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Before Trump, ‘Dreamers’ were shielded from deportation. Here’s what’s changed

by Evelyn Reynolds 11 October 2025, 16:00

The Trump administration has once again put Dreamers on a rollercoaster ride.The federal government is sending mixed signals about Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca), a popular program devised under Barack Obama that had until recently allowed undocumented immigrants brought to the US as children to live and work legally without serious risk of deportation.On one hand, in a new court filing, the federal government suggested it may eventually resume official consideration of initial Daca applications for the first time in years, which could let tens of thousands of people finally have their petitions processed.On the other, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has claimed that immigrants who say they are under the Daca umbrella “are not automatically protected from deportations”, as the program “does not confer any form of legal status in this country”.Such an approach has been used by Trump officials to justify detaining about 20 known Daca recipients during the new administration so far – despite no White House or DHS memo, regulation or executive order revealing a policy change.“We started hearing from those detained that when they tell Ice [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] agents that they have Daca, the Ice agents say: ‘Oh, that doesn’t matter any more’,” said Juliana Macedo do Nascimento, a spokesperson for the immigrant youth organization United We Dream.Here’s what to know about Daca, the “Dreamers” it protects, and how Donald Trump’s hardline immigrant agenda is upending that protection.Who are dreamers?“Dreamers” is a nickname for immigrants brought stateside as children, who do not have legal status. One estimate counts almost 2.5 million Dreamers in the US.The moniker refers to the Dream Act, proposed legislation that has been deliberated for decades in an attempt to offer Dreamers a pathway to legal immigration status. Lawmakers have introduced at least 20 iterations of the bill, but despite bipartisan support, no version has cleared both chambers of Congress.So-called Daca recipients are the subset of Dreamers who have been able to qualify for the Daca program. There are more than 525,000 active Daca recipients nationwide, the vast majority from Mexico, though beneficiaries come from countries around the globe.Daca recipients’ average age is 31 years old. California and Texas host the largest Daca populations by far, with 147,440 and 87,890 respectively.In 2023, more than nine out of 10 Daca recipients who were surveyed by national immigrant-focused organizations were either employed or in school. They reported that having Daca protections had made it possible for them to find jobs that paid better, work in fields that reflected their education and long-term career goals, get professional licenses and reach economic independence. The program had also opened the door for some beneficiaries to buy homes and cars.What is Daca?The Daca policy debuted on 15 June 2012 to address Dreamers’ need to work legally and be “lawfully present” in the US rather than hide from immigration enforcement and work under the table. To qualify, an applicant must have come to the country before they were 15 years old, have been aged 30 or younger on the date the Obama administration announced the program and have resided in the US since June 2007, among other requirements.Daca access is barred for anyone convicted of a felony, significant misdemeanor or three or more misdemeanors.Although the program has been a lifeline for many undocumented youth, it’s not a legal status or pathway to citizenship, and the antiquated cutoff dates for eligibility have made it so that Dreamers in high school now are less likely to qualify. At the same time, protracted litigation has long paused the processing of initial Daca applications.“I think it’s really important to understand how tragic it is that young people who are Americans in every sense but lack one piece of paper here not only aren’t getting a pathway to citizenship, but aren’t even getting these very basic and temporary deportation protections and work authorizations,” said Todd Schulte, president of the advocacy group FWD.us.Why Congress hasn’t done anything to provide more stability for Dreamers is the “billion-dollar question”, said Diana Pliego, senior strategist for campaigns at the National Immigration Law Center – especially, she added, when more than 80% of Americans support a pathway to citizenship for them, and when it’s estimated that providing that would add about $800bn in US gross domestic product growth over a 10-year period.Where does the program stand now?Earlier this year, the fifth circuit court of appeals ruled in practice that Daca and work permit adjudications should restart as normal everywhere except Texas, where officials successfully argued the state was negatively affected by Daca recipients because of education and healthcare costs.The window has closed for appeals to the US supreme court, at least for the time being. Now, a district court will eventually decide how to implement the fifth circuit’s ruling, and in a recent court filing, the Trump administration outlined its vision for complying, in part through restarting initial adjudications of Daca petitions.Yet, simultaneously, the Trump administration said those proposals would “not limit DHS from undertaking any future lawful changes to Daca”, and for now, the status quo prevails.“This administration can do many things. So we’re just worried about creating an expectation or false hope for people with initial applications,” said Macedo do Nascimento.Trump tried to phase out Daca during his first administration but was ultimately stopped by the supreme court.What about Dreamers in Texas?Though they are likely to still receive deportation protections, there’s a risk that Texas Dreamers may lose both their work permits and their “lawful presence” designation, which would affect their economic prospects and could have larger immigration consequences.Who is being detained?Even as the Trump administration floats restarting initial Daca adjudications, it is arresting current Daca recipients as part of its mass deportation campaign.Evenezer Cortez Martínez – who came to the US when he was four years old and had a valid Daca permit through October 2026 – was deported to Mexico in March. He was eventually allowed to return to his wife and children in Kansas City, though he said: “I still have that doubt about whether it’s really true that I’m [back] here.”Similarly, in August, Paulo Cesar Gamez Lira was targeted in El Paso, Texas, in front of his children, his arm being dislocated during the chaos, before he was detained in New Mexico. DHS called him a “criminal illegal alien” because of a decade-old charge for marijuana possession as a teenager that was later reduced to disorderly conduct, and that had never stopped the agency from renewing his Daca protections.Cortez Martínez and Gamez Lira are two of 20 or so known Daca recipients who have been arrested, detained or deported this year.Tricia McLaughlin, DHS assistant secretary for public affairs, has encouraged Daca recipients to consider voluntary deportation.To Pliego, that would be a loss for the US.“These are people who have built their lives here, who, you know, have been here since they were young kids,” she said. “This is their home. And so we’re losing longstanding community members who are contributing to the country, who are giving back in a lot of ways.” More

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Judge halts Trump administration from detaining immigrant children after they turn 18
by Evelyn Reynolds 4 October 2025, 22:12
A federal judge has temporarily halted a Trump administration initiative that would have kept immigrant children in custody after their 18th birthdays, preventing their transfer to adult detention centers that advocates said were planned for this weekend.On Saturday, US district judge Rudolph Contreras in Washington DC issued a temporary restraining order directing US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) to stop placing unaccompanied immigrant children into adult detention once they reached legal adulthood, reported the Associated Press.Contreras ruled that automatically detaining these individuals violates an earlier 2021 court order that explicitly prohibited such actions. The ruling adds to a growing list of federal clashes over Trump’s controversial immigration policies, particularly those involving minors.Just a day earlier, it was reported by the Guardian that the Trump administration has plans to offer immigrant children $2,500 to self-deport, with a “one-time resettlement support stipend” given to children in exchange for their voluntary departure.“This policy pressures children to abandon their legal claims and return to a life of fear and danger without ever receiving a fair hearing,” said Murad Awawdeh, president of the New York Immigration Coalition. “The chaos built into this policy will devastate families and communities – and it is targeted to hurt children.”Under federal law, unaccompanied minors are housed in facilities overseen by the office of refugee resettlement, which operates under the Department of Health and Human Services, not Ice.Contreras’s 2021 ruling required that when these children turn 18, they must be released to “the least restrictive setting available”, provided they aren’t considered a danger to themselves or others and aren’t likely to flee. Many are placed with relatives or foster families.Despite the ruling, attorneys representing immigrant youth have also reported receiving alerts that Ice had instructed shelters to stop releasing soon-to-be 18-year-olds, even those with approved release plans, and instead prepare to send them to adult detention, according to the AP.The Trump administration is also facing accusations of reviving the practice of separating families in order to coerce immigrants and asylum seekers to leave the US, as attorneys and former immigration officials have spoken out against the practice.In several cases, officials have retaliated against immigrants who challenged deportation orders by forcibly separating them from their children, a Guardian investigation found. The officials misclassified the children as “unaccompanied minors” before placing them in government-run shelters or foster care.It was also reported earlier this year that Ice officials are actively seeking out unaccompanied immigrant children in operations nationwide with a view to deporting them or pursuing criminal cases against them or adult sponsors sheltering them legally in the US.Over the past several years, the government has imposed stricter screening before releasing children to relatives or sponsors in the US, extending the average time minors spend in custody. That process, which now involves fingerprinting, DNA tests and home visits, has slowed releases considerably.Data released last month also revealed that immigrants with no criminal record are now the largest group held in US immigration detention, surpassing the number of detainees who have been charged with crimes. More
