The U.S. Is Trying to Legalize the Indefinite Detention of Migrant Children

The last legal barrier to indefinite child detention is collapsing. What follows will be darker than what came before.

In 1985, a fifteen-year-old girl named Jenny Lisette Flores fled the violence of El Salvador and came to the United States, alone, looking for safety. She found a cage. She had fled the civil war in El Salvador, a war in which the U.S. government had a dirty hand.

Border agents locked her in a detention center with adult men. They strip-searched her on a regular basis. They told her she could only leave if a parent came to get her even though her aunt, a legal resident, stood ready to take her in. She waited. Days passed. Then weeks. No one came. Her crime was being alone, being young, and daring to survive.

We don’t know exactly when she was released, or how. Her story, like so many stories of migrant children, faded from view after it served its legal purpose. She vanished from the headlines. Her name remained only as the title of a court case.

But that case changed everything.

It took twelve years of courtroom battles, but eventually, that cage birthed a settlement. The Flores Agreement. A promise scrawled in legal ink that the United States would at least try not to torture migrant children. It said they should be kept safe. That they shouldn’t be jailed with strangers. That they should get food, water, a bed. It didn’t offer comfort. It offered the barest minimum of humanity.

Donald Trump is trying to kill The Flores Agreement. We need to talk about what that means, and who stands to benefit.

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The Motion and the Money

On May 22, 2025, the Trump administration filed a legal motion with one clear purpose: to obliterate the Flores Settlement Agreement. The only legal safeguard preventing the United States government from locking up migrant children indefinitely.

It was more than a filing it was a declaration of war on the last remaining legal protections for migrant children in U.S. custody. The Trump Administration argues that Flores is ‘outdated’ and it shackled immigration policy, that it tied the hands of federal agencies with too many rules, too many eyes, too much restraint.

In their words, it was time for this ‘decades-long oversight to end’. What they really meant was: let us do whatever we want to immigrant children.

On that same day, coincidence be damned, House Republicans passed a historic budget bill. Buried inside it was a jaw-dropping $160 billion for immigration enforcement. Of that, $45 billion was earmarked for detention.

This wasn’t coincidental timing. It was choreography. The motion and the money came together like lock and key.

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GEO’s Golden Goose

Behind the courtroom filings and the bureaucratic language is a brutal truth: immigrant detention is a business and their children are the latest product.

See, the U.S. government doesn’t run most of its own detention facilities. It outsources them and where there’s outsourcing, there’s profit. Private prison giants like GEO Group and CoreCivic hold multimillion-dollar contracts with ICE, CBP, and ORR to operate “family residential centers.” These are not charities.

They are corporations and they are paid by the head, by the day.

Geo Group alone is already making $150-200 per person/day that they keep them in their facilities. In 2025, they’ve already signed one billion dollars in new contracts with the Trump Administration. They also stand to earn a significant amount from the $59 billion dollars allocated for detention centers in the “Big Beautiful Bill” if it passes the Senate.

By the way, GEO Group isn’t just dipping its toes into immigration detention. They run dozens of private prisons across the United States, housing everyone from undocumented migrants to U.S. citizens caught in the dragnet of mass incarceration. This isn’t a niche operation. It’s a billion-dollar empire built on locking people up. Immigrant children are just the newest revenue stream.

Under the Flores Settlement, migrant children, whether unaccompanied or with family, must generally be released within 20 days, either to a relative or to a licensed facility, meaning a shelter approved by state child welfare agencies with basic standards for safety, care, and oversight.

Without Flores, there’s no deadline, no requirement to transfer them out of unregulated detention, and nothing stopping the government from locking children in jail-like conditions indefinitely.

It forces facilities to meet basic health and safety standards. Flores slows the churn. It keeps the profit margins in check.

Without it, the detention centers become warehouses. No release clock ticking. No outside inspections. No court demanding a toothbrush, a bed, a licensed nurse.

That’s why the Trump administration wants Flores dead.

It’s not just about detaining children longer. It’s about detaining them cheaper, too. No one has to give them hygiene supplies like a toothbrush and soap if there’s no one demand it. No one has to provide adequate meals if there’s no court ordering calories. No one has to pay trained counselors if trauma goes unreported.

We’ve already seen what happens when the rules bend. Children sleeping on cold concrete under Mylar sheets. A sixteen-year-old boy dying of the flu while agents watched from a monitor and never intervened. Unaccompanied minors injected with psychotropic drugs without consent. Kids separated from their families, then mocked for crying too loud at night.

One little girl, ten-year-old Dixiana, testified about her time in an ICE detention facility during the Trump’s first presidency. Where she was kicked awake by a male officer while in custody. She slept on the floor. She was denied water. She was placed in a cell so overcrowded that girls had to sleep sitting up. She cried all the time. Most of the other children did too. There were no windows, and the lights never went off. She lost track of time and begged to see her mother. She caught chickenpox in detention. All of this happened under the existing protections of Flores.

Now imagine what they’ll do without it.

