Mckenzie Funk, Propublica

Immigration agents have put civilians’ lives at risk using more than their guns.

An agent in Houston put a teenage citizen into a chokehold, wrapping his arm around the boy’s neck, choking him so hard that his neck had red welts hours later. A black-masked agent in Los Angeles pressed his knee into a woman’s neck while she was handcuffed; she then appeared to pass out. An agent in Massachusetts jabbed his finger and thumb into the neck and arteries of a young father who refused to be separated from his wife and 1-year-old daughter. The man’s eyes rolled back in his head and he started convulsing.

After George Floyd’s murder by a police officer six years ago in Minneapolis — less than a mile from where an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed Renee Good last week — police departments and federal agencies banned chokeholds and other moves that can restrict breathing or blood flow.

But those tactics are back, now at the hands of agents conducting President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign.

Examples are scattered across social media. ProPublica found more than 40 cases over the past year of immigration agents using these life-threatening maneuvers on immigrants, citizens and protesters. The agents are usually masked, their identities secret. The government won’t say if any of them have been punished.

In nearly 20 cases, agents appeared to use chokeholds and other neck restraints that the Department of Homeland Security prohibits “unless deadly force is authorized.”

About two dozen videos show officers kneeling on people’s necks or backs or keeping them face down on the ground while already handcuffed. Such tactics are not prohibited outright but are often discouraged, including by federal trainers, in part because using them for a prolonged time risks asphyxiation.

We reviewed footage with a panel of eight former police officers and law enforcement experts. They were appalled.

This is what bad policing looks like, they said. And it puts everyone at risk.

“I arrested dozens upon dozens of drug traffickers, human smugglers, child molesters — some of them will resist,” said Eric Balliet, who spent more than two decades working at Homeland Security Investigations and Border Patrol, including in the first Trump administration. “I don’t remember putting anybody in a chokehold. Period.”

“If this was one of my officers, he or she would be facing discipline,” said Gil Kerlikowske, a longtime police chief in Seattle who also served as Customs and Border Protection commissioner under President Barack Obama. “You have these guys running around in fatigues, with masks, with ‘Police’ on their uniform,” but they aren’t acting like professional police.

Over the past week, the conduct of agents has come under intense scrutiny after an ICE officer in Minneapolis killed Good, a mother of three. The next day, a Border Patrol agent in Portland, Oregon, shot a man and woman in a hospital parking lot.

Top administration officials rushed to defend the officers. Speaking about the agent who shot Good, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said, “This is an experienced officer who followed his training.”

Officials said the same thing to us after we showed them footage of officers using prohibited chokeholds. Federal agents have “followed their training to use the least amount of force necessary,” department spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said.

“Officers act heroically to enforce the law and protect American communities,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said.

Both DHS and the White House lauded the “utmost professionalism” of their agents.

Our compilation of incidents is far from complete. Just as the government does not count how often it detains citizens or smashes through vehicle windows during immigration arrests, it does not publicly track how many times agents have choked civilians or otherwise inhibited their breathing or blood flow. We gathered cases by searching legal filings, social media posts and local press reports in English and Spanish.

Given the lack of any count over time, it’s impossible to know for certain how agents’ current use of the banned and dangerous tactics compares with earlier periods.

But former immigration officials told us they rarely heard of such incidents during their long tenures. They also recalled little pushback when DHS formally banned chokeholds and other tactics in 2023; it was merely codifying the norm.

That norm has now been broken.

One of the citizens whom agents put in a chokehold was 16 years old.

Tenth grader Arnoldo Bazan and his father were getting McDonald’s before school when their car was pulled over by unmarked vehicles. Masked immigration agents started banging on their windows. As Arnoldo’s undocumented father, Arnulfo Bazan Carrillo, drove off, the terrified teenager began filming on his phone. The video shows the agents repeatedly ramming the Bazans’ car during a slow chase through the city.

Bazan Carrillo eventually parked and ran into a restaurant supply store. When Arnoldo saw agents taking his father violently to the ground, Arnoldo went inside too, yelling at the agents to stop.

One agent put Arnoldo in a chokehold while another pressed a knee into his father’s neck. “I was going to school!” the boy pleaded. He said later that when he told the agent he was a citizen and a minor, the agent didn’t stop.