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Trump administration to offer unaccompanied minors $2,500 to self-deport, memo reveals
by Evelyn Reynolds 4 October 2025, 00:21
The Trump administration wants to offer immigrant children $2,500 to self-deport, according to a memo obtained by the Guardian.The memo, sent by the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to legal providers representing unaccompanied children and reviewed by the Guardian, says that immigration officials have identified unaccompanied immigrant children 14 years of age and older in government custody who have expressed interest in voluntarily departing the US.The government “will provide a one-time resettlement support stipend of $2,500” to these children in exchange for their voluntary departure, the memo states. It notes that unaccompanied minors from Mexico will not be eligible.DHS confirmed the details of the memo and its plans to offer children money in a statement to the Guardian on Friday.The effort by the administration is a significant departure from longstanding immigration policy related to minors in US custody, according to experts. Although voluntary departure for unaccompanied immigrant children has always been an option, it typically requires consultation with attorneys and approval by a judge. The administration’s decision to incentivize children to engage in self-removal is new.The administration’s “message is confusing and seems to fly in the face of established laws and protocols that Congress passed to protect children from cyclical trafficking risks”, said Shaina Aber, executive director of the Acacia Center for Justice, in a statement. “We are concerned by messaging from the Department of Homeland Security that suggests children who were trafficked against their will into the US by cartels will be part of an incentive program aimed at getting children to waive their legal rights under the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act.”Immigration lawyers and advocates have expressed alarm at the potential ramifications for children and their families. “We are mindful that this $2,500 incentive being offered to children in exchange for giving up their legal claims and accepting voluntary departure has the potential to exploit their unique vulnerabilities as unaccompanied minors in government custody,” said Marion “Mickey” Donovan-Kaloust at the Los Angeles-based legal aid group Immigrant Defenders Law Center, or ImmDef.“This policy pressures children to abandon their legal claims and return to a life of fear and danger without ever receiving a fair hearing,” said Murad Awawdeh, president of the New York Immigration Coalition. “The chaos built into this policy will devastate families and communities – and it is targeted to hurt children.”Children who arrive in the US or at a border without a parent or guardian are classified as unaccompanied minors, and are placed in the custody of the office of refugee resettlement (ORR), which is under HHS. Children are placed in federal government-run shelters until they can be reunited with family members vetted by the ORR, or with foster families, a process outlined in federal law.Since the Trump administration came into office, it has engaged in efforts to remove immigrant children from the US. The administration has attempted to roll back legal representation for minors, cutting back a federally funded program that provided legal aid for unaccompanied children.In late August, the administration prepared to hastily deport dozens of Guatemalan children. Many of the children had pending immigration cases and had not elected to leave the US, according to their lawyers.Dozens of children were roused from their beds at shelters and taken to an airport in the early morning hours and ushered onto flights – and were only released after a judge temporarily blocked the deportations.“We urge the public not to lose sight of the broader context in which this program is unfolding: a sustained assault on children’s access to legal counsel, dramatically prolonged detention periods, the expedited processing of deportation cases, and, most disturbingly, children being dragged from their beds in the middle of the night last month and threatened with deportation,” said Donovan-Kaloust.Members of Congress also have expressed concern about the treatment of immigrant children in US government custody. This week, led by the representative Delia Ramirez, those members wrote a letter to DHS opposing efforts to return immigrant children to their countries of origin.The letter, which has not previously been reported on, was submitted before the newest Trump administration memo incentivizing children to voluntarily return to their countries of origin. The members of Congress requested that DHS provide information on its push to return immigrant children to their home countries.“Given that we know the Trump Administration has no concern for keeping families together, we expect that DHS’s new policy will deprive children of due process and place them in grave danger of trafficking and other harm,” the members wrote.The newest directive was sent to ORR legal service providers on Friday morning, four days after the congressional letter.Dina Francesca Haynes, executive director of the Orville H Schell Jr Center for International Human Rights at Yale, said she questioned how children who are not old enough to enter into contracts on their own could be expected to consent to a legally complicated immigration decision.She said she is also concerned that the program will fuel family separations. Already, the Trump administration has issued stringent new restrictions on who can take custody of unaccompanied minors, requiring US identification, proof of income and in many cases a DNA test of family members seeking to reunite with children in ORR shelters or foster care. The new limits have made it especially difficult for immigrant families, and undocumented immigrants, to take custody of children.Haynes said she worries that children would feel pressured to accept a voluntary departure in order to protect their family members from being targeted or deported.“It’s just so astonishing that this is something that [the US] would be doing as a policy,” she said. “It’s coercing children who are already traumatized.”Earlier on Friday, rumors began spreading regarding the administration’s efforts to target children and incentivize them with money to voluntarily depart.According to a statement from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the “voluntary option gives UACs [unaccompanied children] a choice and allows them to make an informed decision about their future. Any payment to support a return home would be provided after an immigration judge grants the request and the individual arrives in their country of origin.”The offer is being made to 17-year-old unaccompanied children first, DHS said, despite the memo outlining that the deal is being offered to children as young as 14.The stipend program to urge children to depart the US echoes a similar scheme that the government devised to incentivize adults to self-deport. In May, the administration announced it would offer a $1,000 incentive to immigrants who “self-deport” using a government-designed app.Following the launch of that self-deportation program, it was unclear how many people partook in the scheme and whether any of them actually received the promised $1,000, Haynes said. “So I don’t know that the funds would actually be an incentive,” she said.Advocates have also raised alarm that children are increasingly being used as pawns in an effort to locate and deport their family members. Earlier this year, the Guardian reported that DHS was beginning to seek out unaccompanied immigrant children in operations nationwide in an attempt to deport them or pursue criminal cases against them or their adult sponsors.A recent Guardian investigation found that immigrant families are being threatened with separation from their children in order to coerce immigrants and asylum seekers to leave the US. In several cases, officials have forcibly separated immigrant children from their parents, and misclassified the children as “unaccompanied minors”, in an apparent effort to retaliate against families who have challenged deportation orders or insisted on their right to seek asylum. More
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Trump revives family separations amid drive to deport millions: ‘A tactic to punish’
by Evelyn Reynolds 2 October 2025, 11:00
