Federal agents on the lookout for undocumented immigrants to deport paid a visit recently to the offices of a state-funded children’s shelter in the Florida Keys.

Trying to find the undocumented parents of a child living in the shelter, the agents staked out the parking lot of the office building, assuming they would eventually come there to visit their youngster.

At a program dedicated to the welfare of families, federal agents were seeking to tear one apart.

The stakeout, detailed during a meeting this month between Florida’s privately-operated foster care providers and the state, is just one example of how the Trump administration’s mass-deportation campaign is encircling vulnerable children who were previously off-limits — and squeezing the social welfare agencies tasked with caring for them.

Since Donald Trump began his second term, his administration has directed immigration agents to target unaccompanied minors, moved to cut contracts that fund their legal representation and sent Homeland Security agents to homes where unaccompanied children are released to conduct welfare checks. In at least one case, it has leaned on Florida’s state government to violate its own rules and laws by sharing information about the immigrant children in its care.

And earlier this month, the Department of Homeland Security announced a new policy that will clear the way for the agency to deport children who are in the United States as documented victims of abuse, neglect or abandonment under a classification known as Special Immigrant Juveniles.

The new guidance leaves unprotected those children who lack the ability to apply for lawful permanent residency because visas aren’t available — at the very moment when there is a years-long backlog for green cards.

“While children are waiting for a visa, they have no formal immigration status and no automatic protection from deportation,” said Robert Latham, a University of Miami law professor. “Despite the lack of formal protection, these children have never been targeted for removal by any prior administration.”

In a statement to the Miami Herald Wednesday, a DHS spokeswoman said that Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem “take the responsibility to protect children seriously and will continue to work with federal law enforcement to reunite children with their families.”

“Many of the unaccompanied children who came across the border are victims of smugglers and sex traffickers,” said Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for public affairs at the department. “DHS is leading efforts to conduct welfare checks on these children to ensure they are safe and not being exploited.”

McLaughlin added that Noem and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “have already reunited over 5,000 unaccompanied children with a relative or safe guardian.” She also emphatically denied that “ICE staked out a state-run children’s shelter or the offices of the provider of the shelter in the Florida Keys to arrest illegal aliens.”

“This is yet another attempt to demonize our brave ICE law enforcement officers. ICE officers are facing a 500% increase in assaults against them as they put their lives on the line to arrest murderers, rapists, and gang members,” she said.

Child welfare providers, jarred by the state’s controversial decision this month to turn over a 17-year-old foster child to ICE, sought guidance during a meeting with Florida’s Department of Children and Families.

“There are a lot of raids going on in the Florida Keys, so I assume this is not going to be something that’s a one-time thing,” Esther Jacobo, head of Citrus Health Network’s child welfare program in Miami-Dade and Monroe counties, said of the parking lot stake-out during the meeting.

But Florida administrators were hesitant to give much direction to the providers trying to balance their obligations to the at-risk children in their care, the state agency that funds them and the federal immigration authorities that have become increasingly assertive in their efforts to take undocumented migrants into custody.

“I don’t have that written guidance. I’m also hesitant to a certain degree to put some things out as they have been shifting,” said Amanda VanLaningham, DCF’s deputy assistant secretary. “From a very high-level perspective…things have been changing so quickly.”

‘Things are Changing’

The dilemma over what to do with abused, neglected or abandoned children who are undocumented was laid bare on June 9, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents removed a Honduran teenager named Henry from his Pensacola foster home in handcuffs and shackles.

Henry, who is not being fully named by the Herald to protect his privacy, was 13 when he illegally crossed the southwest border with his mother. He ping-ponged between an uncle, his mother – who was deported and had been accused of mistreating him – and state care in Texas before he drifted to Escambia County in search of his brother, and work.

DCF defended its decision to call ICE in a statement to the Herald, saying that Henry had “absconded and due to his actions, was intercepted by Florida law enforcement.” A spokesperson said that in Henry’s case, the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the federal agency responsible for caring for unaccompanied minors, was “the appropriate legal custody.”

But DCF’s decision to surrender Henry to ICE was in contravention of a 1995 agency rule – which is still standing – that forbids administrators from acting upon a child’s immigration status.

That rule, Latham recently wrote on his blog, comports with state law, “which only permits disclosure of information about a dependent child to a small list of people and entities without a court order.” ICE isn’t on the list, wrote Latham, associate director of U.M.’s Children & Youth Law Clinic.

“A judge [has] to authorize the disclosure after a full hearing on the need for it,” said Latham, noting that such a hearing did not occur in Henry’s case.

Some providers say they are continuing to follow the rule, regardless.

“We’ve instructed our case management agencies not to provide information to ICE, per the code, and that they require a court order,” Carol DeLoach, chief executive officer of Communities Connected for Kids, the community-based care provider based in Port St. Lucie, said at the meeting with DCF.

DeLoach and others also had several questions for DCF administrators: Can agencies provide care to a child who lacks a legal immigration status? Can they hand a child over to otherwise fit relatives if the family members are undocumented? How can administrators perform an adequate background check on prospective caregivers without a Social Security number?

