On a bright, chilly autumnal morning in Seattle, lawyer Janet Gwilym is taking her two young clients Manon, 10, and her brother EJ, eight, to an immigration appointment at an imposing building.
Later, at her office, the siblings place items into the backpack of a cuddly soft toy – a bunny with fluffy ears, which they are preparing for his court appearance. Manon and EJ are intent on the task at hand – placing slime in the backpack so bunny has something to play with during the long hearing, along with a plastic card, which outlines the children’s rights. The idea is to help the children understand what to expect, so their actual court appearance is less stressful. Later, Janet shows the siblings a model courtroom, with plastic figures representing the immigration judge and the government lawyer. “What’s a hearing?” Manon asks. “Good question,” says Janet, explaining that it is a chance for Manon to have her case heard in front of a judge, who can decide if she may stay in America.
Mount Rainier, the highest peak in Washington state and a symbol of the enormity of the American West, looms large on the horizon above the US citizenship and immigration building. Manon and EJ are not the children’s real names – we used pseudonyms to protect their identities in our report for Noosphere, the independent journalism platform. Both children face the threat of deportation back to Haiti, a country that is so unsafe that the US State Department advises American not to go there – citing gang violence and the threat of kidnapping.
Manon and EJ crossed the border into America by themselves. Their mother left Haiti, fleeing the siblings’ abusive father, and while crossing the notorious Darién Gap – a remote, 60-mile stretch of rainforest, swamp and mountainous terrain between south and north America – she and their older sister disappeared, and are presumed dead. Manon and EJ completed the treacherous journey to America without a parent. Having legal representation can be a matter of life and death for children like Manon and EJ, Janet told me when I interviewed her for Noosphere. Migrant children without lawyers have a less than 1 per cent chance of staying in America.
Donald Trump returned to the White House promising to carry out the largest ever mass deportation campaign – and he pledged to target violent criminals and gang members. Yet, of late, the administration has been speeding up the deportation of an entirely different and less threatening group: unaccompanied migrant children. The number of deportation orders for unaccompanied children rose from 2,000 in January 2025 to 7,300 this July, according the Vera Institute of Justice, a non-profit research group. The question is why this particular group of migrants has become a focus for the White House.
The US Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, has accused the Trump administration of violating children’s rights and flouting federal law to hit quotas and satisfy their ideological crusade against immigrants. Reporting suggests it is Stephen Miller, the deputy chief of staff at the White House known to be focused on immigration policy, who is leading this drive to accelerate the removal of undocumented immigrant children. “The cruelty is the intent of this,” one source told The Guardian. The Trump administration says it is merely clearing up the mess created by President Joe Biden, who relaxed the pandemic-era rules on children crossing the border, which led to hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied migrant children arriving in America.
In July, after a long-running dispute with the contract provider, the Trump administration cut the federal funding that pays for children like Manon and EJ to have legal representation. Janet, the siblings’ lawyer, is the legal services director for the International Rescue Committee (IRC) in Washington state. She and her colleagues are currently representing 185 unaccompanied migrant children, despite having lost their federal funding. The IRC, founded at the call of the physicist and refugee Albert Einstein, is committed to ensuring these children are represented, for as long as possible. But other groups that lost funding in July have had to stop doing this work – and the Trump administration is now saying government lawyers will represent unaccompanied migrant children. Critics say that’s a clear conflict of interest – children will be in immigration court represented by the government that wants to deport them.
There are more than 24,000 unaccompanied migrant children like Manon and EJ in America who are facing immigration proceedings. The US Congress requires the federal government to provide legal representation for these children, because they are vulnerable and they’re too young to know their rights. But it’s not an absolute legal right – Congress asks the government to represent them “to the greatest extent practicable”. That ambiguity has enabled the Trump administration to cut funding for the network of lawyers like Janet who have years of experience representing these children, give contracts to inexperienced providers, and now come up with the idea of government representation for them. When pressed, the administration says it’s committed to providing legal representation for all “eligible unaccompanied children”.
In addition to the funding cuts for legal representation, court hearings have been sped up – more than 100 children were scheduled to appear in Seattle’s immigration court in a single day recently. Across America, there are reports of unaccompanied children appearing in front of immigration judges without lawyers. It’s a chaotic situation. Many immigration courts don’t allow cameras or reporters, so the true picture is unclear. News organisations have resorted to sending court artists into these immigration courts, who draw images of small children slumped into chairs in front of a judge. Janet says she is afraid that a real humanitarian crisis is coming. “It is already happening,” she told me for Noosphere, “but we will see some horrible outcomes from this if kids do not receive the representation that they need, if we do not follow due process and the rules and laws that we have set up to protect these children.” Janet fears that children will die if they are deported back to unsafe countries.
Where is the outcry, you might ask? The Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement policies and the images of masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents carrying out raids have become so common that migrant children facing deportation is just another headline. The Republican-controlled Congress has chosen to look the other way. Democrats are asking questions but have no powers of oversight, unless they win the House of Representatives in November’s midterm elections – which they are on track to do.
Trump was elected with a mandate to carry out a mass deportation campaign, and he and his top adviser, Miller, are interpreting that to include children who crossed into the US without parents. The Department of Homeland Security is now offering children aged 14 and above $3,000 (£2,250) to self-deport. The administration claims that many children who crossed the border alone during the Biden years were placed with sponsors who were smugglers and sex traffickers, and the aim now is to reunite children with their families. Critics say this is a smokescreen, obscuring the real agenda of deporting vulnerable children as a deterrent to families who might otherwise risk sending their children to the US.
Against this complicated backdrop, Manon and EJ are hoping to be allowed to stay in America. Both children told me how much they enjoyed school, and how about their hopes for the future. Manon wants to be a fashion designer and EJ dreams of being a football player.
Their session on what to expect in immigration court at an end, the children finish packing the bunny’s backpack and put him away, eager to head back to school. The classroom is one of the few places of safety in their uncertain world.
Laura Trevelyan hosts a weekly current affairs TV programme, ‘The Exchange’, on the ‘Noosphere’ platform for independent journalists