“I started screaming with everything I had, because I couldn’t even breathe,” Arnoldo told ProPublica, showing where the agent’s hands had closed around his throat. “I felt like I was going to pass out and die.”

DHS’ McLaughlin accused Arnoldo’s dad of ramming his car “into a federal law enforcement vehicle,” but he was never charged for that, and the videos we reviewed do not support this claim. Our examination of his criminal history — separate from any immigration violations — found only that Bazan Carrillo pleaded guilty a decade ago to misdemeanor driving while intoxicated.

McLaughlin also said the younger Bazan elbowed an officer in the face as he was detained, which the teen denies. She said that Arnoldo was taken into custody to confirm his identity and make sure he didn’t have any weapons. McLaughlin did not answer whether the agent’s conduct was justified.

Experts who reviewed video of the Bazans’ arrests could make no sense of the agents’ actions.

“Why are you in the middle of a store trying to grab somebody?” said Marc Brown, a former police officer turned instructor who taught ICE and Border Patrol officers at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers. “Your arm underneath the neck, like a choking motion? No! The knee on the neck? Absolutely not.”

DHS revamped its training curriculum after George Floyd’s murder to underscore those tactics were out of bounds, Brown said. “DHS specifically was very big on no choking,” he said. “We don’t teach that. They were, like, hardcore against it. They didn’t want to see anything with the word ‘choke.’”

After agents used another banned neck restraint — a carotid hold — a man started convulsing and passed out.

In early November, ICE agents in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, stopped a young father, Carlos Sebastian Zapata Rivera, as he drove with his family. They had come for his undocumented wife, whom they targeted after she was charged with assault for allegedly stabbing a co-worker in the hand with scissors.

Body camera footage from the local police, obtained by ProPublica, captured much of what happened. The couple’s 1-year-old daughter began crying. Agents surrounded the car, looking in through open doors.

According to the footage, an agent told Zapata Rivera that if his wife wouldn’t come out, they would have to arrest him, too — and their daughter would be sent into the foster system. The agent recounted the conversation to a local cop: “Technically, I can arrest both of you,” he said. “If you no longer have a child, because the child is now in state custody, you’re both gonna be arrested. Do you want to give your child to the state?”

Zapata Rivera, who has a pending asylum claim, clung to his family. His wife kept saying she wouldn’t go anywhere without her daughter, whom she said was still breastfeeding. Zapata Rivera wouldn’t let go of either of them.

Federal agents seemed conflicted on how to proceed. “I refuse to have us videotaped throwing someone to the ground while they have a child in their hands,” one ICE agent told a police officer at the scene.

But after more than an hour, agents held down Zapata Rivera’s arms. One, who Zapata Rivera’s lawyer says wore a baseball cap reading “Ne Quis Effugiat” — Latin for “So That None Will Escape” — pressed his thumbs into the arteries on Zapata Rivera’s neck. The young man then appeared to pass out as bystanders screamed.

The technique is known as a carotid restraint. The two carotid arteries carry 70% of the brain’s blood flow; block them, and a person can quickly lose consciousness. The tactic can cause strokes, seizures, brain damage — and death.

“Even milliseconds or seconds of interrupted blood flow to the brain can have serious consequences,” Dr. Altaf Saadi, a neurologist and associate professor at Harvard Medical School, told us. Saadi said she couldn’t comment on specific cases, “but there is no amount of training or method of applying pressure on the neck that is foolproof in terms of avoiding neurologic damage.”

In a bystander video of Zapata Rivera’s arrest, his eyes roll back in his head and he suffers an apparent seizure, convulsing so violently that his daughter, seated in his lap, shakes with him.

“Carotid restraints are prohibited unless deadly force is authorized,” DHS’ use-of-force policy states. Deadly force is authorized only when an officer believes there’s an “imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury” and there is “no alternative.”

In a social media post after the incident and in its statement to ProPublica, DHS did not cite a deadly threat. Instead, it referenced the charges against Zapata Rivera’s wife and suggested he had only pretended to have a medical crisis while refusing help from paramedics. “Imagine FAKING a seizure to help a criminal escape justice,” the post said.

