On an early April morning, two U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents approached Y.R. in the parking lot of her Dallas-Fort Worth area apartment as she was about to head to her construction job.
Y.R., a 37-year-old undocumented Honduran immigrant who came to the U.S. in early 2022, had spent nearly a year been filling out government forms and submitting to a background check and DNA test to get custody of her niece and nephew, who had been stuck in a federal shelter after they crossed the Texas-Mexico border in the spring of 2025.
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After two weeks in a detention center in North Texas, Y.R., was released on bond by an immigration judge and reunited with her now 11-year-old niece and 14-year-old nephew in May — over a year after they entered the shelter. Even though they have reunited, Y.R. is in deportation proceedings.
“I never thought about giving up on trying to get them. Even when I got arrested, I immediately thought about my niece and nephew,” said Y.R., who asked to be identified by her initials out of fear that the Trump administration may retaliate against her. “I told my lawyer, ‘I’m not leaving the U.S without the children.’”
Since President Donald Trump returned to office, his administration has implemented a slew of changes to the vetting process for close relatives and other guardians who volunteer to take in undocumented children, from narrowing the list of acceptable identity documents to mandating DNA tests. Crucially, it also dropped a rule that prohibited the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which cares for unaccompanied migrant kids, from sharing information about potential sponsors with ICE.
According to ICE documents, agents said they found and arrested Y.R. with help from the Office of Refugee Resettlement.
Those changes have led to prolonged stays in shelters for unaccompanied children. Some advocates say the changes allow ICE to use kids as “bait” to arrest their potential caregivers.
Under the first Trump administration, immigration officials created a public firestorm by separating children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border — parents went to detention centers while children went to shelters. In some cases, the parents were deported while their children remained in shelters for months.
More than 4,600 children were separated from their parents after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border under what the Trump administration called a zero-tolerance policy. More than half were boys under the age of 10. The Biden administration reunited nearly 70% of the children with their parents, as of April 2024, the last report a family reunification task force published before the Trump administration returned to office.
The new information-sharing practice and arrests of potential sponsors will have a chilling effect on families who may not come forward to take children for fear of being detained, said Bob Carey, the former director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement director during the Obama administration.
The Trump administration did not say how many sponsors have been detained as part of these efforts, but an NPR radio affiliate in California cited at least 100 such cases across the country as of March. In comparison, at least 170 sponsors were arrested during the first Trump administration as of late 2018.
Alexa Sendukas, a managing attorney with the Galveston-Houston Immigrant Representation Project, said the policy is separating migrant families without generating the attention that followed the border separations during Trump’s first term, because arresting potential sponsors is “much less obvious to the general public and much less likely to generate outrage, because it’s happening secretly.”
Advocates say the new policies also harm children’s mental health by keeping them in shelters for months at a time.
As of June, the Office of Refugee Resettlement had an average of just under 1,800 children in custody across the country — a drop from an average of over 5,000 kids in January 2025 when Trump returned to the White House. But they spent an average of 117 days in shelters in fiscal year 2025 — double the average during the first Trump administration and three times more than a decade ago.
There is no specific law that dictates how long immigration officials can hold a child in a shelter. But immigration lawyers representing children in custody say that the prolonged stays in shelters violate a federal law that requires that each child be “promptly placed in the least restrictive setting” that best serves them.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, defended the Trump administration’s practices of arresting some sponsors who are undocumented and have a criminal history.
In the statement, the spokesperson blamed the Biden administration for letting thousands of unaccompanied minors cross the U.S.-Mexico border and provided more than a dozen examples of ICE detaining sponsors with criminal histories that included possession of child pornography, larceny, fraud and homicide.
ICE is committed “to protect vulnerable children from sexual abuse and exploitation” through collaboration with local police departments, the spokesperson said. “The primary focus of this initiative is to conduct welfare checks on these children to ensure that they are safe and not being exploited.”
