The Acacia Center for Justice and their partners, including the National Center for Youth Law, have released reports documenting this concerning phenomenon and unpacking the negative implications for the care and well-being of children. Their findings are alarming.
ORR, normally a humanitarian-focused agency, is partnering more closely than ever with enforcement agencies like ICE and CBP. For example, ORR now allows CBP and ICE to interview unaccompanied children in shelters with no attorney present.
ORR is weaponizing the sponsorship process to expand vetting to all members of households, complicate and prolong screening procedures, and lure in adults to arrest, detain, and deport them.
Consistent with this administration’s broader resistance to public transparency and accountability, ORR removed sponsorship packet information from its public website in May 2025.
Organizations are documenting cases like this one. One 17-year-old’s mother was detained by ICE at her ID verification appointment and hospitalized from the strain. The daughter refused food and water until she was told her mother was safe. ORR then told her to find a different sponsor.
The composition of releases inverted: historically about 95% of discharged children went to a vetted sponsor. Between April and August 2025 only 45% did. Over half left custody by aging out at 18, by deportation, or by other non-sponsor routes.
When children are in prolonged custody, they struggle, growing more anxious, more hopeless, and more convinced that the family on the outside has stopped trying, and the damage does not end on the day they are finally released but can continue for years.
And let’s not forget: ICE tried to deport 76 Guatemalan children under the cover of darkness on Labor Day in 2025, stayed at the last minute by a federal judge’s order.
A new strategy gains traction: habeas for children
As ORR’s failure to expeditiously process sponsor applications and release children persists, children and their advocates have increasingly turned to a novel legal strategy to garner their release: filing habeas corpus petitions in federal courts. You may have heard of habeas corpus from the recent spike in these legal filings across the country in response to ICE’s legally dubious claim that no one in detention is eligible for a bond hearing. Habeas corpus is a foundational principle of the Western legal tradition that says that anyone detained or imprisoned should have the opportunity to contest their detention or imprisonment. Rarely before has this been used—or needed to be used—for cases involving children.
That’s why this conversation on Friday is so important. Acacia and partner organizations are currently engaging in two parallel efforts to coordinate the use of habeas corpus petitions to get children released from prolonged custody and to track the effectiveness of this strategy.
Members of Acacia’s Research, Evaluation, and Data Analytics team are currently conducting research on the use of habeas filings to garner children’s release from custody. The team has identified over 70 cases in which habeas petitions have been filed for this purpose. Initial analysis points to a number of key trends that we will discuss in greater detail.
The strategy has spread, but unevenly. Petitions have been filed in jurisdictions across the country, though attorney availability and the locations of ORR shelters have concentrated large numbers of filings in a handful of places.
Habeas for children works. Petitions have proven to be a particularly effective mechanism for garnering children’s release from custody, with nearly all petitions filed leading to children’s release.
More attorneys needed. For this strategy to reach every child who needs it, more attorneys will have to volunteer, particularly in parts of the country with the fewest.
ORR often caves to habeas. In many cases, children are released before a final judgment is ordered or released simply following the threat of filing a habeas petition. This raises questions about why ORR is delaying release in the first place and suggests that children are continuing to be detained despite completed ORR vetting showing that sponsors are appropriate and safe.
Habeas lawsuits reveal deeper collusion between ORR and ICE. Many of the court documents in these cases are sealed because they involve juveniles, but what is public points to two patterns. ORR and immigration enforcement agencies use reunification as cover to detain sponsors. And local law enforcement working alongside immigration agents has led to previously released children being re-apprehended and detained, after which ORR makes their sponsors start the vetting process over again.
The urgent need to expand habeas for children
In addition to this research-focused effort, Acacia is partnering with the National Center for Youth Law, the Immigration and Human Rights Law Clinic at Loyola University Chicago, The Door, and legal service providers across the country on the Children’s Due Process Project (CDPP).
The CDPP is a nationwide effort to expand capacity for filing habeas petitions on behalf of unaccompanied children by recruiting and training pro bono counsel to file petitions. Advocates submit cases in which children are experiencing unnecessary prolonged detention, and CDPP matches them with pro bono attorneys who can file in federal court. Since officially launching in June, the CDPP has recruited over 50 organizations and individuals to take cases and has placed dozens of cases with pro bono attorneys.
Despite this recent growth, there are still more children in ORR custody who need support than CDPP has attorneys who can help. If you are an attorney and would like to get involved, please fill out the interest form below or email Kel White at [email protected].
Children’s Due Process Project Pro Bono Sign-up Form
About the panelists
Jill Williams, Principal Research and Evaluation Manager at the Acacia Center for Justice, will speak to the research Acacia is undertaking. Acacia is a national nonprofit that until recently was funded to provide legal representation for unaccompanied children. She will walk through the challenge of finding children’s cases among the tens of thousands of habeas petitions filed in federal courts since the start of the second Trump administration, and the trends now surfacing in the data.
Becky Wolozin, Senior Attorney at the National Center for Youth Law, will speak to the work of the Children’s Due Process Project and to why habeas filings have become necessary to win children’s release from ORR detention. She will also explain how ORR’s policies and practices have shifted under this administration toward arrest, detention, and deportation, and away from the child well-being that federal law directs the agency to protect.
For further reading
Acacia Center for Justice. (2025, September). Dismantling Protections: How ORR Policy Changes Trap Children in Extended Detention.
National Center for Youth Law. (2025, September). The Unraveling of ORR: A Quick and Calculated Undoing of a System Intended to Protect Children.
Villarreal, A. (2026, September 3). Revealed: Attorneys rally to free children held in US immigration custody. The Guardian.
Sendukas, A. L., Wolozin, B., Smith, L. J., & Castillo-Granados, D. (2026, June 8). Federal litigation for unaccompanied immigrant children in prolonged ORR custody [Video]. American Bar Association.