“These statements were lies,” Zapata Rivera alleges in an ongoing civil rights lawsuit he filed against the ICE agent who used the carotid restraint. His lawyer told ProPublica that Zapata Rivera was disoriented after regaining consciousness; the lawsuit says he was denied medical attention. (Representatives for Zapata Rivera declined our requests for an interview with him. His wife has been released on bond, and her assault case awaits trial.)

A police report and bodycam footage from Fitchburg officers at the scene, obtained via a public records request, back up Zapata Rivera’s account of being denied assistance. “He’s fine,” an agent told paramedics, according to footage. The police report says Zapata Rivera wanted medical attention but “agents continued without stopping.”

Saadi, the Harvard neurologist, said that as a general matter, determining whether someone had a seizure is “not something even neurologists can do accurately just by looking at it.”

DHS policy bars using chokeholds and carotid restraints just because someone is resisting arrest. Agents are doing it anyway.

When DHS issued restrictions on chokeholds and carotid restraints, it stated that the moves “must not be used as a means to control non-compliant subjects or persons resisting arrest.” Deadly force “shall not be used solely to prevent the escape of a fleeing subject.”

But videos reviewed by ProPublica show that agents have been using these restraints to do just that.

In Los Angeles in June, masked officers from ICE, Border Patrol and other federal agencies pepper-sprayed and then tackled another citizen, Luis Hipolito. As Hipolito struggled to get away, one of the agents put him in a chokehold. Another pointed a Taser at bystanders filming.

Then Hipolito’s body began to convulse — a possible seizure. An onlooker warned the agents, “You gonna let him die.”

When officers make a mistake in the heat of the moment, said Danny Murphy, a former deputy commissioner of the Baltimore Police Department, they need to “correct it as quickly as possible.”

That didn’t happen in Hipolito’s case. The footage shows the immigration agent not only wrapping his arm around Hipolito’s neck as he takes him down but also sticking with the chokehold after Hipolito is pinned on the ground.

The agent’s actions are “dangerous and unreasonable,” Murphy said.

Asked about the case, McLaughlin, the DHS spokesperson, said that Hipolito was arrested for assaulting an ICE officer. Hipolito’s lawyers did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Hipolito limped into court days after the incident. Another citizen who was with him the day of the incident was also charged, but her case was dropped. Hipolito pleaded not guilty and goes to trial in February.

Some of the conduct in the footage isn’t banned — but it’s discouraged and dangerous.

A video from Los Angeles shows a Colombian-born TikTokker who often filmed ICE apparently passed out after officers pulled her from her Tesla and knelt on her back or neck. Another video shows a DoorDash driver in Portland, Oregon, screaming for air as four officers pin him face down in the street. “Aire, aire, aire,” he says. “No puedo respirar” — I can’t breathe. Then: “Estoy muriendo” — I’m dying. A third video, from Chicago, shows an agent straddling a citizen and repeatedly pressing his face into the asphalt. Onlookers yell that the man can’t breathe.

Placing a knee on a prone subject’s neck or weight on their back isn’t banned under DHS’ use-of-force policy, but it can be dangerous — and the longer it goes on, the higher the risk that the person won’t be able to breathe.

“You really don’t want to spend that amount of time just trying to get somebody handcuffed,” said Kerlikowske, the former CPB commissioner, of the video of the arrest in Portland.

Brown, the former federal instructor and now a lead police trainer at the University of South Carolina, echoed that. “Once you get them handcuffed, you get them up, get them out of there,” he said. “If they’re saying they can’t breathe, hurry up.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSeAwZN8mnU

Taking a person down to the ground and restraining them there can be an appropriate way to get them in handcuffs, said Seth Stoughton, a former police officer turned law professor who also works at the University of South Carolina. But officers have long known to make it quick. By the mid-1990s, the federal government was advising officers against keeping people prolongedly in a prone position.

When a federal agent kneeled on the neck of an intensive care nurse in August, she said she understood the danger she was in and tried to scream.

“I knew that the amount of pressure being placed on the back of my neck could definitely hurt me,” said Amanda Trebach, a citizen and activist who was arrested in Los Angeles while monitoring immigration agents. “I was having a hard time breathing because my chest was on the ground.”

McLaughlin, the DHS spokesperson, said Trebach impeded agents’ vehicles and struck them with her signs and fists.