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The Trump administration has revived the practice of separating families in order to coerce immigrants and asylum seekers to leave the US, attorneys and former immigration officials allege.In several cases, officials have retaliated against immigrants who challenged deportation orders by forcibly separating them from their children, a Guardian investigation found. The officials misclassified the children as “unaccompanied minors” before placing them in government-run shelters or foster care.The new practice has taken effect as the administration has also issued stringent new limits on who can take custody of unaccompanied minors – which advocates say keep thousands of children away from their relatives.“This is a tactic to punish people for not acquiescing,” said Faisal Al-Juburi, head of external affairs at the legal aid group Raíces. “It’s a tactic to get immigrants to relent, to agree to self-deport.”The recent separations echo the “zero tolerance” policy of the first Trump administration, when the US systematically separated more than 5,600 migrant children from their parents and caregivers at the US-Mexico border. Images of agents pulling children from their parents’ arms and placing them in overcrowded metal cages sparked domestic and international outrage, and Donald Trump ended the policy.But seven years later, hundreds of parents have still been unable to reunify with their children; the administration lost track of many of the families it tore apart. Though the new separations so far appear less pervasive than the original policy, experts and attorneys said that it could result in another crisis of prolonged, permanent separations.“I would say that the main difference is just that the separations are now happening all over the country, as opposed to at the border, concentrated in areas where you could visibly go see it,” said Michelle Brané, a former Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official who served under the Biden administration. “But the rest of it is not that different. The objective is still to be cruel and send a message that people should not come to the US – that they should leave.”Family separation is one of several ways in which the US government is, increasingly, moving immigrants around the country – shuffling detainees through a vast, chaotic system that advocates say is intentionally cruel.An analysis of leaked flight records and US government detention data, as well as interviews with immigrants, attorneys and former officials, revealed that immigrants are increasingly moved without notice away from their families, communities and legal counsel – leading to apparent violations of constitutional due-process rights.The Guardian reviewed leaked flight data from Global Crossing Airlines, the charter company that operates the majority of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) flights, and found that the vast majority of these trips during the first three months of the second Trump administration were between domestic US airports. The airline transported nearly 44,000 immigrants – including 1,000 children – during that time. US detention data revealed that since the inauguration, nearly 2,350 kids under the age of 18, including 36 infants, have been booked into immigration detention centers around the country.In cases reviewed by the Guardian, parents were moved between detention centers several times after being separated from their children – and in the process were unable to coordinate calls with their kids or their lawyers. Amid the chaos, immigration experts and advocates have the raised alarm that the government could, as it did during the first Trump administration, lose track of where it is sending parents and children – resulting in indefinite or permanent separations.View image in fullscreenThe Department of Homeland Security (DHS) did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment.For LW, a 37-year-old mother who came to the US with her 10-year-old son in April seeking political asylum, returning to China was not an option.LW told her lawyers and immigration officers that she had been sexually assaulted by multiple high-ranking government officials in China. After reporting an assault to the police, Chinese government operatives threatened her with imprisonment – or death. That’s what was awaiting her in China, she told US immigration agents.In a sworn declaration in her immigration case that her lawyers shared with the Guardian, LW alleged her pleas to allow her and her son to remain together while they applied for asylum were ignored by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents in San Diego, California, who forced the mother and son into an unmarked vehicle, and began driving them toward the local airport. According to her sworn declaration, agents told her if she refused to get on a flight back home, the government would take her son away from her.At the airport, the agents tried to drag LW toward the terminals. “I said I needed a lawyer, but they refused, telling me that nobody would want to help me,” she said in her declaration. “Desperate and terrified of what might happen, I dropped to the ground and the officers let me go.”Later that day, she said they drove her and her son back to a CBP facility in San Diego – and then moved them to an Ice facility in Texas. But a month later, she said, immigration agents followed through on their threat: they took her son away and placed him in foster care.Her lawyers said that she and her son have now been separated for nearly five months. He turned 11 in the interim.LW remains detained at an Ice facility in New Mexico, while her son has been placed at a government shelter for unaccompanied minors in New York.Her lawyers from Raíces have repeatedly petitioned for her release, arguing that her prolonged separation from her son was in violation of a court settlement that had blocked family separations during the first Trump administration. But Ice told LW’s lawyers that the settlement did not apply in this case. LW said agents told her she could be reunited with her son if she agreed to accept deportation to China.The DHS has said it always gives parents a choice. “Rather than separate families, Ice asks parents if they want to be removed with their children or if the child should be placed with someone safe the parent designates,” Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the DHS, told the Guardian in September.But in each of the cases reviewed by the Guardian, lawyers said their clients weren’t offered a real choice. In some instances, parents were not fully informed of their options prior to being separated from their children. In others, none of the available options were safe, or possible.LW couldn’t choose to leave her son with another parent or guardian, her lawyers said. Though her boyfriend was already in the US and had offered to act as a legal sponsor, he wasn’t the boy’s biological father and it was unclear that he could fulfill the government’s steep requirements to take custody of him.New policies the Trump administration enacted in January require that anyone seeking to take custody of unaccompanied minors in government-run shelters or foster care must provide proof of their income source, show a US identification and in many cases take a DNA test.A federal lawsuit on behalf of several migrant youths and the legal aid groups representing them alleges that these new requirements have disqualified many parents, siblings and other family members from taking custody of children who have been classified as “unaccompanied minors”.“We’re seeing separation being used as a punitive measure,” said Al-Juburi. “A punitive measure for not acquiescing, for demanding access to legal counsel, and for staking claim to her and her son’s rights to apply for asylum.”As the Trump administration attempts to make good on the president’s campaign promise to enact mass deportations and expel 1 million people each year, legal aid groups and immigration experts say that it appears to be using the threat of separation as one of many aggressive strategies to speed up the removal of migrants from the country.View image in fullscreenIn Texas, which is home to Ice’s sole detention facility currently designated specifically for family units, Raíces has served approximately 250 families this year to date, according to Al-Juburi. Of these families, about 10% have endured some kind of separation while in Ice custody.“This pattern is deeply troubling,” said Elora Mukherjee, a lawyer and the director of Columbia Law School’s Immigrants’ Rights Clinic, who has been advocating on behalf of several clients threatened with separation.Among Mukherjee’s clients are a two-year-old and a seven-year-old. “An Ice officer has threatened to separate each of these children from each other and from their mother and their father, detain them in separate facilities, and put them on four different deportation flights,” she said. “This is unnecessarily cruel.”Many of the migrant families threatened with separations have already made long, dangerous journeys to the US.For Muhammad, a 24-year-old father of four, the journey out of Afghanistan included stopovers in Pakistan, Brazil (where his seven-year-old stepdaughter was kidnapped for ransom) and Mexico (where he had to pay a smuggler to help his family make their way across the US’s southern border).Muhammad’s wife had worked in human rights prior to the US military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021. Once the Taliban took power, she began receiving death threats. Her father – a military general under the prior government – was killed, as was Muhammad’s uncle. The couple knew that they and their children had to leave.They first fled to Pakistan, then got a temporary visa to Brazil. But after Muhammad’s seven-year-old stepdaughter was kidnapped and held for ransom there, he and his wife knew they couldn’t stay.Finally – in February 2025, about a month after Trump was sworn in as president – they arrived at the US-Mexico border. By then, the Trump administration had shut down nearly all avenues to apply for asylum at the southern border, so Muhammad and his wife felt they had no choice but to pay a smuggler to bring them into the US, where they turned themselves over to immigration authorities.