Aged three and facing a judge: Immigrant children are vulnerable and alone in Trump's America

Marion McKeone

LAST WEEK, AMERICAN news outlets broadcast an image of a three-year-old boy, identified only as Mateo, sitting alone at a giant wooden desk as he looked upwards, presumably at the judge addressing him. His expression was one of bewilderment, and no wonder.

Mateo was one of 25 unaccompanied children who appeared before an immigration judge in a Harlingen, Texas courtroom that day. He wasn’t even the youngest.

The judge was asking Mateo whether he would agree to voluntarily self-deport or whether he should issue an order authorising ICE officials to deport the three-year-old.

The same scene played out more than two dozen times that day in a courtroom in Texas as children aged between two and 13 years appeared before the same judge and were asked the same question before he perfunctorily rubber-stamped their ongoing journey of terror.

Mateo was one of the luckier ones. He, at least, had a lawyer (who appeared via Zoom for about one and a half minutes), and a caseworker, both of whom were attempting to make his case for being allowed to remain in the United States.

Because immigration violations are regarded as civil not criminal matters, there is no obligation to provide legal assistance to adults or children who find themselves in immigration court. Each of step in the asylum process generates a maze of legal documents for children and adults, whether they are seeking asylum status, challenging a deportation order or filing an appeal. All of them must be completed in English.

Angel, a 13-year-old boy who had fled violence and almost certain gang conscription in Honduras was not so lucky. He told the judge it was ‘too dangerous’ to go back. His response was to immediately rule that Angel didn’t qualify for asylum. “Would you like to request voluntary departure, or should I issue a removal order?” he asked the child, in a grim reminder of the old joke about whether you’d rather die by bullet or poison.

Angel replied he didn’t know and told the court through tears; “I have no one. I have nothing.”

The judge, whose identity was not released, issued a deportation order and gave the 13-year-old, a month to appeal. With no guardian, relatives or means to hire a lawyer, his deportation is a virtual certainty.

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Trump’s immigration policies

The Trump administration has rewritten US immigration policy, stripping those who appear before judges of the most basic legal rights and protections, firing judges they perceive as lenient and replacing them with what one despairing immigration lawyer described to me as ‘ICE agents in robes.’

“They’re following Trump’s agenda, not the law. And there’s no way of stopping it,” she says.

Immigration judges are overseen by the Department of Justice, which makes them unique in the legal sector. They can be fired at the Attorney General’s whim, or that of Stephen Miller, Trump’s White House enforcer.

According to Judge Holly D’Andrea, head of the National Association of Immigration Judges, as many as 250 veteran immigration judges have either quit or been forced out. She estimates that around 130 immigration judges have resigned rather than enforce Trump’s immigration policies, which they believe violate the law and Constitution.

In the past year alone, the Trump administration has fired more than 100 veteran immigration judges and replaced them with 153 new hires. Some of them were temporary military judges, but at least two-thirds of them have no expertise on the bench but have backgrounds in working for ICE.

Since each immigration judge deals with at least 700 cases a year, a massive backlog of cases is being swiftly dispatched by Department of Justice trained ‘deportation judges.’

Previously, immigration judges were required to have had seven to ten years’ immigration law experience, complete specialised training and a further year’s direct supervision under an experienced immigration judge. Now, new appointees to the immigration bench are simply required to be lawyers from any discipline and undergo just three weeks training.

Unabashed partisanship isn’t a disadvantage. Rather, it seems to be an advantage. Several of newly minted immigration judges defended the January 6th rioters. A despairing immigration lawyer describes them as ‘ICE agents in robes.’

Agencies like the American Civil Liberties Union find themselves in a bind. Do they challenge Trump policies all the way to the Supreme Court, only for the 6-3 conservative supermajority, which has aligned itself with Trump in most immigration related challenges before it, to permanently validate his more egregious overreaches? Or do they focus more on raising public awareness and galvanising the public?

Children caught in the crossfire

There’s plenty to be outraged about. The number of infants and children being held in ICE detention centres has increased by more than 1,000% since Trump’s return to office. The number of deaths in ICE’s adult detention centres has likewise soared. In 2024, eleven deaths were recorded in ICE facilities. In 2025 the number of deaths tripled to 33.

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So far this year a further 27 deaths have occurred. Even allowing for the accompanying surge in the numbers of migrants who are being detained to around 74,000, the mortality rate has more than doubled, according to Physicians for Human Rights.

There has been a private sector surge in the rush to build and staff accommodation centres for children aged 0-12 who either arrived unaccompanied to the US or were separated from their parents during the detention and deportation process.

Meanwhile, the Dilley Immigration Processing Centre in Texas – which was used to detain mothers and children while fathers were detained in separate male adult facilities – has become a byword for the Trump administration’s inhumanity towards migrants.

The centre, which was closed by the Biden administration in 2021, has been the target of repeated legal actions by human rights groups which claim it subjects child and parent detainees to a harrowing regime. Many of the mothers with infants are so stressed they’re unable to breastfeed.

Leeicia Welch, legal director of the Children’s Rights group, has filed multiple court documents alleging the violation of detainees’ rights at Dilley. The facility is required to provide baby formula for mothers who can’t breastfeed, but detainees claim that facility guards refuse to provide bottled water to mix the powdered formula. Welch claims that mothers who can’t afford to buy water from the commissary are forced to use foul smelling tap water, which sickens their infants. She also claims lights are kept on all night in sleeping areas, disrupting the infants and toddlers’ sleep. And in a bewildering ‘security’ precaution, comfort blankets and stuffed toys that were used to soothe infants and toddlers are taken from them at night by guards, exacerbating their distress.

Queries to Core Civic, the private company that runs the Dilley Centre along with several other detention facilities, are met with a standard response claiming they provide toddlers and babies with ‘necessary supplies’.

The indifference and inhumanity which starts in the White House trickles down through the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security and its ICE and CBP sectors. Masked ICE agents routinely behave in a brutal and reckless manner, safe in the knowledge they are unlikely to be held accountable for using excessive violence against undocumented migrants. For profit operators charged with building and running detention centres collect upwards of $770 a day per inmate but routinely cut corners and deny them clean water, decent food or medical care. Now, the same virus of unaccountability has infected the courts.

All administrations end and already, Democrats are promising a reckoning and investigations into the most egregious of the Trump administration’s transgressions, should they take control of the House and Senate following the midterms. The institutionalised inhumanity in the immigration system would be a good place to start.

Marion McKeone is an award-winning journalist, writer and documentary maker.