Trebach denies this. She was released without any charges.

Protesters have also been choked and strangled.

In the fall, a protester in Chicago refused to stand back after a federal agent told him to do so. Suddenly, the agent grabbed the man by the throat and slammed him to the ground.

“No, no!” one bystander exclaims. “He’s not doing anything!”

DHS’ McLaughlin did not respond to questions about the incident.

Along with two similar choking incidents at protests outside of ICE facilities, this is one of the few videos in which the run-up to the violence is clear. And the experts were aghast.

“Without anything I could see as even remotely a deadly force threat, he immediately goes for the throat,” said Ashley Heiberger, a retired police captain from Pennsylvania who frequently testifies in use-of-force cases. Balliet, the former immigration official, said the agent turned the scene into a “pissing contest” that was “explicitly out of control.”

“It’s so clearly excessive and ridiculous,” Murphy said. “That’s the kind of action which should get you fired.”

“How big a threat did you think he was?” Brown said, noting that the officer slung his rifle around his back before grabbing and body-slamming the protester. “You can’t go grab someone just because they say, ‘F the police.’”

Roving patrols + unplanned arrests = unsafe tactics.

In November, Border Patrol agents rushed into the construction site of a future Panda Express in Charlotte, North Carolina, to check workers’ papers. When one man tried to run, an officer put him in a chokehold and later marched him out, bloodied, to a waiting SUV.

The Charlotte operation was one of Border Patrol’s many forays into American cities, as agents led by commander-at-large Gregory Bovino claimed to target “criminal illegal aliens” but frequently chased down landscapers, construction workers and U.S. citizens in roving patrols through predominantly immigrant or Latino communities.

Freelance photographer Ryan Murphy, who had been following Border Patrol’s convoys around Charlotte, documented the Panda Express arrest.

“Their tactics are less sophisticated than you would think,” he told ProPublica. “They sort of drive along the streets, and if they see somebody who looks to them like they could potentially be undocumented, they pull over.”

Experts told ProPublica that if officers are targeting a specific individual, they can minimize risks by deciding when, where and how to take them into custody. But when they don’t know their target in advance, chaos — and abuse — can follow.

“They are encountering people they don’t know anything about,” said Scott Shuchart, a former assistant director at ICE.

“The stuff that I’ve been seeing in the videos,” Kerlikowske said, “has been just ragtag, random.”

There may be other factors, too, our experts said, including quotas and a lack of consequences amid gutted oversight. With officers wearing masks, Shuchart said, “even if they punch grandma in the face, they won’t be identified.”

As they sweep into American cities, immigration officers are unconstrained — and, the experts said, unprepared. Even well-trained officers may not be trained for the environments where they now operate. Patrolling a little-populated border region takes one set of skills. Working in urban areas, where citizens — and protesters — abound, takes another.

DHS and Bovino did not respond to questions about their agents’ preparation or about the chokehold in Charlotte.

Experts may think there’s abuse. But holding officers to account? That’s another matter.

Back in Houston, immigration officers dropped 16-year-old Arnoldo off at the doorstep of his family home a few hours after the arrest. His neck was bruised, and his new shirt was shredded. Videos taken by his older sisters show the soccer star struggling to speak through sobs.

Uncertain what exactly had happened to him, his sister Maria Bazan took him to Texas Children’s Hospital, where staff identified signs of the chokehold and moved him to the trauma unit. Hospital records show he was given morphine for pain and that doctors ordered a dozen CT scans and X-rays, including of his neck, spine and head.

From the hospital, Maria called the Houston Police Department and tried to file a report, the family said. After several unsuccessful attempts, she took Arnoldo to the department in person, where she says officers were skeptical of the account and their own ability to investigate federal agents.

Arnoldo had filmed much of the incident, but agents had taken his phone. He used Find My to locate the phone — at a vending machine for used electronics miles away, close to an ICE detention center. The footage, which ProPublica has reviewed, backed the family’s account of the chase.

The family says Houston police still haven’t interviewed them. A department spokesperson told ProPublica it was not investigating the case, referring questions to DHS. But the police have also not released bodycam footage and case files aside from a top sheet, citing an open investigation.

“We can’t do anything,” Maria said one officer told her. “What can HPD do to federal agents?”