“We have traveled far in search of safety,” said Muhammad, in a sworn declaration in his immigration case that was shared with his permission by his lawyers at Raíces. “I believe that the US is the safest place to raise my family and provide them with all that they deserve and need.”But he hasn’t been able to hold them in nearly six months. His one-year-old, who was born in Brazil, has been growing up rapidly without him.Initially, immigration officials detained the family together, at a CBP facility and then at a family detention center in Karnes, Texas. Then, on 31 March, Muhammad was told he would be escorted to the medical center for an evaluation. It was odd, because he hadn’t made an appointment or asked to see a doctor.“I asked for a moment to say goodbye to my family, but the officer told me I would see them the following day, and not to worry,” Muhammad said. He was handcuffed and placed in a dark room. The next day, he said he was moved to a different detention center in Pearsall, Texas, and then another facility in Conroe, Texas.View image in fullscreenHis wife and children were released from detention and allowed to reunite with Muhammad’s brother-in-law, who was acting as the family’s sponsor, in Utah.Muhammad’s lawyers said Ice informed them that the agency had deemed him a “national security risk”, and that the agency did not need to provide any further details about why he had been separated from his family. The agency also repeatedly restricted him from speaking with lawyers, without explaining why.Former officials and attorneys told the Guardian that Ice is increasingly using national security concerns as a catchall excuse for not providing clear information about why certain individuals are being detained, or denied access to their families and legal counsel.As the weeks wore on, Muhammad consented to be deported to Brazil. He was hesitant – shaken by the episode when his daughter was kidnapped – but it felt like a safer choice than Afghanistan. But Brazil wouldn’t accept him.So he kept asking to speak to his lawyers, and kept asking to apply for asylum in the US.“I feel like I am alone and nothing of my future is within my control,” he said, after two months of detention.His lawyers, meanwhile, were scrambling to schedule a meeting with him. They submitted multiple Freedom of Information Act requests to multiple immigration agencies, seeking to review Muhammad’s case files. Ice maintained that because it had deemed Muhammad a security risk, it did not have to comply with a court-ordered policy to make sure that parents and children who are separated by Ice are allowed regular calls and visits.Finally, after nearly five months in detention, Ice referred Muhammad to the US Immigration and Customs Agency (USCIS) for an interview to determine his eligibility for asylum. Muhammed said officials there told him they were doing so in order to “cover their asses” – so they could check off the box and finally deport him back to Afghanistan.“I miss the days that I would take [my children] out for ice-cream and walk through the park,” he said. “I also miss playing with them before bedtime to make sure that they would sleep well.”Prolonged separations, including those lasting longer than five or six months, could cause a child welfare crisis, experts said.In the aftermath of the family separation crisis during the first Trump administration, pediatricians, psychiatrists and other experts decried the deep psychological scars that the policy would leave on children.A 2021 study found that the impacts of the separations persisted for weeks or months after families were reunited. “The longer the separation lasts, the more harmful it can be,” said Brané, the former DHS official, who led a taskforce charged with finding and reuniting separated migrant families and is now the executive director of the advocacy group Together and Free.During 2018’s period of zero tolerance for migrant families, images of bawling children being ripped away from their parents at the southern border and forced into overcrowded makeshift shelters quickly began to raise public outrage and alarm. But now, Brané said, few asylum seekers are appearing at the southern border – and most of the separations seem to be occurring out of public view.“But the intent is the same, and the impact is the same,” she said. “And I don’t know that they’re tracking this any better than they were before.”Years after Trump ended the zero-tolerance policy, hundreds of children remained separated from their parents – though advocacy groups said it is impossible to know exactly how many, due to a lack of government records or tracking.In some cases, parents were deported while their children remained in foster care. In other cases, when very young children were taken from their parents and spent years in foster care, parents have made the difficult decision to allow their children to remain in the US without them, rather than risk relocating and re-traumatizing them.Amid a new wave of separations this year, attorneys have said the government in several cases has not complied with a 2019 court settlement – known as the “Ms L Settlement” – designed to prevent a second family separation crisis.“It appears that families are not always receiving the notifications that they’re supposed to receive,” Brané said. “The government hasn’t been following certain norms and procedures.”In the three cases reviewed in detail by the Guardian, parents had no idea where their children were being taken. Often, the parents didn’t know where they were themselves, either, and said that they were frequently denied access to calls with their lawyers. According to attorneys at Raíces and other legal aid groups, this has also been the case for other clients.“The reality is that these are scenarios where there are no grounds for [separation], you know, based upon that settlement agreement,” said Al-Juburi. “And it’s much harder to keep families together when they are separated like this and for such extensive periods of time.”Even after separating families, Al-Juburi noted, Ice has been moving parents around from one detention center to another, without advance notice to their lawyers or other family members – setting attorneys on a “wild goose chase” to find out where their clients have been moved.After LW was separated from her child and moved from a detention center in Texas to another in New Jersey, attorneys at Raíces had to wait three weeks to schedule a phone call to consult on her case. On the day of her scheduled call, she was moved again without explanation or notice to El Paso, Texas, into the custody of CBP, and then two days later back to Ice custody in New Mexico.View image in fullscreenIce has told people in its custody, including LW, that they will be reunited with their children if and when they accept deportation, Al-Juburi noted. “But that should be taken with a grain of salt.” As the government increasingly moves immigrants around the country, often in chaotic and irregular ways, there’s a risk that families will be lost in the shuffle.For some parents, the separations – and the subsequent confusion – were too much to bear. SP and her husband agreed to sign deportation papers after more than two months apart from their son.The family had fled Mongolia in April this year, their lawyers said. After SP and her husband had attempted to expose public corruption and money-laundering allegations, they said their 11-year-old son was sexually harassed and physically abused at school – under the watch of administrators the parents believed were allied with Mongolia’s government.The family arrived in Chicago on tourist visas, and were stopped straight away by immigration agents. Almost immediately, they were sent to an Ice facility for families in Texas – where they each struggled with the mental and physical toll of detention.At one point, SP’s husband attempted suicide. At another, her son developed a persistent rash. Neither received sufficient care, her lawyers said.A month later, Ice flew the family to New York – from where they were meant to be deported to Mongolia. But SP and her husband resisted – saying they would be in danger if they returned.View image in fullscreenThat’s when the government threatened to take their son away, according to a sworn declaration from SP in the family’s immigration case. A week later, it did just that. The family was called into a meeting, and they said no Mongolian interpreter was provided – so the 11-year-old was forced to translate for his parents.“My child told me that Ice officers informed him they were going to take him ‘to a place in San Antonio’,” said SP in a sworn declaration in the family’s immigration case. “Neither my husband nor I understood why our child was being taken from us.”The officers had whisked him away without explaining why or where he was being sent. They had left behind his inhaler. SP and her husband were shackled at their hands and feet and taken to another detention center, and separated from each other – again, without explanation – and only allowed to see each other once every three weeks.“I am devastated by this situation,” SP told her lawyers a few days later. “I still do not understand … Ice officers have not explained anything to me.”Her son turned 12 while he was staying with a foster family. Ice ignored repeated notifications by SP’s lawyers that the agency was violating a court settlement regarding family separations.In the end, the agency said it would deport each family member back separately – and SP’s lawyers fought to ensure that, at least, the family could board the same plane out of the country.Her lawyers have not been able to confirm that the family is still safe, back in Mongolia.The Guardian has used first names or initials, rather than full names, in this article to protect people in Ice or CBP custody or who have been deported back to their countries of origin.ContributorsAdditional reporting: Will Craft
