SALT LAKE CITY — Federal immigration authorities have apparently launched an initiative targeting unaccompanied minors in the country illegally, which has prompted backlash from some immigration attorneys and advocates in Utah.
“I think this is one of the most despicable things our government has ever done,” said Nicholle Pitt, a Murray-based immigration attorney. “Many of these children are here because they have been harmed or will be harmed if returned to their country. Rarely are these children ever criminals, and if they are, there are deportation grounds that exist for violations of criminal law.”
Federal officials, meantime, describe the effort, an extension of President Donald Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration, as a way of granting the young immigrants a means of controlling their future. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other officials that work with younger immigrants “are offering a strictly voluntary option to return home to their families. This voluntary option gives UACs a choice and allows them to make an informed decision about their future,” the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said Friday in a social media post.
Utah attorneys on Thursday started receiving word of the operation — dubbed Freaky Friday by critics — from representatives of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, and it’s prompted concern among many. Unaccompanied minors are typically immigrants under the age of 18 who have entered the country illegally, without their parents, frequently fleeing gangs in their home countries or abuse and neglect at home, according to Utah attorneys who represent them.
“They arrive in the U.S. without a parent with them. A lot of them are here by themselves, or they’ve been able to reconnect with an older sibling or an aunt or something, but their parents aren’t here or they arrive later,” said Jason Jensen, a Millcreek-based immigration attorney. Some may have a single parent here or come to the United States after a parent who arrived earlier.
According to Voices for Utah Children, an advocacy group for kids, 198 unaccompanied minors have been released so far this year to sponsors in Utah. The group fears they could be impacted by the new effort.
“We are especially troubled that children, some as young as 10, could be coerced into abandoning legal protections, under threats directed not only at them but also at their families. This raises serious concerns about intimidation, due process and child welfare,” Voices for Utah Children said in a statement.
Voices said the impacted kids as young as 14, maybe even as young as 10, may be getting letters “pressuring” them to waive federal protections they have because of their age and to withdraw any applications they have with federal officials “for relief.” They could receive up to $2,500 each to return to their countries of origin. “If they do not comply, the letters reportedly warn that their parents in the U.S. could be arrested,” the Voices statement said.
The Department of Homeland Security painted a different picture, saying many unaccompanied children were trafficked into the country by drug cartels during the administration of President Joe Biden.
Officials from the Department of Homeland Services and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services “have been working diligently to ensure the safety and well-being of those children,” reads Friday’s statement. Payments to those taking immigration officials up on their offer “would be provided after an immigration judge grants the request and the individual arrives in their country of origin. Access to financial support when returning home would assist should they choose that option.”
While the Trump administration has said its primary focus is on public safety and ferreting out immigrants in the country illegally with criminal backgrounds, their defenders say unaccompanied minors typically aren’t dangerous people.
“These unaccompanied minors are not a danger to any community. In fact, I’d say a large percentage of them are fleeing danger,” said T. Laura Lui, a Murray-based immigration attorney. “Most of them are seeking safety from persecution, abandonment, neglect, abuse that happened in their home country.”
Lui can’t say for sure why the administration has seemingly put a focus on unaccompanied minors but suspects it might be because of all the extra funding available for efforts to address illegal immigration in the the budget bill signed by Trump last July. Moreover, younger immigrants, she said, are “the easiest target.”
The attorneys couldn’t point to any specific enforcement actions since word of the operation aimed at younger immigrants started to spread on Thursday. But Pitt said a Trump administration effort in late August to fly more than 600 unaccompanied Guatemalan minors back to Guatemala may have been a prelude to the effort.
“That was successfully stopped by action in federal court, but it looks like the first attempt at implementing this policy,” Pitt said.
The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.
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