Advocates warn the surge of unaccompanied migrant children sent to the Rio Grande Valley is part of a new fast-removal strategy with little transparency.
The Trump administration is sending dozens of unaccompanied migrant children to the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas to await deportation, Border Report has learned.
About 50 children have been sent to the region from the interior of the U.S. in the past few months and are being held in four detention facilities operated by the Department of Health and Human Service’s Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), Laura Peña, director of the South Texas Pro Bono Asylum Representation Project, or ProBar, said Tuesday.
Children in ICE detention spend Christmas with profound longing for freedom, often writing letters to Santa asking for release, family, or basic items, while facing harsh, austere conditions with limited medical care, toys, or normal holiday cheer, sometimes even experiencing trauma like sudden family separation or poor living conditions, though advocates try to provide activities like crafts to keep spirits up amidst the sadness.
Peña said her nonprofit, which offers free legal representation to migrants, including children, started noticing this trend since the summer.
“We’re starting to see an uptick of children from other parts of the country being detained here on the border, and that is new,” Peña said during a call with reporters. “We understand it’s a pilot program here in the Rio Grande Valley, and that four ORR shelters are essentially holding children until their removal flight is scheduled.”
She says there are about 500 unaccompanied migrant children currently in the Rio Grande Valley — about a quarter of the 2,000 unaccompanied children held by ORR nationwide.
She says there are about 15 ORR shelters to house them in the Rio Grande Valley.
Although all of the facilities operated by Southwest Key were closed earlier this year, Peña says there are still plenty of beds for the children down here.
She told Border Report that she worries the Trump administration will send dozens more children to the area and try to quickly deport them to their home countries.
Nationwide, there are an estimated 2,000 unaccompanied children currently being held by ORR who face the threat of deportation, she says.
“It’s going to increase, I believe, in the coming years, because there’s a lot of beds here in the Rio Grande Valley. There’s the militarization of the border for many years. So there’s a lot of detention capacity for children here. And what we’re seeing, even though it’s maybe, you know, 40 to 50 kids here from other parts of the country, that number’s going to go up. And it’s extremely concerning,” she said.
ProBar represents 12 of the children sent to the Rio Grande Valley, but Peña says one child has already been deported. She says her organization noticed the trend after interviewing the children and hearing their stories and tracking other arrivals.
“The landscape at the border has changed. Instead of being a front line to respond for people seeking access to asylum, we are now the last line of defense, doing everything we can to prevent immigrant adults and children detained in immigration custody from being sent one direction — south of the border,” Peña said.
ProBar recently received a grant from the new Defending Our Neighbors Fund, which is a collaboration by the nonprofits United We Dream, ACLU and the Abundant Futures Fund to raise money for legal representation for migrants targeted for deportation.
The Defending Our Neighbors Fund has so far raised over $12.4 million, Greisa Martinez Rosas, director of United We Dream, said Tuesday.
“The Defending Our Neighbors Fund was created from an idea of the members of United We Dream as a response to deeply urgent reality that we’re facing today, where more families and children are navigating the immigration system without real legal counsel, than at any point in recent memory,” Martinez Rosas said.
The Defending Our Neighbors Fund can be accessed at www.defendingourneighbors.org.
In 2024, she said, an estimated 2 million people will navigate the legal immigration system without legal representation.
In Fiscal Year 2025, only 19% of immigration cases that did not have legal representation were successful, while 48% that had legal representation won their cases, said Mary Meg McCarthy, executive director of the National Immigrant Justice Center.
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