Illustrations: Angelica Alzona
Photo research: Gail Fletcher
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Judges rule against Trump administration on deporting Guatemalan children and Venezuelans
by Evelyn Reynolds 18 September 2025, 18:10
The Trump administration has been handed a double defeat by judges in immigration cases, barring the executive branch from deporting a group of Guatemalan children and from slashing protections for many Venezuelans in the US.A federal judge on Thursday ordered the administration to refrain from deporting Guatemalan unaccompanied immigrant children with active immigration cases while a legal challenge plays out.Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump appointee based in Washington DC, kept in place an earlier judicial block on the policy, sharply criticizing the administration’s unproven assertion that the children’s parents wanted them deported.The administration attempted to deport 76 Guatemalan minors being held in US custody in a surprise move in the early morning on 31 August, sparking a lawsuit and emergency hearing that temporarily halted the move.The Department of Justice lawyer Drew Ensign initially said that the children’s parents had requested they be returned home, but the department later withdrew that claim. Reuters published a Guatemalan government report saying that most parents of the roughly 600 Guatemalan children in US custody could not be contacted and of those who could, many did not want their children forced back to the country.Kelly said the justice department’s explanation “crumbled like a house of cards” in light of that report.The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the justice department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Kelly said some children were unexpectedly taken from their shelter beds in the middle of the night, driven to the airport and, in some cases, put on planes, leaving them worried and confused. At one shelter in McAllen, Texas, a young girl was so scared that she vomited, Kelly wrote, citing evidence submitted in the case.Immigrant children who arrive at US borders without a parent or guardian are classified as unaccompanied and sent to federal government-run shelters until they can be placed with a family member or foster home, a process outlined in federal law.Meanwhile, late on Wednesday, a federal appeals court rejected an attempt by the Trump administration to set aside a judge’s order holding that it unlawfully rolled back temporary protections from deportation granted to 600,000 Venezuelans living in the US.A three-judge panel of the San Francisco-based ninth US circuit court of appeals declined to pause a judge’s 5 September ruling holding that the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, lacked the authority to end the program, known as temporary protected status or TPS.“Vacating and terminating Venezuela’s TPS status threw the future of these Venezuelan citizens into disarray, and exposed them to a substantial risk of wrongful removal, separation from their families, and loss of employment,” the panel said.The justice department has said that if a stay were denied, it might take the case to the US supreme court, which in May put on hold an earlier injunction Chen issued and cleared the way for the administration to end temporary protections for about 348,000 of the Venezuelans at issue.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the DHS, in a statement said the ninth circuit’s ruling “is nothing short of open defiance against the US Supreme Court”. The administration had contended the supreme court’s May decision meant Chen’s latest ruling had to be similarly paused.“Luckily for us, and for all Americans, the Ninth Circuit is not the last stop,” McLaughlin said.TPS is available to people whose home country has experienced a natural disaster, armed conflict or other extraordinary event. It provides eligible migrants with work authorization and temporary protection from deportation. The program was created in 1991 and extended under Joe Biden to cover about 600,000 Venezuelans and 521,000 Haitians. Noem reversed the extensions, saying they were no longer justified, prompting legal challenges.Chen’s decision had also applied to 521,000 Haitians. The administration did not ask the ninth circuit to put that part of Chen’s ruling on hold as a second judge in New York had already blocked the revocation of the Haitians’ status. More
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‘I had teachers crying’: the schools trying to plug million-dollar funding holes after Trump cuts
by Evelyn Reynolds 18 September 2025, 18:00
In the time it took to read an email, the federal money vanished before Eisa Cox’s eyes: dollars that supported the Ashe county, North Carolina, school district’s after-school program, training for its teachers and salaries for some jobs.The email from the US Department of Education arrived 30 June, a day before the money – $1.1m in total – was set to materialize for the rural western district. Instead, the dollars were frozen pending a review to make sure the money was spent “in accordance with the president’s priorities”, the email said.In a community still recovering from Hurricane Helene, where more than half of students are considered economically disadvantaged, Cox said there was no way they could replace that federal funding for the school system she oversees as superintendent. “It is scary to think about it,” she said. “You’re getting ready to open school and not have a significant pot of funds.”School leaders across the country were reeling from the same news. The $1.1m was one small piece of a nearly $7bn pot of federal funding for thousands of school districts that the Trump administration froze – money approved by Congress and that schools were scheduled to receive on 1 July. For weeks, leaders in Ashe county and around the country scrambled to figure out how they could avoid layoffs and fill financial holes – until the money was freed on 25 July, after an outcry from legislators and a lawsuit joined by two dozen states.“I had teachers crying, staff members crying. They thought they were going to lose their jobs a week before school,” said Curtis Finch, superintendent of Deer Valley unified school district in Phoenix, Arizona.View image in fullscreenNow, as students are back in classrooms, their school systems can no longer count on federal dollars as they once did. They must learn to plan without a playbook under a president intent on cutting education spending. For many districts, federal money is a small but crucial sliver of their budgets, potentially touching every part of a school’s operations, from teacher salaries to textbooks. Nationally, it accounts for about 14% of public school funding; in Ashe county, it’s 17%. School administrators are examining their resources now and budgeting for losses to funding that was frozen this summer, for English learners and for after-school and other programs.So far, the Trump administration has not proposed cutting the largest pots of federal money for schools, which go to services for students with disabilities and to schools with large numbers of low-income students. But the current budget proposal from the US House of Representatives would do just that.At the same time, forthcoming cuts to other federal support for low-income families under the Republican One Big, Beautiful Bill Act – including Medicaid and Snap, previously known as food stamps – will also hammer schools that have many students living in poverty. Some school districts are also grappling with the elimination of Department of Education grants announced earlier this year, such as those designed to address teacher shortages and disability services. In politically conservative communities like this one, there’s an added tension for schools that rely on federal money to operate: how to sound the alarm while staying out of partisan politics.For Ashe county, the federal spending freeze collided with the district’s attempt at a fresh start after the devastation of Helene, which demolished roads and homes, damaged school buildings and knocked power and cell service out for weeks. Between the storm and snow days, students here missed 47 days of instruction.Cox worries this school year might bring more missed days. That first week of school, she found herself counting the number of foggy mornings: an old Appalachian wives’ tale says to put a bean in a jar for every morning of fog in August. The number of beans at the end of the month is how many snow days will come in winter.