Faulty reasoning signals

• Confirmation Bias - 0.5% (13 hits)
• Anchoring Bias - 3.4% (82 hits)
• Availability Heuristic - 11.8% (287 hits)
• Representativeness Heuristic - 3.9% (94 hits)
• Hindsight Bias - 0.9% (22 hits)
• Overconfidence Bias - 1.2% (29 hits)
• Framing Effect - 9.3% (226 hits)
• Loss Aversion - 1.8% (43 hits)
• Status Quo Bias - 1.1% (27 hits)
• Sunk Cost Effect - 0.9% (23 hits)
• Optimism Bias - 3.5% (86 hits)
• Pessimism Bias - 7.6% (186 hits)

Article text

These Immigrant Kids Were Once Protected.

Under Trump, Their Deportations Have Tripled.

For the first few weeks after he arrived at the immigration detention center in Winnfield, Louisiana, 18-year-old Elder Chavez was wide awake most nights, listening to the creaky sounds of the bunk beds and to voices of dozens of men, also sleepless, around him.

He suffered terrible headaches and would finally doze off around 4 a.m. — just when guards would begin to summon the detainees for breakfast.

Then he’d sleep for most of the rest of the day.

He had developed the schedule of an owl.

And he thought to himself that the dark circles that had appeared under his eyes made him look like one.

He’d landed at the Winn Correctional Center after Alabama state police had caught him in December going 15 mph over the speed limit and driving without a license.

He was on his way home from getting his favorite sandwich, carne asada, when he was pulled over.

Once the officers realized he was an immigrant, they called U.S.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Chavez offered to show them documents that proved he wasn’t living in hiding.

Immigration authorities had granted him Special Immigrant Juvenile Status because, as a toddler, he’d been abandoned by his parents in Honduras and had come to this country on his own when he was 14.

His sister, who’d migrated years earlier and was living in Alabama, offered to help take care of him.

A lawyer was helping him pursue permanent residency.

“I’m legal in this country,” Chavez pleaded with the officers.

But the officers, he said, weren’t having it.

One of them told him, “Your papers are of no use to me.”

And just like that, an otherwise law-abiding high school student — who loved his welding and carpentry classes, had braces and a girlfriend, and spent weekends playing soccer at the park with his nieces and nephews — was thrown into detention and put on a path toward deportation.

“I’m just waiting here,” he said during a video call from detention.

“I really don’t know what’s going to happen to me.”

Chavez is hardly alone.

A first-of-its-kind analysis of Immigration and Customs Enforcement data found that unaccompanied minors living in the U.S. are being detained and removed at about three times the rate they were during the last time President Donald Trump was in office.

In addition, a ProPublica analysis of court data found that immigration judges, who report to the Justice Department, have issued more than 10,000 removal and voluntary departure orders each month for immigrant minors who either migrated alone or with relatives, a rate that is nearly four times higher than in Trump’s last term.

The vast majority of unaccompanied minors removed last year had no criminal history in the United States, ProPublica’s analysis of ICE data showed.

Before Trump returned to office last year, Chavez would have likely been given a ticket and allowed to return to his sister.

But as part of the president’s mass deportation campaign, his administration has moved to systematically roll back policies that provided immigrant minors access to legal counsel and relief from deportation while they pursued permission to permanently stay in the country.

Those policies were based on laws that had been implemented over more than two decades, with bipartisan support, because both parties believed unaccompanied immigrant minors — ill-prepared to navigate a new country on their own, much less a legal system daunting to most adults — are especially vulnerable to trafficking and other kinds of exploitation.

Congress created SIJ specifically to protect immigrants, like Chavez, who are under 21 and are able to prove in family court that they had been abused, neglected or abandoned by at least one parent in their home countries.

Trump administration officials have long argued that not only are the programs designed to help unaccompanied minors rife with fraud, but that their very existence has encouraged hundreds of thousands of children to embark on dangerous journeys to the border, increasing their risk of falling into criminal hands.