Elsewhere in the country, some officials are trying to hold federal immigration officers to account.

In California, the state Legislature passed bills prohibiting immigration officers from wearing masks and requiring them to display identification during operations.

In Illinois, Gov. JB Pritzker signed a law that allows residents to sue any officer who violates state or federal constitutional rights. (The Trump administration quickly filed legal challenges against California and Illinois, claiming their new laws are unconstitutional.)

In Colorado, Durango’s police chief saw a recent video of an immigration officer using a chokehold on a protester and reported it to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, which announced it was looking into the incident.

In Minnesota, state and local leaders are collecting evidence in Renee Good’s killing even as the federal government cut the state out of its investigation.

Arnoldo is still waiting for Houston authorities to help him, still terrified that a masked agent will come first. Amid soccer practice and making up schoolwork he missed while recovering, he watches and rewatches the videos from that day. The car chase, the chokehold, his own screams at the officers to leave his dad alone. His father in the driver’s seat, calmly handing Arnoldo his wallet and phone while stopping mid-chase for red lights.

The Bazan family said agents threatened to charge Arnoldo if his dad didn’t agree to be deported. DHS spokesperson McLaughlin did not respond when asked about the alleged threat. Arnoldo’s dad is now in Mexico.

Asked why an officer choked Arnoldo, McLaughlin pointed to the boy’s alleged assault with his elbow, adding, “The federal law enforcement officer graciously chose not to press charges.”

How We Did It

ProPublica journalists Nicole Foy, McKenzie Funk, Joanna Shan, Haley Clark and Cengiz Yar gathered videos via Spanish and English social media posts, local press reports and court records. We then sent a selection of these videos to eight police experts and former immigration officials, along with as much information as we could gather about the lead-up to and context of each incident. The experts analyzed the videos with us, explaining when and how officers used dangerous tactics that appeared to go against their training or that have been banned under the Department of Homeland Security’s use-of-force policy.

We also tried to contact every person we could identify being choked or kneeled on. In some cases, we also reached out to bystanders.

Research reporter Mariam Elba conducted criminal record searches of every person we featured in this story. She also attempted to fact-check the allegations that DHS made about the civilians and their arrests. Our findings are not comprehensive because there is no universal criminal record database.

We also sent every video cited in this story to the White House, DHS, CBP, ICE, border czar Tom Homan and Border Patrol’s Gregory Bovino. DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin provided a statement responding to some of the incidents we found but she did not explain why agents used banned tactics or whether any of the agents have been disciplined for doing so.

ICE Sent 600 Immigrant Kids to Detention in Federal Shelters This Year. It’s a New Record.

It was Friday, June 6, and the rent was due. As soon as she finished an errand, Imelda Carreto planned on joining her family as they gathered scrap metal to earn a little extra cash. Her fiancé, Julio Matias, and 15-year-old nephew, Carlos, had set out early, hitching a trailer to the back of their beat-up gray truck.

Shortly after 8 a.m., Carreto’s phone rang. It was Carlos, telling her an officer with the Florida Highway Patrol had pulled over the truck on Interstate 4 near Tampa. The stated reason: cracks in their windshield. But Carreto was worried. She knew Florida police were collaborating with federal immigration authorities. Her fiancé was undocumented. She says she rushed to the scene and made it there just before the immigration officers.

As she feared, Matias had been detained. But to her surprise, so had Carlos. He was just a kid. (ProPublica is only identifying Carlos by his first name because he is a minor.) Carlos was in high school. He’d been living in the United States for over two years and was working toward applying for legal status to stay long term. The government had given her, a legal resident, custody of him. Now he was in handcuffs. Why would they take him too?

Carreto didn’t carry any proof that she had custody of the boy. She had left it in another car in her rush. She recalls officers saying her nephew would likely be released to her in a few days once she presented the proper documents. Before they drove him away, Carlos started to tear up. Carreto told him, “Don’t cry. I don’t know how, but I’ll get you back. Understand?”

A cracked windshield, a waiting officer, a forgotten document: The new family separations often start in the most mundane ways.

Seven years ago, during the first administration of President Donald Trump, children were taken from their families the moment they crossed the border into the United States. Under a policy of zero tolerance for illegal crossing, Customs and Border Protection officers detained adults while children were sent into the federal shelter system. The aim: to deter other families from following. But after widespread public outcry and a lawsuit, the administration ended it.

