Children who cross the U.S. border without a parent or guardian have been kept in federal custody nearly four times as long under the Trump administration compared to previous years, according to a Gothamist analysis of federal data. And far fewer unaccompanied minors detained in New York City have been released since President Donald Trump took office.

Immigration advocates and attorneys say stricter verification requirements have delayed the release of vulnerable youth, traumatizing families through prolonged separation and placing some parents and guardians who are often also undocumented immigrants at increased risk of deportation as they work to gain custody of minors.

When children cross the border alone, they are held in congregate shelters operated by nonprofits throughout the country. To have a child released from detention, parents, family members or other guardians already living in the United States must be approved as sponsors by the Office of Refugee Resettlement.

Under the Biden administration, most parents and other prospective sponsors could regain custody of their children by providing their non-U.S. passport and the child’s birth certificate. But the agency implemented new guidelines last year that have made the process more rigorous. Sponsors are now required to be fingerprinted, submit to DNA testing and income verification, and to take part in in-person interviews and home visits.

Before President Donald Trump took office last year, DNA testing was only required when parents or guardians could not produce documentation of their relationship with a minor in custody. Fingerprinting was only required for non-parent sponsors.

Federal officials have also taken longer to process applications, according to several immigration attorneys who spoke with Gothamist, and the documentation submitted by parents can expire while they are waiting for the resettlement agency to make a decision.

“Any kind of delay means that the parent or sponsor might have to start the process over,” said Zoe Schonfeld, a supervising attorney for the nonprofit Center for Family Representation.

The Office of Refugee Resettlement did not respond to questions about the increased requirements for sponsors and delays in the sponsorship process. But Sierra Kraft, executive director for Immigrant Children Advocates Relief Effort, said the changes are to blame for a drastic shift in how long children spend in custody and how many are released to approved sponsors.

Nationally, unaccompanied minors now spend an average of 117 days in detention since Trump re-entered office, according to Office of Refugee Resettlement data. That’s up from an average of about 30 days between 2021 and 2024.

Kraft said she has regularly seen kids held in custody for as much as 180 days, and that deportation proceedings continue while children are kept in detention, often hindering their ability to fight their case in court.

“It’s just unthinkable what’s happening to youth in custody,” Kraft said.

Changes to the sponsorship process have also coincided with a roughly 75% decline in the number of unaccompanied minors released from detention in New York City since 2024, Gothamist’s analysis shows, mirroring a nationwide trend. Manhattan and the Bronx have seen disproportionately steeper drops of 82%.

Citywide, the Trump administration released just 870 children last year, compared to 3,449 under the Biden administration in 2024, data shows.

It’s unclear how much that decline reflects an overall drop in the number of detained children. Undocumented border crossings have decreased dramatically under Trump and publicly available federal data does not specify how many unaccompanied minors were held in the five boroughs.

Nationwide, roughly 7,000 unaccompanied children were detained in federal custody in 2024 compared to 2,500 last year — a decline of about 64%. But federal data shows that a smaller share of those kids have been released under Trump.

Paola Rivera, also an attorney at the Center for Family Representation, said the difficulty has not dissuaded families from trying to free children from custody. Undocumented parents and guardians risk their own deportation when they go through the more onerous sponsorship application process, she said, and many fear sharing their address or other personal information at a time of heightened ICE enforcement.

“They can feel the impossible position they’re put in,” Rivera said. “But trying to get your child out is not an option. You have to risk detention.”

An ‘abyss’ of paperwork

Immigration advocates and attorneys say the sponsorship application process is a dizzying array of paperwork and appointments.

“At the outset of the process, parents are told there are a finite number of steps they have to complete,” Schonfeld said. “But they will jump through six or seven hoops only to be faced with a dead end.”

She cited one of her own clients: a mother living in New York City who waited 13 months to be reunited with her son.

Schonfeld would not disclose the boy’s exact age because she feared retaliation against the family from immigration authorities for speaking to a member of the press, but she said the child was “of tender age,” a phrase used by the federal government to describe children who are 12 or younger.

The boy's mother said he entered the United States as an unaccompanied minor through Texas and was held in federal custody while she worked through the sponsorship process to be reunited with him.

“They told me they were going to give him back to me once the process was over,” the mother said through a translator. She did not want to be named out of concern it could jeopardize her and her son’s immigration status. She said she also entered the United States without documentation.

The mother said it took months to file the required paperwork, including verifying her identification and proof of employment, to demonstrate she could provide a safe and comfortable home for her son. She said she would not hear back from the Office of Refugee Resettlement for weeks at a time. When she did, she said it was often to instruct her to resubmit some documents, which seemed to disappear into what her lawyer called an “abyss.” Under federal rules, background checks for sponsors expire after 270 days. The sponsorship application process often takes longer.

“The initial papers sort of expired,” she said. “I had to start the whole process all over again.”

Her son was initially held at a facility in Texas for three months. The two only spoke over video calls, she said. Then, the Office of Refugee Resettlement informed her he would be moved to New York City because “he was crying a lot” about being separated from her, she said.

The relocation allowed for in-person visits. For a year, she and her son met once a week at the detention facility. She had hoped he would be released before Christmas last year so they could celebrate together.

“I thought that they were going to give him back in December,” she said. “But that never happened.”

Uncertainty

Immigration attorneys and advocates say the Office of Refugee Resettlement’s more onerous sponsorship requirements are confusing and inconsistently enforced, and that increased wait times are unpredictable, leaving parents and their children in the dark about where their applications stand, along with when or if they might be reunited.

“There’s a mental health aspect and a long-lasting impact this will have on young people,” said Kraft. She added that children in New York City who remain detained for long periods of time have even opted to self-deport back to their country of origin.

“Youth are getting exhausted by the system and the process,” she said. “Several are selecting voluntary departure.”

Guidance issued by the Office of Refugee Resettlement states that the new protocols are designed to weed out abusive or negligent parents and ensure minors are released into safe homes.

But Abena Hutchful, an attorney for the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights, said she believes the additional steps are being used to hold children in detention longer.

“The purpose behind this is not to keep children safe but to violate their due process and prolong family separation,” she said.

Increased monitoring

The mother in New York City who said she was separated from her son for over a year said the sponsorship application process has led to increased monitoring by immigration officials as she herself applies for asylum.

Three days before her son’s release in February, she said agents from Homeland Security Investigations, or HSI, a branch of the Department of Homeland Security, appeared at her home and demanded she come in for an interview at an agency office in New York City.

She ignored the demand. Rivera said the Office of Refugee Resettlement told her it wasn’t necessary to respond. About a month after her son’s release, she said agency officials emailed her and her attorneys, this time giving her a 48-hour deadline to visit their office for an interview. This time, she complied.

Rivera attended as her attorney. She said they sat in a “metal box of a room” for three hours answering questions about how her son got to the border and whether she took out any loans to pay for his travel.

Rivera said the interview is not part of the process for becoming a sponsor and that she later reviewed documents showing that the mother had technically been detained by HSI for those three hours. As a condition of her release, HSI agents required her to visit an ICE office the following day.

Homeland Security Investigations did not respond to requests for comment about whether it regularly conducts interviews as part of the sponsorship process or detains parents after a child has been released.

When she arrived at the ICE appointment, she said agents put a monitoring device around her ankle to track her whereabouts.

“They put a tag on my ankle as if I were a criminal or, or something bad just because I was going through this whole process,” she said. “But now I’m happy and my son is happy, making up for lost time.”