HHS Shelter System Holds 1,900 Migrant Children for Months as Sponsors Face Detention

A nine-year-old girl from El Salvador wrote a letter to her mother from a Houston-area shelter where she had been held for seven months.

The Department of Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement currently holds nearly 1,900 unaccompanied children. These minors are often kept in custody while federal immigration officials detain their parents or sponsors who sought to take them in. This practice extends average shelter stays to nearly six months, a duration far longer than the one-month norm under the previous administration.

Federal agencies have reconfigured the resettlement office to support deportation campaigns rather than prioritize child welfare. Jonathan White, a former federal health official who previously ran the unaccompanied children program, stated that the administration is reshaping the system into a detention program. He noted that children are being used to ensnare family members, turning legal protections for minors into collateral damage for broader immigration goals.

The government is applying strict new requirements for sponsors and arresting caregivers during the vetting process. In one case, a mother named Carmen was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement without a warrant while attending a DNA test appointment. The resettlement office subsequently rejected her sponsorship application because of the detention she faced. Her daughter, identified as M.R., remains in a shelter in Texas while her mother is held in a Louisiana detention center despite having a pending asylum case and no criminal record.

Attorneys report that the office often refuses to release children even when sponsorship requirements are met, forcing families to sue for reunification. U.S. Rep. Andrea Salinas warned that voluntary departure may not feel like a real choice when children see no other exit. The Department of Homeland Security defended the detentions as an effort to prevent children from being harmed by unvetted sponsors. The agency cited 16 cases where sponsors were arrested for serious crimes but disputed the claim that many children were placed with smugglers. The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to questions regarding the treatment of minors in its care.

M.R.’s sister was released when she turned 18, a milestone that allows for transfer to immigration detention. Courts have blocked the administration from transferring others who age out of the system in the same manner. M.R. remains in the shelter alone, without her mother or other close family members. She has told her mother on the phone that she feels lonely and is experiencing nosebleeds. Her attorney, Alexa Sendukas, said the child blames herself for her mother’s detention and struggles to understand why the government kept them apart.