Heather Yountz, senior immigration attorney with the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute, spent 13 years shepherding children and families through immigration court.
She was mostly successful in helping them stay in the country, she said, adding that she stopped representing individual clients in 2021.
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What she’s seeing now — the targeting and deportation of the youngest immigrants and those with statuses once considered among the most protected — is unprecedented.
“Honestly, the deportation of children — particularly unaccompanied children — is a very new phenomenon,” said the lawyer, who now spends much of her time drafting legislation, lobbying for pro-immigrant policies and testifying in support of state bills.
Yountz also trains and advises state and federal legislators, as well as the offices of the Massachusetts governor and attorney general.
It’s not any one element of child immigration that is being targeted: what’s happening instead, she said, is a full-scale assault on every conceivable right.
I spoke with Yountz recently as part of my reporting on how the Trump administration’s latest enforcement wave is affecting students, families and schools. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Which Trump immigration initiatives impact kids most at this moment?
It’s really a constellation of policies attacking children right now, and it’s all part of this really well coordinated effort to strip immigrant children of their status so that they’re going to be easier to deport.
So, one of the biggest ones is the funding cut to legal service organizations. By statute, unaccompanied immigrant children who are under 18 and are in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement — or who were recently released from ORR custody — the Trump administration, like every presidency and executive branch, is required to provide funding for their legal representation. And they have not done so since December of 2025.
Their biggest contract was with the Acacia Center for Justice. In late 2025, the Trump administration said, ‘We will give you this funding if you provide us with certain information about the children’ — and that information was confidential and protected. It was identifying information, so of course, the attorney said, ‘No, that’s a violation of attorney-client privilege.’ And of course, there’s a huge amount of fear that the Trump administration would essentially datamine this to make determinations about who they could deport most easily.
A lawsuit was filed, and essentially it all came to a head on July 31, 2026, when the contracts were set to be renewed and the Trump administration let the contracts lapse. The result was that about $65 million was lost: More than 24,000 children lost funding for their representation.
That coincided with a number of other attacks on children.
Like what?
One of the biggest is the attack on Special Immigrant Juvenile (SIJ) status. The Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, a federal statute, governs the treatment of Special Immigrant Juvenile status. Since abused, abandoned and neglected children are considered a vulnerable population, these children have been given special protections under the TVPRA.
Additionally, the Biden administration created Deferred Action for SIJs, a four-year protection from deportation that allowed work authorization. There were also procedural protections in immigration court. Children with SIJ status who were waiting for their green card would have their deportation case in immigration court “administratively closed” or placed on the status docket so that they would not have to keep coming into court while they waited to be eligible to apply for a green card.
Prior to 2015, obtaining a green card from an SIJ status was a relatively fast process: Children could get one shortly after their SIJ status was approved. The whole process would take about a year.
Now, it can be three to six years, and that’s because of the backlog. Essentially, each applicant for a green card has a “priority date” to adjust to green card status based on the kind of status you are eligible for and the country that you’re from. If your priority date has not come up yet, then you are waiting in a backlog.
And starting in about 2015, when there were a number of unaccompanied children who came over the border, a backlog formed. Unfortunately, Congress hasn’t created an exception for these children from the typical visa process to take them out of that backlog.
And, children used to be in ORR (Office of Refugee Resettlement) custody for around 35 days. Now it’s gone up to 200-plus days.
But aggressive enforcement isn’t the government’s only tactic in pushing kids out of the country, right?
Immigration courts are changing critical hearing dates without properly notifying people.
It’s not uncommon at all for immigrants to check their online account to find out that suddenly they have a hearing today. They may have never received notice but suddenly they have to drop everything and go to court — and if they don’t, they’re going to get an in absentia deportation order, which means they’re going to be ordered deported.
So these changes have come at a time when kids are particularly vulnerable.
That’s not a coincidence. Who’s gonna challenge this? All of the (lawyers) who just got fired, right?
How do the changes to SIJ materially impact kids?
Suddenly these children are having to go in what we call a rocket docket, which is when they go in front of a judge every three weeks in large groups of children — we call it “cattle” in courts — and it’s to create this artificial rush which results in children feeling pressured to give up their status and self-deport.