“We’ve had 21 so far,” Cox said with a nervous laugh on 21 August.A funding freeze rollercoasterFragrant evergreen trees blanket Ashe county’s hills, a region that bills itself as America’s Christmas tree capital because of the millions of Fraser firs grown for sale at the holidays. Yet this picturesque area still shows scars of Hurricane Helene’s destruction: fallen trees, damaged homes and rocky new paths cut through the mountainsides by mudslides. Nearly a year after the storm, the lone grocery store in one of its small towns is still being rebuilt. A sinkhole that formed during the flooding remains, splitting open the ground behind an elementary school.As students walked into classrooms for the first time since spring, Julie Taylor – the district’s director of federal programs – was reworking district budget spreadsheets. When federal funds were frozen, and then unfrozen, her plans and calculations from months prior became meaningless.Federal and state funding stretches far in this district of 2,700 students and six schools, where administrators do a lot with a little. Even before this summer, they worked hard to supplement that funding in any way possible – applying for state and federal grants, like one last year that provided money for a few mobile hotspots for families who don’t have internet access. Such opportunities are also narrowing: the Federal Communications Commission, for example, recently proposed ending its mobile hotspot grant program for school buses and libraries.View image in fullscreen“We’re very fiscally responsible because we have to be. We’re small and rural. We don’t have a large tax base,” Taylor said.When the money was frozen this summer, administrators’ minds went to the educators and kids who would be most affected. Some of it was meant to pay for a program through Appalachian State University that connects the district’s three dozen early career teachers with a mentor, helping them learn how to schedule their school days and manage classroom behavior.The program is part of the reason the district’s retention rate for early career teachers is 92%, Taylor said, noting the teachers have said how much the mentoring meant to them.Also frozen: free after-school care the district provides for about 250 children throughout the school year – the only after-school option in the community. Without the money, Cox said, schools would have had to cancel their after-school care or start charging families, a significant burden in a county with a median household income of about $50,000.Will assistance for immigrant students go away?The salary for Michelle Pelayo, the district’s migrant education program coordinator for nearly two decades, was also tied up in that pot of funding. Because agriculture is the county’s biggest industry, Pelayo’s work extends far beyond the students at the school. Each year, she works with the families of dozens of immigrant students who move to the county for seasonal work on farms, which generally involves tagging and bundling Christmas trees and harvesting pumpkins. Pelayo helps the families enroll their students, connects them with supplies for school and home, and serves as a Spanish translator for parent-teacher meetings – “whatever they need”, she said.Kitty Honeycutt, executive director of the Ashe county chamber of commerce, doesn’t know how the county’s agriculture industry would survive without the immigrant families Pelayo works with. “The need for guest workers is crucial for the agriculture industry. We have to have them,” she said.A couple of years ago, Pelayo had the idea to drive to Boone, North Carolina, where Appalachian State University’s campus sits, to gather unwanted appliances and supplies from students moving out of their dorm rooms at the end of the year to donate to immigrant families. She’s a “find a way or make a way” type of person, Honeycutt said.Cox is searching for how to keep Pelayo on if Ashe county loses these federal funds next year. She’s talked with county officials to see whether they could pay Pelayo’s salary, and has begun calculating how much the district would need to charge families to keep the after-school program running. Ideally, she’d know ahead of time and not the night before the district is set to receive the money.Around the nationDistricts across the country are grappling with similar questions. In Detroit, school leaders are preparing, at a minimum, to lose Title III money to teach English learners; more than 7,200 Detroit students received services funded by Title III in 2023.In Wyoming, the small, rural Sheridan county school district 3 is trying to budget without Title II, IV and V money – funding for improving teacher quality, updating technology and resources for rural and low-income schools, among other uses, the superintendent Chase Christensen said.Schools are trying to budget for cuts to other federal programs, too, such as Medicaid and food stamps. In Harrison school district 2, an urban district in Colorado Springs, schools rely on Medicaid to provide students with counseling, nursing and other services.The district projects that it could lose half the $15m it receives in Medicaid next school year.“It’s very, very stressful,” said Wendy Birhanzel, superintendent of Harrison school district 2. “For a while, it was every day you were hearing something different. And you couldn’t even keep up with: ‘What’s the latest information today?’ That’s another thing we told our staff: if you can, just don’t watch the news about education right now.”There’s another calculation for school leaders to make in conservative counties like Ashe, where 72% of the vote last year went to Donald Trump: objecting to the cuts without angering voters. When North Carolina’s attorney general, a Democrat, joined the lawsuit against the administration over the frozen funds this summer, some school administrators told state officials they couldn’t publicly sign on, fearing local backlash, said Jack Hoke, executive director of the North Carolina School Superintendents’ Association.Cox sees the effort to slash federal funds as a chance to show her community how Ashe county schools uses this money. She believes people are misguided in thinking their schools don’t need it, not malicious.“I know who our congresspeople are. I know they care about this area,” Cox said, adding that they care even if they do not fully grasp how the money is used. “It’s an opportunity for me to educate them.”If the education department is shuttered – which Trump said he plans to do in order to give more authority over education to states – she wants to be included in state-level discussions of how federal money flows to schools through North Carolina. Importantly, she also wants to know ahead of time what her schools might lose.As she made her rounds to each of the schools that first week back, Cox glanced down at her phone and looked up with a smile. “We have hot water,” she said while walking in the hall of Blue Ridge elementary school. It had lost hot water a few weeks earlier, but to Cox, this crisis was minor – one of many first-of-the-year hiccups she has come to expect.Still, it’s one worry she can put out of her mind as she looks ahead to a year of uncertainties.Marina Villeneuve contributed data analysis to this story, which was originally produced and published by the Hechinger Report. More
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‘We pray a visa comes before death’: Gaza’s injured children left in limbo
by Evelyn Reynolds 18 September 2025, 04:00
Mariam Sabbah had been fast asleep, huddled under a blanket with her siblings, when an Israeli missile tore through her home in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza, in the early hours of 1 March.View image in fullscreenThe missile narrowly missed the sleeping children but as the terrified nine-year-old ran to her parents, a second one hit. “I saw her coming towards me but suddenly there was another explosion and she vanished into the smoke,” says her mother, Fatma Salman.As the parents searched desperately for their children, they found Mariam lying unconscious in a pool of blood; her left arm was ripped off, shards of shrapnel had pierced through her small body, and she was bleeding heavily from her abdomen.As well as losing her arm, the blast left Mariam with severe abdominal and pelvic injuries from shrapnel tearing through her bladder, uterus, and bowel.“Mariam needs specialised paediatric reconstructive surgery,” says Dr Mohammed Tahir, a British surgeon who treated Mariam while volunteering at al-Aqsa hospital in Gaza. “Her arm amputation is also very high and requires limb lengthening and specialist prosthesis. Without this, it will be very difficult for her to live a normal life.”View image in fullscreenMariam is one of tens of thousands of people in Gaza who have been injured by Israeli military attacks over the past 23 months, which have also killed more than 64,000, mainly women and children.Repeated military strikes and attacks on Gaza’s hospitals and Israel’s blockade of basic goods and supplies into the territory have left the health sector devastated and doctors without the means to treat the sick, injured, and famished.Since October 2023, 7,672 patients, including 5,332 children, have been medically evacuated from Gaza for urgent treatment abroad, but trying to get a medical evacuation organised and approved is a slow, arduous and heavily vetted process.So far more than 700 patients – many of them children – have died waiting for permission to be granted to leave Gaza by Cogat, the Israeli government department responsible for approving medical evacuations, according to the WHO.View image in fullscreenMariam and her family secured the offer of surgical care from a specialist team in Ohio, and the little girl waited two months to be given permission from Cogat to leave Gaza, by which time her condition had deteriorated. She was finally evacuated to Egypt but was then stuck for months waiting for her US travel documents to be processed.Then, just a few days before her appointment at the embassy in Cairo to approve her visa, the US suddenly stopped issuing visas for Palestinians – including children – to be treated in US hospitals.View image in fullscreenThe decision followed an online pressure campaign by Laura Loomer, a far-right influencer close to Donald Trump, who had posted pictures and videos of evacuated patients from Gaza arriving on US soil on social media channels, asking: “Why are any Islamic invaders coming into the US under the Trump admin?”Despite the rhetoric surrounding the visa ban – with Loomer hailing the move as a victory, saying it would stop “this invasion of our country”, the US has only accepted a total of 48 medical evacuations from Gaza, according to the figures provided to the Guardian by WHO. In comparison, 3,995 and 1,450 critically injured people have been evacuated to Egypt and the UAE respectively from Gaza. The UK has so far accepted 13.Medical NGOs say that around 20 severely wounded children have been affected by the ban, and are now stuck in transit countries with nowhere to go and with the treatment needed to save them dangerously out of reach.Since receiving the news that she had been blocked from receiving treatment, Salman has been unable to console her daughter. “She won’t leave her bed or stop crying,” she says. “Mariam had placed all her hopes of getting better on her medical treatment in the US.”A few wards down, and also now stuck in Egypt after the US visa ban, is 18-year-old Nasser al-Najjar, who can no longer bear to look at himself in the mirror.