Sendukas, who is representing Y.R., said she doesn’t buy it. She said her organization’s clients, including the three women the Tribune interviewed, are law-abiding sponsors who have complied with everything the federal government has asked them to do. In the ICE documents, the agency said Y.R. has no criminal history.
“I do not believe for one second that this is about protecting children,” she said. “All of the families we’re working with are honest, God-fearing, hard-working people, just trying to make a better life for their children, and all they want is to reunite with their children.”
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families, which oversees ORR, did not respond to requests for comment from the Tribune.
Mental breakdown
F.S., a 32-year-old woman, said she left Guatemala in 2023 because of violence and because she couldn’t afford to raise three children in her home town. She joined a caravan of migrants that got her to Mexico, then crossed the border, surrendered to the Border Patrol and requested asylum.
She was allowed to stay in the U.S. while her case was pending and moved in with a childhood friend who lived outside of Dallas. A deportation order was issued after she missed a court date; F.S. said she didn’t get the letter about the court date because they moved and it wasn’t forwarded to their new address.
In October 2025, her oldest son decided to join her. After getting a ride to the Texas-Mexico border, where he crossed alone and turned himself into Border Patrol agents, he was immediately placed in a shelter.
F.S. said she talked to her 13-year-old son regularly and visited him at least once a week. She would make the four-hour drive one way to see him at the shelter.
Like Y.R., she was arrested by ICE after she began the vetting process to get custody of her son. According to court documents filed in immigration court by F.S.’s lawyer, she was arrested as part of the Trump administration’s operation to find undocumented sponsors.
“I believe I was arrested because I came forward for my son,” she said. “I feel bad because he blames himself. He says the reason I’m arrested is because of him.”
Her son has been in a shelter for over eight months as of July 20. He took her arrest hard, she said, and has been prescribed various medications to help quell his anxiety “and to help control his emotions.” He has refused to talk to anyone at times.
F.S., who also asked to be identified by her initials because she fears retaliation by the government for speaking publicly about her case, said her son was recently admitted into a psychiatric hospital because his anxiety has become debilitating.
“I fear for him here in the United States if he remains in the shelter. He is not doing well there, and he needs my support,” she said.
Both the mother and son have agreed to be deported so they can reunite sooner, said Sendukas, who is also representing them.
Sural Shah, a California-based pediatrician and chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Council on Immigrant Child and Family Health, said long stays in shelters can also cause children to mistrust their caregivers.
“There can be, especially for young kids, a lot of questions: Why didn’t you come help me? Why didn’t you come get me?” Shah said. “That’s really difficult because all of that affects how children adjust to that trauma and we know that these early experiences can have impacts on them for the rest of their lives.”
“I feel guilty,” F.S. said. “I never imagined he would be in the shelter too long because I thought I was doing everything by the rules.”
Another immigrant mother said she also was arrested after coming forward to sponsor her daughter, following the advice of a social worker who assured her nothing bad would happen.
M.R., 41, said she crossed the Texas-Mexico border illegally with one of her three children in 2021 after a crime syndicate murdered her husband, brother and pregnant cousin in El Salvador. Her two other children crossed the border in 2025 and were placed in a shelter, she said; her eldest daughter was released when she turned 18, but her 9-year-old was not.
When she gave her information to ORR, the agency asked her to come to an office for a DNA test, she said. ICE agents were waiting to arrest her. Three months later, she’s in a Louisiana detention center awaiting deportation, while her daughter has been in the Texas shelter for over seven months.
“I feel terrible, I came to the U.S. seeking refuge, but I feel like I’m in an equally, if not, worse situation than we were in El Salvador,” M.R. said, holding back tears. “I thought I was doing everything the right way, but it turned out it’s just a nightmare.”
Crossing the river alone
Y.R. said she left Honduras in April 2022 because she feared she would be a target of local gangs known to extort people.
“There was just a lot of insecurity,” she said.
She left behind her daughter with her father. She also left her niece and nephew, who she had helped her sister raise. She entered the U.S. with a tourist visa.