Is that the only way the government is pressuring school-aged kids to leave the country?
Similarly, in the Office of Refugee Resettlement facilities themselves, we are hearing stories of children being pressured by the staff — even offered money to leave the country.
And the paperwork for various immigration claims is extremely complex, right? Not something that can be easily done without a lawyer?
Right, and that’s another piece of the constellation of attacks. The overcomplication, the slow walking of each step of the process of guardianship — and the added costs. All of it is to make it as difficult as possible to allow any immigrant to get status in the United States. It’s part of this large deportation effort, to deport as many people as possible, and convince as many people to self-deport.
That is the absolute fingerprint of the Trump administration’s immigration policy.
Tell me more about these packed immigration hearings, the ones attorneys call “cattle.”
We are hearing heartbreaking stories about some of these hearings down in Texas that have 80 children in them, and the judge will say something like, ‘Raise your hand if you want voluntary departure.’ There’s kids on the floor with crayons. There’s a 3-year-old playing with a microphone. We just heard about a 1-year-old who was told by a judge, ‘You have three weeks to file your asylum application, or else we’re going to have to order you deported.’ That baby had no effective legal representation.
Has there been any legal group that has taken the place of those that used to represent these kids?
The Trump administration has hired these ‘legal service’ groups. They’re not advocating for the kids to stay, certainly. In one case, an attorney who had been paid to represent these children stood in the courtroom, watched the whole thing, didn’t intervene, didn’t say a word. The 1-year-old I just mentioned was told to go. It’s a kangaroo court at the highest level.
What could bring about change for these children?
The way to stop the Trump administration’s executive orders, declarations, administrative actions, is by statute. Congress has the power to override an executive order or policy memo by passing a statute.
Could Congress, right now, prevent the deportation of Haitians? Yes, they could.
They could prevent the deportation of SIJs by statute. They could make all of these children green card holders.
The problem is you need to have not just a majority in Congress in order to pass this in both the House and the Senate: Trump’s going to veto it. So, you’ve got to be able to override that veto (which requires a two-thirds majority in both houses).
If there was some check or balance that could be put into place by the House or the Senate or both, the Trump administration would not be able to steamroll immigrants in this unfettered fashion.
A lot of this work has to be done at the state and local level. States and local cities and towns have authority to protect the people living within their confines.
Here in Massachusetts, we just passed the PROTECT Act that put in place some protections for immigrants. (The legislation, according to the state’s website, “strengthens public safety by ensuring residents can access schools, child care programs, medical care, and courts without fear of immigration enforcement; reinforces constitutional protections and due process rights; and restricts state and local involvement in federal immigration enforcement.” It also provides stronger protections for parents who are detained or deported, bans new 287(g) agreements — cooperation agreements between local law enforcement and ICE — “and allows civil rights claims to be made against government officials, including ICE agents.”)
How is Trump’s current stance on these issues different than in his first term?
The Trump administration is appealing all of these challenges to the Supreme Court — and winning largely. The Supreme Court is rubber stamping his attacks and abuses on immigrants, and that’s a marked difference from Trump 1.
If he went to the Supreme Court (in the past), there was actually a weighing of the constitutionality of these aspects that took place among the justices that was not as political as it appears to be now.
And there has been a big change in terms of the immigration judges hearing these cases, right?
Immigration judges are not real judges. They are part of the administrative branch of the federal government and technically are administrative judges. They are not under the judicial branch of the federal government.
Here in Boston — but really in many parts of the country — judges with experience who have been doing this work for many years are getting fired and they’re being replaced with new judges. Sometimes they’re temporary, sometimes not. Many of them have been in the military.
Most of the immigration judges we have encountered have no or very little immigration experience. They don’t fully comprehend the law that they’re actually required to apply.
It’s complex, ever-changing, and applies from the tiniest little memo that was produced this morning all the way through state law, federal law, administrative orders, executive orders, everything — international treaties.
These new judges seem to be reading scripts from the stand, and don’t appear to be using discretion as required. Basically they’re doing what they’re told or they’ll be fired.