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreenAfter becoming displaced, Najjar and his family were sheltering at a school in Jabaliya, northern Gaza, when it was targeted in an Israeli airstrike in January. The 18-year-old suffered devastating injuries to his face and jaw that left him completely disfigured; he lost his left eye, his nose was severed and his jaw shattered – leaving him unable to breathe, eat or speak properly.“I once took pride in my appearance but now I don’t even recognise myself,” says Najjar, his voice raspy and breathless.The teenager requires extensive reconstructive and cosmetic surgery that is not available in Egypt and doctors have warned that without the operations, his condition will deteriorate.He has been offered treatment at the El Paso children’s hospital in Texas, where specialist doctors are waiting to operate on him, but it is now uncertain if Najjar will ever be permitted to go.View image in fullscreenThe weight of uncertainty takes a heavy mental toll. Ahmed Duweik already suffers from phantom limb pain; sharp, stabbing sensations that come and go unpredictably and leave him screaming in agony. But since learning that his medical trip to the US might not go ahead, the 10-year-old has become withdrawn and emotionally unresponsive.View image in fullscreenAhmed was also asleep at home when the missiles struck the Nuseirat refugee camp in the middle of the night. During the bombing, he suffered horrific injuries with shrapnel penetrating his entire body; he was left with an amputated arm, soft tissue loss in his right thigh, and severe nerve and vascular damage.Ahmed requires complex reconstructive surgery and prosthetic fitting that are not available in Egypt. Since the attack, he has developed severe psychological trauma and is unable to sleep, waking up every night crying and screaming, clinging to his mother in fear.Doctors warn that if Ahmed’s treatment is delayed any further, his condition will continue to worsen.Dr Mosab Nasser, chief executive of FAJR Global, the medical aid organisation that managed to evacuate the children from Gaza and was due to arrange their surgical care in the US, said the visa ban had imposed an “indirect death penalty on the most innocent victims of this war”.View image in fullscreen“We’re talking about a handful of children suffering from severe, life threatening injuries,” he says. “These medical evacuations are a lifeline for these kids and we urge the US government to reject such divisive rhetoric and reaffirm its role as a temporary safe haven for those who so desperately need it.”In a statement to the Guardian, a US state department spokesperson confirmed it had paused the visas and would take the time necessary to conduct a full and thorough review, adding: “There are many countries around the world with great hospitals that should be stepping up to provide assistance, including France, Australia, UK, and Canada to name a few.”For now, a bleak Egyptian hospital has become the children’s home, where they have been stuck in limbo since the visa ban, with no designated doctors and limited specialist expertise to treat their extensive war injuries. The families are confined to small, sweltering and cramped rooms. None of them have any idea what comes next.“We feel so powerless,” says Khatib, as she sits beside her son. “All we can do is pray that his visa approval comes before death does.” More
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Rinse and repeat: US vaccine hearing on unpublished study debates same myths
by Evelyn Reynolds 10 September 2025, 09:00
A congressional hearing on Tuesday titled “How the Corruption of Science Has Impacted Public Perception and Policies Regarding Vaccines” largely consisted of a debate over an unpublished study comparing chronic illnesses in children who received vaccines with those who didn’t.The study was lead-authored by Marcus Zervos of Henry Ford Health, completed in 2020, and never submitted for publication, according to testimony during the hearing. Senator Ron Johnson, the chair of the subcommittee for the hearing, and the witness Aaron Siri, a lawyer who has represented RFK Jr and the anti-vaccination non-profit Informed Consent Action Network, both claimed the study was not submitted because the authors would lose their jobs were it to be published.Zervos and the other authors of the study were not present at the hearing. The study, which has never been peer-reviewed, is not currently available to the public as a pre-print or in any other form.Henry Ford Health’s communication office did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.The only information that is currently publicly available about the study comes from the hearing itself, including witness testimony and a brief trailer for a documentary from the Informed Consent Action Network. The trailer says the study found that “amongst the unvaccinated group, there was zero brain dysfunction, zero diabetes, zero behavioral problems, zero learning disabilities, zero intellectual disabilities, zero tics and zero other psychological disabilities”.The trailer also includes a clip of Donald Trump saying: “A few decades ago, one in 10,000 children had autism. Today, it’s one in 31.”Witnesses on both sides of the debate during the hearing agreed that the study in question found no link between vaccines and autism.Jake Scott, a clinical associate professor of infectious diseases at Stanford – and the only physician who served as a witness during the hearing – had a different explanation as to why the study was not published.In his testimony, Scott said that the study is “fundamentally flawed”, adding that its core problem was that “vaccinated children had twice the follow up time and substantially more healthcare visits than unvaccinated children”. More healthcare visits mean more opportunities to be diagnosed with conditions like ADHD.Scott went on to explain that “the study reports zero ADHD cases among 1,000s of unvaccinated children. How is that possible with a national prevalence at 11%? That’s highly unlikely, unless conditions went undiagnosed.” Scott noted that the study also claimed a six to eightfold increase in ear infections among vaccinated children, but there is no plausible scientific explanation as to why vaccines would increase ear infections.This finding is consistent with past research showing that parents who do not vaccinate their children are also less likely to have their children treated for health conditions in the medical system. Conditions that were not diagnosed or treated would not have shown up in the study, which relied on medical records, according to hearing testimony.Siri claimed the authors of the study ran sensitivity analyses to account for the differences in medical care. These are not available to the public.As a point of comparison, Scott referenced a Danish study published this July in Annals of Internal Medicine which investigated whether childhood vaccines were linked to 50 different conditions, including many of the same conditions from the unpublished study, like ADHD, autism, asthma, food allergies and eczema. The Danish study looked at outcomes in over a million vaccinated children and 15,000 unvaccinated children, while the unpublished study looked at 18,500 vaccinated children and 2,000 unvaccinated children, according to hearing testimony.The Danish study found no statistically significant increase in risk for any of the conditions investigated, and that vaccinated children experienced lower rates of certain conditions, like ulcerative colitis.Johnson and Siri expressed skepticism over the Danish study, noting that the authors have not released the de-identified raw data they used for their conclusions. No data is available about the unpublished study.Later in the hearing, the conversation turned towards skepticism about vaccines in general and the Covid-19 vaccine specifically.Some graphics that Johnson shared left out critical information. For example, a line chart he introduced accurately showed that measles death rates had already begun to decline significantly before vaccines were introduced in the 1960s, due to other factors like improved sanitation, healthcare access and nutrition, but the chart stops in 1960. After vaccines were introduced and widely adopted, both measles cases and death rates declined to nearly zero.Measles was effectively eliminated in the US in 2000, but cases reemerged when vaccine adoption decreased. There have been 35 measles outbreaks in 2025, according to the CDC. At least two US children and one adult have died of measles this year.Scott, the Stanford witness, had trouble answering some questions based on spurious facts. He was silent for a moment when Johnson asked him “Did you believe when Fauci told us that the [Covid] mRNA shot would stay in the arm?” There is no credible evidence that Fauci ever said this.Toby Rogers, a fellow at the Brownstone institute whose study linking vaccines and autism was retracted said: “I believe we are in the midst of one of the greatest crimes in human history,” referring to vaccines. In now-deleted tweets, Rogers has called for hearings similar to the Nuremberg trials for public health officials who promote vaccines.When Senator Richard Blumenthal, the ranking member of the hearing subcommittee, asked if Rogers believes the Covid-19 vaccine is comparable to the Holocaust, several audience members applauded. More
