Stephen Miller is leading an unprecedented and intense White House drive across a host of government departments to accelerate the removal of undocumented immigrant children from the US, using tactics that critics say are cruel and racist and, in some cases, flout federal law, the Guardian has learned.
As deputy chief of staff at the White House, focused on immigration policy, Miller is seen as the mastermind and enforcer behind Donald Trump’s hardline anti-immigration agenda.
He is directing a whole-of-government approach that has been ramping up throughout Trump’s second term and is targeting a vulnerable population of undocumented children. Many abruptly find themselves denied access to legal immigration pathways in the US, with their applications fast-tracked and then rejected before being forced out of the country.
Almost 200,000 children have been ordered removed from the US by immigration judges since Trump returned to the White House, a doubling of such court orders since January 2025, according to analysis of data from the Department of Justice’s executive office for immigration review (EOIR) conducted by the California-based advocacy Mobile Pathways and shared with the Guardian. The advocacy group has focused its numbers on children appearing in immigration court, regardless of whether they arrived in the US alone or with family, and believes the total to be an undercount.
Miller has harnessed personnel and power for his task from at least five cabinet-level government departments, as described to the Guardian by several sources briefed on various initiatives, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. The departments include Health and Human Services (HHS), which oversees the care of migrant children who are in the country without a parent or guardian; the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), where Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) are based; and the Department of Justice (DoJ), which houses the immigration courts – with the state department and the Department of Defense playing more subsidiary roles.
Miller frequently confers with subordinates, daily at times, pressing them to maximize removals of immigrant children from the US, according to a number of sources familiar with the White House plans.
“The folks that have to do the implementation are told, ‘These instructions came directly from the White House,’ or ‘These instructions came directly from Stephen Miller,’ as a way of conveying, you know, the importance of implementing them in a timely fashion and doing it in the way that they were instructed to do it,” one source said.
Sources warned of the White House pushing each department to boost efforts individually and by working together in new ways to speed up and expand the deportation of undocumented children – especially by dismantling inter-agency communication safeguards designed to protect children, and hurrying them in vast numbers, without lawyers, in front of asylum officers and immigration judges who are either inclined or are under pressure to take a hard line and get them out of the US.
All departments involved, and the White House, were sent questions and asked for comment.
The White House did not deny that Miller is orchestrating a multi-agency effort to speed up the removal of undocumented children but claimed the effort was not new.
However, the White House and some other agencies that responded framed their endeavors as an anti-trafficking initiative instead of a means to enforcement.
“The Department of Homeland Security, the US Department of Health and Human Services, and the Homeland Security Council are working to locate and rescue these children. We are ensuring these children are reunited with their parents and families in their home countries,” said White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis.
The Homeland Security Council is a body which, under Trump, now answers directly to him within the executive office of the president of the United States and is led by Miller.
But there is no certainty that deported young people end up reunited with family and safe in their home countries, as many of them left in the first place because of threats to their wellbeing, including from their own family, or in order to reunite with parents in the US.
One source said: “This administration has shown time and again that it has no plan for children other than to disrupt their lives and endanger them … they have no credibility to claim that they are acting with children’s safety as their priority.”
Claire , an immigration policy fellow at Hyphen, a nonprofit intermediary focused on racial equity, said: “A facade of trafficking is sort of a convenient, feel-good cover that has nothing to do with trafficking and everything to do with reducing the program [of federal care for undocumented children], getting rid of services, getting rid of things they don’t like, and then removing kids.” Trickler-McNulty was previously an assistant director at ICE and a senior counselor at USCIS during the Biden administration.
Another source said of the Trump administration: “They are weaponizing that narrative [trafficking] because it makes them out to be the good guys, and everything else makes it really clear that they’re not.”
Critics point out that while there are some genuine instances of exploitation within the US that were exposed during the Biden administration, including by the New York Times, the Trump administration and and other rightwing politicians and commentators are using extreme, and relatively rare, examples to justify their drastic intervention.
The sweeping inter-agency effort has also left more than 1,800 undocumented immigrant children stuck in the custody of federal health officials after often having previously experienced abuse, neglect, abandonment, trafficking or other harm in their countries of origin or on the way to the US. Sources believe many of those officials are collaborating with immigration enforcers while sharing children’s confidential files in an unparalleled and legally dubious dismantling of bureaucratic safety firewalls.
One consequence of this strand of the anti-immigration crackdown is the sharp acceleration in the DoJ’s immigration court orders to remove children from the US issued under the second Trump administration. This includes a rapid increase over this spring and summer. Removal orders rose from 7,366 a month in January 2025 to 16,200 in June, 16,750 in July and 14,744 in August, according to Mobile Pathways’ research.
