President Donald Trump’s officials are allegedly turning child reunification into an immigration-enforcement tool by using kids in federal custody as leverage to identify, summon, and detain parents and caregivers.
That is the shocking finding of a new KFF Health News investigation, published Tuesday, which says the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) is now coordinating with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to arrest some parents and other sponsors seeking custody of children in government shelters. ORR is led by Angie Salazar, a former ICE official.
ORR had more than 2,300 children in shelters or foster placements in February, KFF reported. The investigation says that, before Trump, 79, returned to office, ORR was meant to keep child welfare separate from immigration enforcement and barred from sharing sponsor immigration-status information for enforcement purposes.
The alleged shift was made possible by policy changes. In March 2025, HHS updated the ORR rulebook and removed the earlier provision stating that the agency should not share potential sponsors’ immigration status information with law enforcement or immigration enforcement entities.
KFF also reported that ORR tightened sponsor requirements, narrowed accepted identity documents, expanded fingerprint checks to every adult in the home and backup caregivers, and, in some cases, required in-person ID appointments with ICE agents present.
The investigation’s clearest example is “Carlos,” a pseudonym for a father whose 14-year-old son and 16-year-old daughter had been held for months in a federal shelter in Texas after crossing the border to join him.
Carlos said an officer told him to come to an ICE office in New Mexico to discuss reunification. When he got there, he said officers tried to force him to sign papers he did not understand, then stripped him, took his belongings, and chained him “by the neck, waist, and legs.”
“They tricked me,” Carlos said. “They used my children to grab me.”
KFF reported that he had temporary protected status, had been vetted as a sponsor, passed DNA testing, and had “no criminal history” on his arrest paperwork. A federal judge later found he had been unlawfully detained and released him on bond in March.
The tactic described by KFF echoes other episodes that the Daily Beast has reported on during the Trump immigration crackdown.
In February, the Beast reported that Angel Camacho, a 43-year-old Venezuelan IT worker, said Border Patrol lured him to a station in Dania Beach, Florida, for what he thought was a routine work visit, only to arrest him when he arrived.
Last September, the Beast reported that agents were accused of grabbing a five-year-old girl in Leominster, Massachusetts, to force her father to surrender. And in January, school officials in Minnesota said agents used five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos as “bait” after class, taking him to his home and pressuring the adults inside to reveal themselves.
Those cases involved different facts and agencies. But together, they describe a similar operational tactic—using family ties, routine pretexts, or children’s vulnerability to flush out adults that the authorities wanted to detain.
KFF said LAist obtained data indicating that more than 100 caregivers had been arrested while trying to get children out of detention, though KFF said it could not independently verify that number with federal agencies. It also reported that children’s average stay in ORR custody, about one month in 2024, had risen to more than half a year by February.
A lawsuit filed in February by Democracy Forward and the National Center for Youth Law says the new approach has forced previously approved sponsors to start over and prolonged family separations, calling it “a quieter, new form of family separation.”
The Daily Beast has contacted HHS, DHS, ICE, and ORR for comment.
