parents left to find work in the U.S., with her grandparents. She spoke with her mother almost every day on video calls. Birthdays and Christmas gifts arrived in the mail.

In the summer of 2025, her mother told her on a video call that she was going to be a big sister. A few months later, Camila crossed the border into Arizona. How a five-year-old got from central Mexico to the border, and with whom, isn’t in the records and her mom declined to share those details during an interview. What is: her parents weren’t allowed to take her because of their immigration status, so the government labeled her ‘unaccompanied’.

She spent the next four months in federal immigration custody — first in a detention center run by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, then in a shelter in eastern Connecticut, where she was the youngest by far. And then she was moved to New Haven, the city where her mother lived. Camila's mother, who entered the country illegally, has a pending application seeking legal residency in the U.S.

At night Camila slept in a foster home. Her days were consistent: breakfast to evening was spent at an office building fitted with classrooms, where she was the only child in her class.

She got to see her mother once a week — for an hour.

A child psychiatrist who evaluated her in the final weeks of her detention wrote that she had nightmares and refused to talk about her family. The doctor wrote in that evaluation submitted to the court that Camila was processing what was happening to her through her play.

“She is having nightmares, is avoidant of discussion of her family and separation, and she manifests anxiety through her play,” Dr. Laine Taylor wrote. “Her play evaluation... clearly demonstrated that she is struggling with anxiety and fear.”

Camila is home now, released three days after lawyers filed a lawsuit challenging her detention. There is a new baby brother in the apartment.

She paints. She dances. She runs. She has a pink princess-themed room, but she sleeps with her mom.

“She doesn't like to be away from me,” her mom said during an interview. “When she's away from me, she thinks these people are going to come back for her.”

Liam, 15 years old — 255 days in custody

 
On Jan. 5, Liam’s mother received the call she’d waited eight months for. Her son Liam was finally coming home.

Minutes later, the shelter called her back. There was a mistake. She couldn’t pick Liam up yet, but they would call her back soon.

By the time U.S. District Judge Vernon Oliver heard arguments for and against Liam’s release on Jan. 15, his mother was still waiting for that follow-up call, according to the lawsuit she filed challenging his detention.

It all began in May 2025, when local police arrested Liam at 15 following a fight. Agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrived at the station after Liam’s father got there to pick him up, separated the two and took them both into custody. Liam went to an ICE office in Burlington, Massachusetts, then an ORR shelter in Texas for three months before finally landing at Noank Community Support Services, in Groton, Connecticut.

Whether, and how, ICE ever contacted Liam’s mother after his arrest is a matter of dispute.

Liam’s mother and his attorneys said in court filings that ICE called her when he was in Burlington but did not tell her she could pick him up there. She didn’t hear from him again until he was in Texas.

Meanwhile, the government made a series of seemingly contradictory statements, according to Oliver’s ruling. In one filing cited in the ruling, it said ICE couldn’t locate or contact her. In another, it said ICE asked her to pick Liam up but she didn’t show — and if she had, ICE would have also arrested her. That same filing said she was at the police station during his arrest.

In a May letter to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees ORR, U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., pointed to allegations that federal officials have used children as bait to arrest their sponsors. Officials, Wyden said, have used the threat that they will arrest and deport a sponsor to pressure a child to accept voluntary deportation.

ORR removed a Biden-era regulation last year that prevented it from sharing information about sponsors’ immigration status with ICE or disqualifying sponsors because of their immigration status.

The government’s full response to Liam's habeas petition isn’t open to the public. But in a court filing defending its decision to designate Liam as an unaccompanied minor instead of turning him over to his mother, the government said it acted appropriately.

“DHS had no choice but to declare Petitioner a UAC," the government said, using the acronym for "unaccompanied alien child," the legal term for such immigrant children.

Oliver was blistering in his assessment of the government’s claims in Liam’s case, calling them “disturbing” and saying they were “full of significant incongruities.”

Before his arrest, Liam liked to play in his neighborhood and help his mother in the kitchen. In the shelters, he grew anxious and depressed. A psychological evaluation last December recommended his release “as soon as possible so he can return to his family, which is crucial for his well-being.”

Oliver ordered ORR to release Liam in mid-January, 27 days after the lawsuit challenging his detention was filed. His mother was finally able to pick him up the following day.

Miguel, 14 years old — 167 days in custody

 
Miguel was 14 years old and wanted to be a teacher. He should have been in middle school. Instead, he was taught inside the building where he was held in New Haven — a converted office fitted with classrooms — alongside his 16-year-old brother and an 11-year-old, both in federal custody.

Not able to enroll in a neighborhood school, he had been "isolated from peers and deprived of basic opportunities for the educational and social-emotional growth that's critical to [his] development," the lawyers seeking his release wrote in the petition asking a federal judge to release him.

Miguel was born in the highlands of Guatemala, into a family too poor to keep him in school. He and his brother worked the family's field, but it was never enough. Last December they crossed the border illegally to join their father, who had left to find work in the U.S. years earlier.

Their father, in Providence, court records show, wanted only to bring his sons home. It would take more than five months. From the first week, his attorney says in court records, he told the government he wanted to sponsor them — and was told to find an English speaker to help with an application that wouldn't come for nearly four months. When an official finally called, she said his immigration status made him ineligible, that he should find someone else, that the people he lived with might doom the case. None of it was true, his attorney told him. He moved anyway, then resubmitted documents the system had lost. He took a DNA test for a relationship no one questioned, and sat for a home study that his lawyers say no rule required.

The waiting wore on Miguel. The separation from his father, he said in a sworn statement, was so "painful" that it was "hard to think about anything else." He cried often, and the stress brought headaches and fevers. He described his detention as “being stuck in a waiting room for something that never happens.” He was "desperate,” his attorney said, to feel his father's hug again.

On May 19 — four days after his lawyers sued, 167 days into his detention — the government released Miguel and his brother to their father.

Luis, 16 years old — 167 days in custody

 
Luis was 16 and wanted to be a lawyer, or maybe an architect.

But rather than spending time in school, he and his younger brother spent nearly every day inside the same New Haven building. There were occasional excursions — a park, the aquarium — but when the weather was poor or cold, they did not go outside at all. At night, they slept in the homes of foster parents — people who, when they first arrived, were strangers. They were dropped off each morning before breakfast and picked up just before dinner.

In one respect the detention fell harder on Luis: unlike Miguel, he still faced deportation. His brother's immigration case had been terminated in February, but Luis' remained open and was due in immigration court in Hartford on May 21.

The waiting hit him hardest at night.

He couldn't sleep and was prescribed sleeping pills. He called the prolonged detention a "nightmare" and said in a sworn statement that "the pain is getting worse every day." He came to fear that "the day will never come" and described his and his brother’s confinement as "waiting somewhere they don't belong."

On May 19 — two days before that hearing — records show he and his brother were released to their father.