Of the more than 200,000 children in total that have been ordered removed under the second Trump administration, 70% were under the age of 13. The percentage of hearings ending in a removal order also more than doubled over the 20 months.
“What is my biggest fear? A lot of it is [already] happening,” Trickler-McNulty said.
She is concerned by the administration gutting legal services and due process for children, closing down higher quality facilities, and having ICE officials take on senior roles in immigrant child welfare at HHS’s office of refugee resettlement (ORR).
“Stephen Miller is incredibly involved in the whole immigration side, he has his daily calls, he reaches down into the agencies,” she said.
Many unaccompanied children are facing the prospect of a forced return to dangerous situations in their countries of origin, particularly in Central America, including Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, or even places as unstable as Afghanistan. Many have relatives in the US whom they could live with, who are vetted by the government and are known as sponsors. But the second Trump administration has severely restricted this from happening, either through new bureaucratic methods that keep children in custody until they can be deported, or by making prospective sponsors too scared of ICE to come forward.
Adults and families embroiled in the immigration system are subject to potential detention by DHS, while unaccompanied children are supposed to be quickly transferred from that department’s agencies into the custody of ORR.
This divide is by congressional design, in recognition that children in the country alone should not rely for care on the same agency that is trying to deport them, experts said.
Yet as in other policy areas, this White House is prepared to break norms.
“The Trump administration has sacrificed every element of ORR’s child welfare mission on the altar of higher deportation numbers,” US senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, told the Guardian. “Instead of protecting kids from human trafficking or helping them reunite with family, Trump and officials at HHS and DHS are violating children’s rights [and] flouting federal law to hit quotas and satisfy their ideological crusade against immigrants. The result is significant harm and trauma to innocent children.”
ORR is responsible for providing the children with a safe place to live while ensuring they have access to legal information and thoroughly vetting their potential sponsors, usually family members, who apply for their release – serving a child welfare role that has historically been separate and apart from the nation’s immigration enforcement arm.
Yet “there was a rollback of that really important firewall, and there was a lot more information sharing” that kicked off in Trump’s second term, one source told the Guardian.
“It’s clear from who leadership is and Miller’s influence and the power dynamics of this administration that, you know, if DHS wants access to a child, they’re going to get access to a child,” another source said. “If ICE wants access to literally every single child’s identifiable information, mental health records, behavioral records, all of that, they have it. I mean, it’s not about sharing at this point. They just have access to it.”
Half a dozen experts and government staff have detailed, as one put it, “an unprecedented level of collaboration between agencies like USCIS, ORR and ICE and the immigration courts”.
Two sources described being briefed on the White House putting together a group of officials, known as “a tiger team” in government parlance, to coordinate policy around unaccompanied children, involving DHS, ORR, the DoJ and the state department.
The result is “coercive measure after coercive measure in trying to get kids to relinquish their rights”. Experts interviewed for this article describe many measures and the extent to which they required inter-agency collaboration which have not been previously reported, including:
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An influx of immigration and criminal enforcement officials joining ORR in key roles, with the likely effect of shifting the agency’s priorities further away from child welfare and toward mass deportations, given the expertise and point of view of its new leadership and their known closeness with Miller.
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ORR having ICE officers present – and sometimes waiting to detain people – at new in-person appointments that are now part of the sponsorship process, and the two agencies appearing to share information so that prospective sponsors are detained just before or shortly after a child is set to be released from federal custody, which critics believe is not a coincidence.
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ORR seemingly collaborating with USCIS to schedule and rush through asylum adjudications for the children in their custody, sometimes through unorthodox, virtual interviews, not giving the children enough time to truly prepare or consult with attorneys.
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ORR receiving feedback from the White House that its policy ideas were not sufficiently punitive and Miller forcing the agency to implement new tactics with the express purpose of increasing deportations among children and their family members.
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Immigration judges allegedly being told by supervisors to rubber-stamp some of the requests by ICE’s attorneys who are arguing to deport immigrants – including these children – in court, with the White House watching closely.
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State department officials warning some countries of origin to expect increases in deported minors.
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The Pentagon being asked by HHS to supply forensic auditors to scour for fraud among legal services organizations representing the children.
In a particularly dramatic case that a source suspects of involving inter-agency collusion, enforcement agents located and detained a small child’s parent just one day before the child was going to be released from ORR custody and reunited with the parent.
Then, the source said, USCIS quickly asked the child’s attorneys if they wanted to withdraw their client’s asylum application – given that the child no longer had a relative available to care for them.
If it was, indeed, a tactic, it was successful: that family agreed to be deported so they could finally be together and free again.
Sources said that federal rules prohibit ORR from sharing children’s welfare files with ICE and this wall had typically been effective but now was being routinely disregarded.