Today, family separations are back, only now they are happening all across the country. The lawsuit against the zero tolerance policy resulted in a 2023 settlement that limits separations at the border, but it does not address those that occur inside the country after encounters with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. Advocates fear the administration is conducting the new separations for the same reasons as before: to deter new immigrants from coming and to terrify those who are here into leaving.

Since the start of this year, some 600 immigrant children have been placed in government shelters by ICE, according to government data. That figure, which has not been previously reported, is already higher than the tally for the previous four years combined. And it is the highest number since recordkeeping began a decade ago.

ProPublica pieced together additional information for around 400 children sent to shelters by examining state and federal records and conducting dozens of interviews with current and former government officials, advocates, attorneys and immigrant families.

Around 160 of the cases that we learned about involved child welfare concerns, which current and former officials say is typical of the children ICE has sent to shelters in the past. These cases include instances of kids who were encountered alone inside the country or were considered potential victims of domestic abuse or trafficking, or instances where minors or the adults they were with had been accused of committing a crime.

But in a majority of the cases we examined, kids ended up in shelters in ways government officials say they never would have in the past: after routine immigration court hearings or appointments, or because they were at a home or a business when immigration authorities showed up to arrest someone else.

In South Carolina, a Colombian family of five went to a government office for a fingerprinting appointment, only to have the parents detained while the children — ages 5, 11 and 15 — were sent into the shelter system for four months. In South Florida, a 17-year-old from Guatemala was taken into custody because officers couldn’t make contact with his dad after a traffic stop; his dad is deaf. In Maryland, a 17-year-old from Mexico ended up in a shelter after making a wrong turn onto military property.

In around 150 cases, children were taken into federal custody after traffic stops. The trend is especially noticeable in states like Florida, where thousands of state and local police, including highway patrol, have been deputized to enforce immigration laws.

“What’s happening to kids now is like many small zero tolerances,” said Marion “Mickey” Donovan-Kaloust, director of legal services at the Los Angeles-based Immigrant Defenders Law Center. This and other changes affecting immigrant children are “adding up to a huge trauma.”

Most of the cases we found involve teenagers, and many of them had been in the United States for years. In those cases, being sent to a shelter can mean separation not only from their families but from schools, friends, churches, doctors and daily routines.

Once children are in shelters, the government is making it harder and harder for relatives or other adults who act as sponsors to get them back. The average length of stay has grown to nearly six months, up from one month during the presidency of Joe Biden, public data shows.

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a written statement that the Biden administration released immigrant kids to sponsors too quickly and without proper vetting, sometimes into unsafe situations. “The Trump Administration is ensuring that unaccompanied minors do not fall victim to the same dangerous conditions,” Jackson said.

Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin, speaking for ICE, said the agency “does not separate families” and instead offers parents the choice to have their children deported with them or to leave the children in the care of another safe adult, consistent with past practices.

Asked about Carlos’ detention in Florida, McLaughlin said that traffic stops by officers trained to partner with ICE have prevented abuse of immigrant children and “resulted in arrests of human traffickers, abusers, and other criminals.”

ProPublica found no evidence of Carreto or Matias, her fiancé, being accused or convicted of serious crimes. Carreto had been found guilty of driving without a license at least twice and had gotten a speeding ticket. Matias pleaded guilty to a 2011 taillight infraction. He now has an ongoing case for driving without a license from the traffic stop with Carlos, and he has been returned to Guatemala.

Shelter Network Turned on Its Head

What is happening now is not what the system was set up for.

The nation’s network of roughly 170 federal shelters for “unaccompanied” immigrant children is run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, part of the Department of Health and Human Services. The office is tasked with temporarily housing vulnerable children who cross the border alone, holding them in the least restrictive setting possible until they can be released to a sponsor in the United States. Typically that means placing kids with a parent or other family member. The office finds and vets the sponsors and is required to release children to them without delay. Once kids are out, they can apply to remain here permanently.

Under Biden, when border crossings surged to record highs, around 470,000 children were released to sponsors after going through the shelter system. Republicans said the releases incentivized smugglers to endanger kids on the long journey north and encouraged parents to send their children across the border alone.