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Migrant and Seasonal Head Start is a ‘bridge’ for many US families. An order threatens its survival
by Evelyn Reynolds 9 September 2025, 12:00
It has been a challenging year for Head Start.The Trump administration first froze funding and cut staff, forcing many centers to close temporarily or permanently. It then asked Congress to eliminate the early childhood education program in a leaked budget proposal (the White House ultimately reversed course).Then, in July, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released an executive order excluding some immigrants from accessing a range of federal programs, including Head Start. Its argument: Head Start is equivalent to public welfare, which unauthorized immigrants have not been able to access since the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWOR) of 1996. And Head Start advocates are waiting to learn whether enforcement will begin this week or sometime soon.The term “unauthorized” includes not only undocumented people but also those who entered the US legally but do not qualify for public benefits, such as asylum applicants; trafficking victims; and recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca), a program that protects people who came to the US as undocumented minors from deportation and allows them to work.Head Start centers have said they have no protocols for verifying eligibility. The program doesn’t, for example, gather information on citizenship status.Attorneys general from 20 states and a coalition of Head Start organizations filed separate suits in federal court, arguing that the order was unconstitutional. Following the lawsuits, the government backtracked, though only slightly: it delayed enforcement of the rule until 10 September, pending the result of the legal challenges.Experts say this executive order is a broader attempt to disenfranchise immigrants from accessing a wide range of public services. “On its face, this appears designed to ensure that virtually all public supports are unavailable to unauthorized persons,” said Mark Greenberg, who formerly worked as deputy general counsel in the Department of Health and Human Services and also served in its administration for children and families.He said that the government has “a very, very difficult case … The legal question for the courts at this point will be, ‘Is Head Start similar to welfare?’”View image in fullscreenHe believes that this argument will be very difficult to prove. First, welfare is almost always defined as cash assistance or its equivalents, welfare checks or electronic benefit transfer (EBT) cards, used for food stamps. Head Start programming is neither. In addition, PRWOR does not give federal agencies the power to define what counts as a public benefit. So the government has to argue that Congress always intended to define Head Start as welfare – something it has never done.Should the executive order stand, it’s hard to estimate the possible impact on Head Start. Estimates suggest that the vast majority of the nearly 755,000 children currently enrolled are US citizens. Only 1.5 million children under 18 living in the US in 2023 were unauthorized, the most recent year for which statistics are available.However, one particular part of Head Start is likely to feel the impact more deeply.Migrant and Seasonal Head Start (MSHS) provides early childhood education and services to approximately 25,000 children whose families work in agricultural labor. These children range in age from infancy to five years old, and the program currently operates in 34 states.The term “migrant” as used in MSHS does not refer to citizenship status. “In our world, a migrant means a family that is moving within a certain distance from their home in pursuit of work,” said Cleo Rodriguez Jr, executive director of the National Migrant and Seasonal Head Start Association (NMSHSA).Nevertheless, between 37-45% of all farm workers are unauthorized and the order “raises the concern of chilling effects that go far beyond the families [in Head Start]”, Greenberg said. Parents may choose not to enroll eligible children to protect unauthorized family or friends from discovery, denying them the opportunities for social mobility and education that Migrant and Seasonal Head Start provides. And enforcement would theoretically apply to all families seeking Head Start services.Soon after Head Start’s creation in 1965, program administrators realized that itinerant farm workers could not enroll their children in one location year-round. Migrant Head Start began in 1969 to support these families. Seasonal Head Start was added in 1999 as warmer weather due to climate change enabled more agricultural workers to work year-round in one location.View image in fullscreenMSHS works the same as the other Head Starts in a few ways. It also serves infants and children up to age five. All enrolled children receive health services such as developmental and vision screenings and nutritional support.And according to Rodriguez, some of the key features of Head Start’s larger programs began with standards set by Migrant and Seasonal Head Start. The program served children agedup to three years from the beginning, whereas Early Head Start only started in 1995. Similarly, it always offered extended hours so agricultural workers could spend as long in the field as necessary; conventional Head Start did not expand to full-day and year-round care until 1998.“The program that supports agriculture families is really the model for all of Head Start,” Rodriguez said. “We’ve always served the infants and toddlers. We’ve always done the extended hours. We’ve always been flexible.”Every program, by necessity, is different, dictated by the length and yield of each harvest season. “What works in Nebraska doesn’t necessarily work in central Florida, and what works in central Florida doesn’t necessarily work in central Michigan,” he said.Variation even occurs at the same center from year to year. It’s common, Rodriguez said, for growers to ask MSHS staff to extend the program on short notice if the weather suddenly becomes more favorable.MSHS can even be open six or seven days a week and for lengthy hours. “Programs can start deploying buses at 4.35 in the morning, and get the kids to school and put them back to bed,” Rodriguez said.The flexibility that makes MSHS so useful for growers and families also makes it challenging to study, according to early childhood researcher Michael Lopez, who helped design Head Start studies while employed by the administration for children and families from 1991 to 2005.“We would do an assessment at the beginning of the year, an assessment at the end of the year, and you look at progress over the year,” he explained. “A defined academic experience for an MSHS kid could be three months in this location, three months in that location,” he said. In addition, “a lot of these measures were developed for predominantly English-speaking classrooms”, not designed for students learning the language.Nevertheless, Lopez said existing research supports the value of early education on children’s health and development no matter the program. “There’s no question in my mind that it has positive effects,” he said.View image in fullscreenMultiple studies suggest that children of migrant farm workers have among the highest high-school dropout rates in the country, due to a combination of language barriers, frequent moves and even a need to work to support their families.So when Rodriguez kept encountering MSHS graduates who not only completed high school but also went to college, one of his first projects as NMSHSA executive director was to start a summer internship program in Washington DC. Since 2012, 49 interns have worked for organizations including United Farm Workers, UnidosUS and the National Hispanic Caucus of State Legislators.Maria Espinoza participated in the program in 2021 and worked in agricultural research and policy before starting law school at American University this year. The youngest of seven, she was born in South Carolina to migrant parents during the tobacco harvest. When the family settled in the agricultural community of Immokalee, Florida, they sent her to a center run by Redlands Christian Migrant Association (RCMA).“It was one of the first organizations that we interacted with after we moved,” Espinoza said. She recalls walking to and from class with her parents, interacting with her teachers and her parents attending meetings after their long hours working in the fields.“They were kind of a vehicle for how we settled into our community and the US as a whole,” she said, describing RCMA staff and centers as “pillars of the community”.Two of her siblings found employment at RCMA, with Espinoza’s eldest sister eventually launching her own daycare business. Espinoza’s nieces and nephews now attend RCMA’s charter school.“[MSHS] does so much to fill all those gaps and make a bridge so that both the families and their children are able to succeed,” Espinoza said.Even if the executive order is struck down, families are already more hesitant to engage, according to Rodriguez. Some MSHS parents have already been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice).“My parents were both migrant farm workers, and I also did work when I was a kid,” Rodriguez said. “So this is very personal to me.”However, he still has a deep belief not only in the benefits of MSHS but also in America as a whole.“We’re still the greatest country with the greatest opportunities,” he said. More

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Migrant and Seasonal Head Start is a ‘bridge’ for many US families. An order threatens its survival

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