“They’re taking norms that no-one ever thought needed to be legislated … because there was at least a general understanding of how harmful it would be if they were undone. And this administration just doesn’t care about harm, right? The cruelty is the intent of this,” a source said.
A state department spokesperson said: “The United States expects every country to accept the return of its nationals expeditiously. The state department leads diplomatic efforts to ensure compliance with this basic responsibility.”
These practices are being implemented in tandem with other policies that are keeping children in foster homes, shelters or even secure lockups, away from family, for very long periods, where many lose hope and choose to self-deport. Hundreds of undocumented children are currently being sent to Texas, where it is easier to deport them.
Federal officials have also defunded over 20,000 unaccompanied children’s attorneys from nearly a hundred legal services organizations across the country, while approaching firms and anti-trafficking organizations with little immigration law experience but with ties to the administration or ICE to replace them.
Meanwhile, in a message shared with the Guardian, a Department of Defense (DoD) personnel manager sent out a recruiting request saying that the health department was urgently looking for lawyers to represent the children, seemingly from within DoD itself, which manages the nation’s military. The message encouraged recipients to pursue an encore career in government and continue serving their country, touting an expedited hiring process, a $10,000 signing bonus and a competitive benefits package.
The message is unusual because it indicated the involvement of the Pentagon in child welfare and immigration matters, and its apparent attempt to recruit military personnel who may have only the most rudimentary understanding of immigration law and little training in trauma-informed legal representation.
“HHS considered recruiting and detailing military lawyers for temporary augmentation of capacity but is no longer pursuing this option,” an unnamed HHS spokesperson told the Guardian in a statement.
The Department of Defense referred questions to the White House and HHS.
“The erosion of due process, the dramatic attacks on both immigration courts and legal service providers, all of these feel like they are tools that are part of this larger project of essentially deporting these children by any means necessary,” said Azadeh Erfani, director of policy at the National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC).
For some experts, Miller’s widely recognized leadership of the inter-agency effort is itself concerning because of his engagement with of white nationalist ideology. Miller’s rhetoric frequently echoes the “great replacement theory”, a racist notion that nonwhite immigrants will overrun western civilization.
For his part, Trump has said that immigrants in the US from around the world are “poisoning the blood of our country” – a line that drew comparisons to Nazism.
“There is little doubt that Stephen Miller’s influence on these anti-children policies comes with racial bias,” said Erfani.
Another source added: “There’s some real animus towards the kids coming from Miller and his acolytes. And I think that it’s also very connected to the same reason that he wants to get rid of birthright citizenship. It’s about demographics, right? And he sees the kids as, like, the future generation that will, you know, continue a multiracial, multicultural vision of this country.”
Miller’s departmental subordinates include a number of immigration enforcement veterans who have switched from ICE to immigrant child welfare in the health department, including Angie Salazar, now the acting director of ORR, John Fabbricatore, now a senior advisor at HHS, and Dawnisha Helland, the assistant principal deputy director of the unaccompanied alien children bureau at ORR.
Their roles at HHS give ICE a potential communication channel on issues involving unaccompanied children. “All these folks used to work together,” one source said.
The Trump administration repeatedly argues that its custody and enforcement policies for unaccompanied children protect them from trafficking and being taken in by relatives who pose as safe and loving while preying on or exploiting them.
“ORR is not involved in the enforcement of immigration law or in the removal process. ORR is, however, involved in an inter-agency effort to locate children that arrived at the border alone during the Biden administration, and who were then release[d] to poorly vetted sponsors. In some cases, these sponsors exploited the unaccompanied children in their care, including through trafficking,” the unnamed HHS spokesperson told the Guardian.
DHS echoed that sentiment, saying that its officials were dedicated to locating children “who came across the border unaccompanied [and] were placed with unvetted sponsors who were actually smugglers and sex traffickers”.
But critics reiterated their argument that this perspective is exaggerated to the point of being disingenuous.
At the same time, the administration has implemented changes to reporting child trafficking concerns that could make it harder for survivors to win asylum and other immigration relief, the Associated Press reported.
Meanwhile, one expert told the Guardian that they did not know how officials at ORR could ever again reassure a prospective sponsor that it was safe to apply for a child’s release, or tell a child that they were protected, with this administration’s track record.
That expert fears that families across the globe whose children are fleeing gang conscription, violence and persecution will no longer look to the US for survival. They will be too afraid of the chances of a child being swiftly detained and deported even in the typical case where the child aims to join other family members living and working in the US.
“If you’re that family and you have no option for your child to be safe except sending them to the United States, now that is off the table,” the source said. “And so what happens to those kids?”
Will Craft and Andrew Witherspoon contributed reporting and graphics
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