A year later, Y.R.’s sister and brother-in-law decided to flee Honduras too, with her niece and nephew. Y.R. said someone threatened to kill her brother-in-law and the rest of his family if he didn’t pay a “safety fee.”
They arrived in Mexico, hoping to get an appointment with U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents to request asylum. But with only so many appointments available each day, the family grew desperate after months and decided to cross the border and surrender to Border Patrol agents. Instead of being allowed to stay, they were deported back to Honduras, Y.R. said.
The family decided to try again, only to be kidnapped by suspected drug cartel members looking to ransom migrants in exchange for their freedom, Y.R.’s nephew said. The boy, who is now 14, said they escaped when the men guarding them were distracted.
The family decided the children had a better chance of getting permission to stay in the U.S. if they crossed without their parents, so they walked to the banks of the Rio Grande and the children waded across on April 25, 2025 and approached Border Patrol agents.
The next day, they were in a government shelter with dozens of other children. Meanwhile, the parents returned to Honduras.
“God’s best soldiers“
Soon after, Y.R. received the call from the Office of Refugee Resettlement, asking if she was indeed the boy and girl’s aunt and if she was willing to take responsibility for them.
She agreed, and began a process that would take nearly a year.
She allowed an inspector to go through her apartment to make sure it would be a safe environment for the children.
After the paperwork, DNA test and background check, she thought she was done.
Then officials asked her to apply for an Individual Tax Identification Number, commonly known as an ITIN, a nine-digit number the IRS provides to people who file taxes but don’t have a Social Security number, such as undocumented immigrants. The IRS told her it would take four weeks to issue her a number and in the meantime they would hold onto her passport until her application was processed.
As she waited for her ITIN, immigration officials told her the criminal background check she had done had expired and needed to be done again.
“It just felt like they wanted me to give up, like they were dragging their feet to see who would give up first, me or the kids,” she said.
The process is making it harder for families to reunite, said Becky Wolozin, senior attorney at the National Center for Youth Law.
“It is a real Kafkaesque situation where there are endless bureaucratic steps that have very little or nothing to do with the child’s safety or welfare,” Wolozin said.
In March, she received a call from an immigration official asking her to report to a local office to verify her identity. Y.R. told them the IRS still had her passport to process her ITIN. The immigration agent told her to come in anyway.
Y.R. said she didn’t go, suspecting it was a trap to detain her.
A month later, two immigration agents arrested her at her apartment. According to the arrest affidavit, the agents said they got her information from the Health and Human Services and that Y.R. had no criminal history.
The immigration judge released her from detention, in part, because she had entered the country legally.
“I like to say I’m one of God’s best soldiers, but I’ve been asking him for a break,” she said.
“It felt like a prison”
Meanwhile, her niece and nephew waited in the shelter. They saw friends leave and had to make friends with new children as they came in.
The shelter separated them by gender, so they would only see each other once a week, the nephew said. The girl embraced her brother and sometimes she cried, he said.
To pass the time, he played basketball and watched movies. She learned how to play chess. They started to learn English.
But it still felt oppressive, he said.
“It was stressful because you couldn’t do anything freely, you had to ask for permission to do anything,” he said. “It felt like a prison.”
In May, Y.R. received a call from her lawyer, Sendukas, who said the federal judge in the case ordered her niece and nephew to be released to her.
“Are you serious?” Y.R. asked, she recalled.
“Can you pick them up today?” Sendukas asked.
“Of course,” Y.R. said without hesitation.
Y.R. left work at a construction site and rushed home to shower. Meanwhile, the nephew received the news from a shelter employee.
“To be honest, I cried,” the nephew told his aunt later.
Five hours later, Y.R. arrived at the shelter.
The children’s luggage was already in the lobby. Y.R. and the children rushed to each other and hugged.
“There was a sense of relief, like we finally did it,” Y.R. said.
After taking the kids for pizza, Y.R. called her sister in Honduras to tell her the good news.
“‘I didn’t call you sooner because I didn’t want to jinx it,’ she recalled telling her sister, who broke down in tears.
Colleen DeGuzman contributed to this story.