Stories from the Frontlines: The Details Behind our Government’s Attempt at Child Snatching
By HIAS PA Executive Director, Cathryn Miller-Wilson
Published September 28, 2025
On Labor Day weekend, one of our staff attorneys representing Guatemalan kids got a 1 am text that woke her up: ICE would be arriving in a couple of hours to deport children at ORR shelters around the country. Text messages across a national network of youth attorneys were swirling.
After midnight on Sunday during Labor Day weekend, ICE arrived at federal shelters in two states demanding that the shelters wake up Guatemalan kids who were in the midst of legal immigration proceedings, and tell them to pack their bags because they were being deported. While this occurred in two states, the lawyers uncovered a list of kids from all over the country that ICE intended to pick up and deport. Three children at the shelter that HIAS PA works with were on ICE’s list of Guatemalan kids slated for removal (and their hearings disappeared from the court docket).
The children are detained at a shelter that HIAS PA attorneys have worked closely with for the last fifteen years. We go to the shelter every week to provide linguistically, culturally and age-appropriate legal information about legal rights and obligations in the United States to newly arriving children. We also meet with each new arrival individually to determine whether they are eligible for immigration relief, which almost all are. Our clients and other children on the list came to the US seeking protection and safety, and are entitled to their day in court.
Thankfully, the National Immigration Law Center (NILC) was able to file for emergency relief, which was granted. Sadly, due to the current lawlessness of our federal government, it took several hours, in the middle of the night, to get the federal contractors who were responsible for moving those kids who had been woken up, shackled and placed onto buses to be driven to the airport to stand down and return them to the shelters. While the wrangling was occurring, some children remained shackled, for nine hours, on the tarmac.
The William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection and Reauthorization Act (TVPRA) – passed by Congress in 2008 and re-authorized several times since – was passed to prevent this very thing. It mandates hearings, it requires due process, just like our Constitution does.
And the horror goes on. This past weekend, our attorneys prepared for another legal standoff – this time with Honduran children. Wise to the fact that the perpetrators of this lawlessness could no longer count on lack of scrutiny as lawyers across the country have mobilized and stand ready, no kids were woken up this weekend, and none were shackled and transported. But the threat from the highest levels remains as statements continue to be made that Honduran children will be deported. There is no mention in those statements of hearings, due process or any reference to the federal anti-trafficking law that is supposed to protect them.
This is where our country finds itself: government officials at the highest levels, commanding federal law enforcement to violate federal law and wake children up in the middle of the night, haul them from their beds, shackle them, drive them to an airport, creating the need for lawyers to file lawsuits in the middle of the night, and compelling Judges to order them to stop – and they refuse to do so for several hours until they reluctantly relent. The price of this one night of lawlessness? A 14 year old child who ran away in terror and remains missing; teenagers torn away from foster homes and schools where they had found safety; traumatized children across the country with no notion who or what they can trust, and who might be sent back into danger because they now live in a country whose leadership and democracy has crumbled and no longer can be counted on as bulwarks against danger for children.