“Things are changing, and they’re changing very frequently,” said VanLaningham. “The hesitancy of putting a few of these things down right now is you’re going to start potentially creating a cascade of information. You send one out and then it’s going to be updated a month later.”

Case in point: On June 6, Homeland Security issued the policy “alert” that the agency would no longer consider children under a special classification for abused, abandoned and neglected youth for deferred action. That means they will not get deportation protections and work permits while they wait to apply for their green cards, which can take years.

“It’s disgraceful,” said Modesto Abety, a children’s advocate who headed the Miami-Dade Children’s Trust for 13 years before retiring. “Clearly, these kids are at great risk. Returning them exposes them to greater risk. When we use them as pawns to meet quotas for how many immigrants must be deported it’s shocking.”

Gov. Ron DeSantis’ office did not respond to a request seeking comment on how the governor envisions the state’s child welfare agency playing a role in immigration enforcement alongside the Trump administration.

Rocket Dockets and Welfare Checks

Advocates say unaccompanied kids now have less time to find attorneys because their cases are being fast tracked in “rocket dockets” and scheduled for hearings within weeks of entering federal custody. The Trump administration slashed funding for the children’s attorneys, too. Though a judge has temporarily blocked the cuts, some youth were deported while attorneys were unavailable, advocates said.

ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations unit also began a program of welfare checks for unaccompanied immigrant children in February, citing “alarming instances” of sexual abuse and forced labor by unvetted sponsors. The agency said the checks were meant to ensure the kids’ needs are met and they are living in safe environments.

But advocates worry that the home visits will result in a widening net of deportations as immigration agents — who have little or no child welfare experience — round up undocumented immigrants they encounter along the way.

The length children spend in federal custody has ballooned because undocumented relatives and sponsors are hesitant to take them in, service providers told the Herald.

“It really breaks my heart because a lot of these kids have already gone through persecution, trauma, trafficking,” said Shaina Aber, the executive director of Acacia Center for Justice, a national organization that represents unaccompanied migrant children. “And they have enormous potential to bounce back from those traumas if they are provided with the type of dignity in care and support that they need.”

Florida’s Department of Children and Families has declined to discuss its plans for dealing with children in the state’s care who are undocumented, or the meeting earlier this month to address how administrators and caseworkers handle the conflict. DCF also declined to explain its role in Henry’s detention – though the agency did confirm that Henry had been placed in the resettlement office’s custody.

For more than a week, the agency has declined to tell the Herald how many children in its care lack immigration documents, or even the total number of kids receiving child welfare services from the state. DCF’s website indicates that about 14,965 children are in out-of-home care with the state, with about another 7,060 receiving some services while still living with their parents.

Meanwhile, scores of migrant children have been resettled by the federal government in Florida, where, according to official data, 1,907 unaccompanied minors were released to federal resettlement sponsors between October 2024 and May 2025.

Florida does not publish data on how many unaccompanied children are currently housed in the state, DCF said previously. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, there are 16 shelters in Florida that currently contract with the Office of Refugee Resettlement Residential Care Program that provides funding to DCF for services – a federal program that provides funding to DCF.

Intelligence sharing

This is not the first time that state officials have left providers in the dark — and kids twisting in the wind — over what to do when immigration enforcement actions conflict with child protection efforts.

In 2022, DeSantis took action against what he said was the “clandestine resettlement” of migrant children in Florida by the Biden administration. He directed Florida child care regulators to stop issuing or renewing the licenses of facilities that contract with the federal government to care for undocumented children and teens who are waiting to be reunited with their families or vetted sponsors.

The effort was largely seen as a way to force these kids out of the state. At the time, providers said the state was offering little to no information about the steps they needed to take to ensure the state’s directive did not affect the children’s safety and well-being.

Now with Trump in the White House, the DeSantis administration has proposed that state and federal authorities work together seamlessly to find, arrest and deport immigrants in the country illegally, using its agencies – including the Department of Health – to help with “intelligence sharing operations.”

In the trenches, the caseworkers and administrators of Florida’s 18 private child welfare agencies under contract with DCF to provide foster care, adoption and other child welfare services have found it increasingly difficult to navigate the shifting landscape.

During the meeting with DCF, one provider said her agency was struggling to keep undocumented children out of foster care, but is uncertain whether state and federal dollars could properly be spent on prevention efforts.

“We have, I think, almost close to 30 [undocumented] kids now that are in our system, and I’m small,” the woman said.

Recently, the woman said, her agency discovered a few children in the agency’s care had previously been the subject of “ICE orders.”

In the Florida Keys, the operators of a state-contracted shelter approached by immigration authorities declined to disclose where the child’s undocumented parents could be located, Jacobo, a former DCF secretary and the leader of Miami’s foster care agency, said in the meeting.

In the ensuing days, federal agents apparently used the child’s presence at the shelter as bait to locate the parents by “staking out” the agency’s parking lot, Jacobo said. When contacted by the Herald, Jacobo declined to identify the family or discuss the case.

The administrator of another foster care agency said later in the meeting that immigration agents had staked out her parking lot, as well.

“We’ve seen all the news about what is happening,” VanLaningham said during the meeting, “and appreciate the very difficult situation that a lot of our families in this area — and in your area specifically — are experiencing.”