The White House called the previous administration’s sponsor-vetting process “abysmal,” and said that many records pertaining to minors released under Biden “were either fraudulent or never existed to begin with.”

Biden officials deny these claims. But some kids have indeed ended up working in dangerous jobs.

The Trump administration has placed former ICE officials in charge of the refugee resettlement office and has made it a priority to locate children who were released from custody in previous years. To facilitate the effort, ICE plans to open a national, 24-hour call center meant to help state and local officials find them. The government says it says it has already checked on more than 24,400 children in person, and it cited more than a dozen examples of sponsors and immigrant minors arrested for crimes ranging from murder to drug trafficking, rape and assault. One of the cases the White House highlighted was of a 15-year-old Guatemalan girl the government says was released in 2023 to a man who falsely claimed to be her brother and allegedly went on to sexually abuse her.

Under Trump, the government has introduced new vetting requirements, including expanded DNA checks, fingerprinting for everyone in the sponsor’s household and heightened scrutiny of family finances.

In response to questions from ProPublica, the refugee resettlement office said it was legally required to care for all unaccompanied kids who came through its doors and defended the new vetting process. “The enhanced sponsorship requirements of this administration help keep unaccompanied alien children safe from traffickers and other bad, dangerous people,” a spokesperson said.

Because so many children are now being sent into shelters in ways they hadn’t been before, though, lawyers and advocates worry the administration’s efforts have another motive: to more broadly target and deport immigrant kids and their families. They also say the new requirements are creating so much fear that some undocumented family members are hesitant to come forward as sponsors.

Around half of the kids that ICE sent into the shelter system this year have been there before. When they arrived years ago, after crossing the border alone, they were released as soon as possible. This time, back in the system, they’re languishing.

“I think that they’re using a clearly vulnerable, clearly sympathetic population in a way that sends a powerful message to literally every other population,” said Jen Smyers, who was an official at the Office of Refugee Resettlement during the Biden administration. “If they’re going to go after these kids who have protections and say we care about them, and then treat them like this, that shows everyone that no one is safe.”

This month, attorneys suing the government over its treatment of children in the shelter system recovered a government document being provided to unaccompanied minors who cross the border. It warns them that if they do not choose to leave the country within 72 hours they will “be detained in the custody of the United States Government, for a prolonged period of time.” The document also warned that if the person who sought to sponsor the minors was undocumented, they would be “subject to arrest and removal” or to criminal penalties for “aiding your illegal entry.”

Customs and Border Protection told ProPublica that the document is used to ensure immigrant children “understand their rights and options.”

There have already been cases of prospective sponsors who have shown up at government offices for in-person interviews and been detained for being in the country illegally, said Marie Silver, a managing attorney at the National Immigrant Justice Center in Chicago.

“They are using the kids as bait, and then the kids are stuck,” Silver said. “They are creating unaccompanied children this way.”

Separation in the Sunshine State

In Florida, we found two dozen kids arrested in traffic stops who went on to spend weeks or months in federal shelters. Some are still there.

Gov. Ron DeSantis and the state’s Republican majority have spent years crafting policies that allow local police officers to seamlessly operate as federal immigration enforcers. They aim to be a model for how states can help the Trump administration “reclaim America’s sovereignty.”

Across Florida, almost 5,000 officers — even those from its Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission — are empowered to detain people over their immigration status and to call in federal authorities to come pick them up. ProPublica obtained state data revealing that Florida police have arrested at least 47 children on federal immigration charges since late April, with the Florida Highway Patrol leading the tally.

In cases like that of Carlos, children were sent to a federal shelter despite having a parent or legal custodian caring for them. Five current and former federal officials said this could be a violation of ICE’s own policy. The policy dictates that officers should let primary caregivers like Carreto take them home or find a safe place to send them. (It does not clearly require caregivers to show any documentation.) If they can’t find a safe place, or if there are signs the child is in danger, officers are supposed to alert local law enforcement or child-welfare officials and wait for them to arrive.

Florida has its own laws governing how state and local officers should interact with children. If a kid is found alone or in danger, state police must call a hotline run by Florida’s Department of Children and Families. The call is supposed to trigger a process in which state judges review any decision to place a child in the care of someone other than their family within 24 hours.