To make its case, his administration points to the record 450,000 unaccompanied minors who arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border and were released into the country under President Joe Biden.

Neither those children nor the people to whom they were released were properly vetted, say Trump administration officials.

As a result, administration officials say, some of the children became victims of abuse or exploitation.

Alarming numbers of them were found working illegally in factories or in other jobs that put them at risk for trafficking, injury and wage theft.

Other minors, the administration has said, became criminals.

It put out a July 2025 government report that said since 2013, some 19,000 SIJ petitioners were found to have criminal arrest records, including hundreds with serious charges like murder and sex offenses.

The administration says the best way to stop such abuses and criminality is to disincentivize immigrant children from coming in the first place.

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said Trump is “undoing the damage Biden did.”

Responding to questions about ProPublica’s data analysis, which was based on data provided via Freedom of Information Act requests and was validated with outside experts, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said the agency “could not verify the veracity” of the data.

Advocates argue that the administration is using exceptional cases to cast all immigrant minors and the adults who sponsored them in a negative light.

They say that some of their clients who have been living in the U.S. for years, including those, like Chavez, who have since turned 18, face serious risks if sent back to their home countries.

The majority of the unaccompanied minors who have come to the United States in the last decade were fleeing Central American countries crushed by economic turmoil, violence and political upheaval.

Some came from families riven by poverty and domestic violence.

Some, like Chavez, have no parents to go back to.

“These children have been through incredibly harrowing and traumatic experiences,” said Michael Lukens, the executive director of the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, a legal defense organization.

“And ICE is retraumatizing them.”

To the administration’s claims that its policies are aimed at protecting minors, he said, “If you’re worried about the welfare of kids, stop rounding kids up and trying to deport them.”

Sometimes the deportation orders issued in immigration court have been coming so fast that lawyers say even they have a hard time explaining them to their clients.

Within a span of three hours on a single morning in April in a downtown New York immigration courtroom, Judge Jem Sponzo issued deportation orders for 25 minors, almost everyone on her docket appearing virtually that morning.

Some of the hearings were only a few minutes long, and some of the minors were too young to understand what was happening to them.

Among the children in court that day was an 8-year old girl from Ecuador who was seeking asylum and SIJ.

The girl’s mother had already won asylum in a separate case.

But Sponzo ordered the girl to be deported anyway.

In another case, an attorney pleaded for more time to prepare enough evidence to support an asylum petition for her client from Guatemala.

The attorney said her client’s home in Guatemala was dominated by an abusive father whose violence made it hard for her to gather information she needed for the case.

Sponzo politely denied the request, saying, “I empathize and thank you for your efforts.”

Then she ordered the child deported.

A high school senior from Guatemala who lives in Queens, with side-swept black hair and wearing a short sleeve athletic shirt, appeared on a video screen from a room with piled-up clothes on the bed and an American flag tacked on the wall.

He stayed on mute while his lawyer asked for more time for his applications for SIJ and asylum to be processed.

Sponzo said no and ordered him deported.

His lawyer said in an interview her client is now afraid he could be picked up by ICE at any time.

At the end of the day, several of the attorneys said they felt blindsided by the judge’s rapid-fire denials.

Although they all said they would appeal her rulings, which could buy their clients some time to stay in the U.S., one said the deportation orders would “hang over their heads like a loaded gun.”

Olivia Cassin, a former immigration judge who oversaw juvenile dockets in New York, said that before Trump returned to office, there was widespread recognition that it took time for immigrant minors’ SIJ and asylum petitions to work their way through the backlogged system.

For SIJ recipients, getting a green card often takes years.

Judges typically gave minors that time.

Now the authorities overseeing immigration courts have instructed them not to do so.

Sponzo cited those instructions at the end of many of the cases she heard that day in April.

Cassin is one of the more than 100 immigration judges who have been fired since Trump returned to office.

Some of the judges who lost their jobs said they believe they were pushed out because the administration saw them as not aligned with its agenda.

But they also say they’ve received no official explanation for their firings.

Sponzo was also fired recently.

She could not be reached for comment.

