The boy who faced Immigration Court Judge Shawn Abraham needed the microphone lowered before his hearing could begin. His feet didn’t reach the floor.
He is 12 years old.
The lawyer and advocate who sat with him at the respondent’s table told Abraham that he had no caregivers in El Salvador, where Abraham would order him deported moments later.
He was one of more than a dozen unaccompanied minors without legal status who appeared at Chicago Immigration Court Wednesday for a hearing that was unprecedented until recently. During the proceedings, an immigration judge entered removal orders against some of the children, despite their attempts to seek a long-held legal protection to remain in safety in the United States due to abuse or neglect.
Attorneys, advocates and elected officials said the Trump administration began employing the tactic against unaccompanied children in recent months, violating the rights of the children, many of whom have pending petitions for special immigrant juvenile status. Coupled with a loss of a federal government contract that covered legal services for children who enter the U.S. without a parent or guardian, the practice creates a crisis for migrant children, who may be deported back to dangerous situations, they say.
“We failed those kids,” said state Sen. Cristina Castro, D-Elgin, pausing to apologize as she became tearful at a press conference held blocks from the site of the court call.
Retired immigration judge Jennie Giambastiani, who was the designated judge for Chicago’s juvenile docket for 17 years until she left the bench in 2019, said judges in the past had significant latitude to administratively close this kind of juvenile case while kids had their petitions adjudicated. Now, she said, “it’s become a numbers game.”
“I’m just distressed to see how children have become pawns of this immigration game,” she said. “I don’t see how it harms the U.S. to await adjudication of an administrative agency for a petition as opposed to cutting it off at the knees for purposes of meeting deportation quotas.”
Beginning on May 10, immigration officials announced that children who applied for special immigrant juvenile status are no longer automatically protected from deportation while they wait to become lawful permanent residents.
Federal officials had tried to roll back the automatic deportation freeze for SIJ applicants in 2025, but were stymied by an order from a federal judge in New York. In April, though, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services issued a new policy that lets those previously automatic protections be adjudicated in cases that began after May 10.
At the press conference, attorneys signaled they would fight the new policy in federal court.
In response to a request for comment, representatives with the Department of Homeland Security referred to a press release from June that alleged “rampant fraud” in the process to seek special immigrant juvenile status.
Federal and state officials lambasted President Donald Trump and Chicago-based immigration court judges who they say are violating the legal rights of the children and potentially sending them back to abusive situations in their countries of birth.
“Did you think you saw the worst of the worst with ICE when they were shooting people in streets of Chicago, Minneapolis and other cities?” U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin said.
Immigration judges acting on behalf of the Trump administration have begun ordering deportations for children who have been deemed abandoned, abused, or neglected by their parents, even though they have pending petitions to legally remain in the country, attorneys say. State juvenile court judges have determined the children have faced abuse or abandonment, which allows them to seek special immigrant juvenile status as a pathway for legal permanent residence.
“The Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda is escalating its attacks on children,” said Michael Hoyt, managing attorney at the National Immigrant Justice Center. “The administration has weaponized the court system against them and violated their due process.”
During the proceedings on Wednesday, Abraham entered removal orders for at least six children.
Abraham — a former Cook County state’s attorney and assistant counsel to ICE — is brand-new to Chicago’s immigration court. He joined a court whose lineup of judges has seen drastic changes since the second Trump administration began and which recently became the national leader in deportation orders, owing in large part to what court observers and advocates have dubbed “mega-master” hearings.
Those hearings, which can produce dozens of removal orders at a time, and the firings and buyouts of the court’s longtime judges are both widely regarded as products of the administration’s efforts to remake the country’s immigration court system in the image of the president’s hardline immigration agenda.
The attorneys were able to prepare the children that faced the judge on Wednesday, said Laura Smith, executive director of the Children’s Legal Center. But when judges began ordering deportations earlier this summer, it took the children and their attorneys by surprise, leaving the children sobbing after the hearings, she said.
“These children fled to the United States seeking safety and protection from the horrors that no children should have to endure, children who have been kidnapped, children whose parents have been killed and who have been completely abandoned by their families,” she said.
In the case of the 12-year-old boy, Abraham ordered him removed to El Salvador. Unlike most of the children who come to immigration court with their parents beside them, the only adults with the boy were an advocate and an attorney.
As he issued the deportation orders, Abraham repeatedly said that the children could not remain in the country while their applications for legal status waited in the queue with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services because Congress had put a cap on the number of visas available, creating an “uncertain and lengthy period of time” before the children’s petitions could lead to legal status.
The advocates who came with the children to court passed out small fidget toys from a plastic gallon bag. They waited quietly, some for more than two hours, in the benches of Courtroom 8, while Abraham set most of their next court dates to early September, denied motions to terminate pending cases and ordered children removed from the U.S.
Again and again, advocates and lawyers for the children told Abraham that they had no caregivers in their home countries or that they were considered abandoned by their parents. Most had been in the country for less than a year.
The final child to be called for his hearing had been in the U.S. since Nov. 22, 2025. He sat leaning forward at the table as Abraham walked through his reasoning for deporting him. Abraham then asked if he had any questions.
Speaking in Quiché through his interpreter, the boy did have a question.
“Why are you sending me back to Guatemala?” he said.
“You didn’t necessarily do anything wrong,” Abraham said. “But you are removable from the country based on the way you entered the country. Since you are removable, that’s why you are being ordered removed back to Guatemala.”
The boy had no other questions.
The Associated Press contributed.