It’s not clear if Florida officers are calling the state hotline when encountering immigrant children. But it is clear that this year they have often called ICE.

State police contacted immigration officials directly about Carlos, Florida records show. Carlos went into federal custody without a state shelter hearing, according to his attorney, who said the same thing has happened to three other clients following traffic stops.

State Rep. Lawrence McClure, the Republican who introduced legislation this January that supercharged Florida’s cooperation with ICE, promised during debate on the bill that nothing would change about how the state treated immigrant children. McClure did not respond directly to questions from ProPublica about the transfers to ICE.

Boundaries between state and federal policy “are being blurred” in an “unprecedented way,” said Bernard Perlmutter, co-director of the University of Miami’s Children and Youth Law Clinic.

The collaboration with local police in Florida and elsewhere comes as ICE has worked increasingly with other federal agencies that may have their own policies for handling encounters with kids.

In response to detailed questions from ProPublica, DeSantis’ press secretary emailed a list of more than a dozen links from the video platform Rumble in which the governor speaks about immigration enforcement, writing: “Governor DeSantis has made immigration enforcement a top priority to keep Florida communities safe.”

Other state officials, including from the Florida Highway Patrol and Department of Children and Families, either did not respond or declined our requests for comment on the state’s partnership with ICE and its impact on immigrant children.

It was Florida’s cooperation with federal authorities that landed Carlos in the federal shelter system this June — his second time there.

In December 2022, Carlos, then 13 years old, came to the United States from Guatemala, where his single mother made him work or beg for money, according to court records. He thought he would be better off in the U.S. with her sister, according to records provided by his attorney. He made the journey without his parents, the documents say.

After he crossed near Donna, Texas, he was picked up by border agents and spent three weeks in a federal shelter before being released to his aunt. Carreto said she had no idea Carlos was making the journey until she received a 2 a.m. phone call from immigration authorities. She welcomed the boy into her sprawling Guatemalan American family and insisted that he go to school.

Two and a half years into his stay with Carreto came the traffic stop.

Carlos was first taken across the state to the Broward Transitional Center, a for-profit detention facility operated by the GEO Group, an ICE contractor. He was transferred later in the day to an Office of Refugee Resettlement shelter in Tampa run by Urban Strategies, another government contractor, records show. The GEO Group declined to comment and referred ProPublica to ICE. Lisa Cummins, president of Urban Strategies, wrote in an email: “We remain deeply committed to the care and well-being of the children we serve.”

Carreto launched into weeks of confusing phone calls and paperwork to get her nephew back. She had to send in a 10-page application. She turned over information about her finances, her adult son’s finances, her lack of criminal history. She submitted samples of her DNA. She sent photos of the smoke alarms in her house.

Shortly after Carlos was detained, Carreto said, immigration officers paid an unannounced visit to her home. Her son Ereson, who is 18, says federal agents came onto the property without permission and asked if any immigrants were living there. The visit scared the family.

Carreto’s daughters eventually managed to pinpoint Carlos’ location by asking him over the phone to name landmarks he could see, then searching for them on Google. In video calls home, Carreto said, Carlos was visibly sad. She said he sometimes skipped meals. “Why are they keeping me here?” she recalled him asking, “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

Carreto visited the offices of Homeland Security Investigations in Tampa with three of her children. She said agents asked how much she paid to have Carlos smuggled across the border and how much she was getting paid to try to get him out of detention. They threatened her with federal charges if she didn’t tell the truth, she said.

“I told them that nobody is paying me,” she said. “I’m doing this because he’s my nephew. He’s like a son to me.”

Carlos was released after two and a half months.

He was one of the lucky ones: His aunt was a legal resident who had custody of him, and the family had the resources and determination to fight for him.

The government this year has moved to slash legal services for children and offered cash to kids who give up their cases and go home. (The Office of Refugee Resettlement’s statement to ProPublica said it is fully complying with a court order requiring that minors be provided with legal representation.) Attorneys who represent children said they have seen a spike in cases of self-harm and behavioral problems as kids lose hope of being released.

Of the kids that ProPublica learned about, around 140 were still stuck in federal shelters as of last month. Close to 100 were ordered to be deported or had signed papers agreeing to leave the country.

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