The Justice Department did not respond to questions about the firings.

It’s not just the overhaul of the immigration courts that is having an effect on immigrant kids.

Early on in Trump’s second term, officials moved to curb funding for advocacy groups that provide legal services to unaccompanied minors.

It also put an end to a Biden-era policy known as “deferred action,” which protected minors who had been granted SIJ from deportation.

SIJ on its own does not confer legal status, and the deferred action policy was implemented to cover those with SIJ until they could get their green cards.

After advocacy groups took the administration to court, federal judges ordered the government to restore funding for legal assistance and access to deferred action for SIJ recipients.

Despite those rulings, some legal advocates say they still have not been paid what they’re owed.

And earlier this month, several groups said federal agents appeared at their Washington-area offices, seeking to look at client files, even though they didn’t have warrants.

The advocates said they saw the move as an attempt to intimidate them.

As for granting deferred action, U.S.

Citizenship and Immigration Services said in a statement that the agency would do so only under “compelling circumstances on a case-by-case basis.”

DHS, which oversees USCIS and ICE, emphasized in an email that having SIJ “does NOT confer lawful status,” adding that “any recipient may be subject to removal.”

The agency did not respond to a question about the agents who visited advocates’ offices.

Over the last year, the administration says it has tracked down 146,000 of the unaccompanied minors who entered the country under Biden in order to check on their well-being.

The majority of all the minors who entered the country in recent years had been released to one or both parents in the United States or to other close relatives.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said at a June press conference that some of the welfare checks found minors were doing fine with their families.

But he asserted that he’d also tracked down children who were in the hands of rapists and other criminals.

“We start digging into these cases and you start hearing absolute horrific things,” he said.

When asked for verifiable details about some of the cases Mullin mentioned, DHS did not respond.

A DHS spokesperson later sent a list of 16 people who had sponsored immigrant minors and had previously been charged with crimes including assault, drug trafficking or domestic violence.

Meanwhile, Justice Department officials said they’d indicted less than a handful of people on charges of smuggling or exploiting immigrant minors.

No officials from DHS or the Justice Department explained what had become of any of the children connected to those indictments.

As for immigrants who had entered the U.S. as children and are now adults, Mullin said, “we are working on the process of sending them back.”

Six months into his detention, Chavez is on his own.

He was ordered deported but is appealing the decision and filed a habeas petition.

Della Valle has been released, thanks to his wife’s outspoken advocacy.

His release was bittersweet for Chavez.

But Della Valle has not forgotten him.

Della Valle and his wife, Angela Della Valle, have helped Chavez’s sister, Mayuri Chavez, to pay off his outstanding traffic tickets and prepare his defense.

The couple started a letter-writing campaign for him.

They’ve passed out flyers with a picture of a chair Chavez made in carpentry class, asking people to color it in and send him messages of encouragement.

Della Valle said he feels pangs of guilt about leaving Chavez behind.

He still speaks to Chavez most days and tries to keep the teen’s spirits up, but worries his words don’t carry the same weight now that he’s out.

Della Valle tries to convince himself that Chavez will be OK, saying, “I think me being out might be good for him because he knows that there’s hope.”

Meanwhile, Chavez has been moved to different cells multiple times.

One had only a single functional shower for dozens of men.

The video call system often malfunctioned.

Someone stole his small notebook, where he had carefully written down all the telephone numbers of the people he was in touch with outside.

One night he dreamt he was free.

When he woke up and realized he was still in detention, he panicked and had trouble breathing.

He said he has been trying to keep up the routine he started when Della Valle was there, but each passing week makes it harder.

In a series of interviews from detention, Chavez worried about losing half his junior year of high school.

He missed a required English test and a deadline to turn in a history project, and now that the school year is over, he is unclear if he will be able to make the assignments up to be able to graduate on time.

His sister spent a lot of money to get him braces, and without regular adjustments he worries it will all be for nothing.

He missed the birth of his new nephew, and he is unsure if he will be able to meet him.

“I had so many plans,” he said, “but now everything is ruined.”