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Trump’s War on Flores Began Years Ago

Donald Trump’s obsession with dismantling the Flores Settlement didn’t begin in 2025. It was born in the rage of his first presidency, when a little-known consent decree became one of the few legal barricades standing between his administration and the complete militarization of the border.

It was 2018, and the world watched in horror as children were ripped from their parents’ arms, locked in cages, and scattered across the country. It was called the “zero tolerance” policy but what it tolerated, with grim efficiency, was cruelty. Babies were taken from breastfeeding mothers. Toddlers sobbed for their parents and some parents were deported while their children remained behind. Their fates left to a chaotic and underregulated foster system. The Trump Administration still cannot account for where at least 1, 475 of those children ended up.

In 2019, Trump’s Justice Department stood before a panel of federal judges and argued, with a straight face, that the Flores Settlement did not require the government to provide detained children with basic hygiene supplies. Not soap. Not toothbrushes. Not even a place to sleep. They claimed the words “safe and sanitary” were too vague, that comfort wasn’t a legal obligation, that maybe kids could survive on concrete and cold air.

What stopped the indefinite detention of those children? Not Congress. Not conscience. It was Flores. Flores and Judge Dolly Gee.

If Flores is dismantled now, there’s no court-ordered 20-day limit. No rule demanding licensed shelters. No barrier to indefinite detention in secretive, unregulated facilities where contractors cut costs and children disappear again only this time, no one will be able to ask where they went because they won’t even know they exist.

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Then They Came for the Children

This isn’t the Trump administration’s first attack on migrant children since returning to power. But the past few days have made one thing chillingly clear: they’re accelerating.

Maybe they’re running out of adults to torment. Or maybe they’re just more honest now about who their policies are designed to punish. Either way, the cruelty has found a new target: children.

In Bakersfield, California, a four-year-old girl named Sofia Vargas is fighting to stay alive. She depends on TPN, a complex, high-risk nutrition therapy delivered through a central line in her chest. It must be compounded in a sterile pharmacy, adjusted weekly based on bloodwork, and infused over fourteen hours a day. Without it, she will die.

Not metaphorically. Not gradually. Literally. She will die a slow death as she starves to death because her body can’t digest nutrients no matter how much she eats. Her doctors have made that plain. But the Trump administration wants to deport her anyway. They say she no longer qualifies to stay. They’re not offering a hospital in her home country. They’re offering a grave.

At the same time, Homeland Security agents have begun showing up unannounced at homes, schools, and shelters across the country. They call them “wellness checks,” but these aren’t trained social workers. These are criminal investigators from Homeland Security Investigations: a unit better known for drug busts and human trafficking cases.

They’ve questioned six-year-olds in public libraries. They’ve photographed apartments through windows. They’ve demanded to speak with children whose cases have already been decided in their favor in court.

In one case, agents knocked on the door of a Massachusetts home where two teenage brothers lived with their adult sibling, who had already passed all the required check-ins with the Office of Refugee Resettlement. DHS showed up anyway. The boys stopped going to school. They were afraid. Their story is not an outlier.

This isn’t about protecting kids. If it were, there would be warrants. There would be ORR staff. There would be trauma-informed care, not armed agents at your door. This is surveillance dressed as concern. It’s about fear. Control. Sending a message to families that no one is safe, not even the youngest, not even the legal guardians who’ve done everything right.

These are not isolated incidents. This is policy. A deliberate escalation. While House Republicans push for budget language that would slap thousands of dollars in fees on anyone trying to sponsor an unaccompanied child, DHS is already treating those children like fugitives. Asylum seekers are being priced out of protection. Legal service providers have been stripped of funding. The very agencies once tasked with helping kids are now hiring deportation specialists.

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Fin

Jenny Lisette Flores vanished from the headlines the moment she was freed, but the cage she was held in never really opened. It just got bigger. It changed shape. It multiplied and now they are tearing apart the only thing that ever tried to slow them down.

The Flores Agreement was not mercy. It was not justice. It was a bandage on a wound the United States refuses to stop cutting open. A narrow promise that we would not knowingly destroy children. Not without a time limit. Not without a bed. Not without someone, somewhere, being forced to look.

Now even that is too much.

They’re not hiding it anymore. They are building billion-dollar empires on childhood suffering. They are sending armed men to knock on the doors of seven-year-olds. They are writing checks for cages while cutting lawyers for kids. They are kicking little girls awake on concrete floors and calling it national security. They are deporting dying children, and they are calling it law.

If they succeed, no one will know how many children are taken or where they’re held or what’s done to them. There will be no court orders. No inspections. No names. Just silence, like Jenny’s, repeated thousands of times in the dark.

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This is the future they’re building and we will have to live with what we let them do.

The "Big Beautiful Bill" hasn’t passed yet, but the clock is ticking. If it does, it will funnel billions into the pockets of private prison contractors, erase the last legal safeguards for migrant children, and clear the way for indefinite detention without oversight.

Call your senators, even the Republicans, and tell them to vote no. Demand that they fight back against Trump’s war on migrant children. Demand that they stop him from deporting a four-year-old girl who will die without her medical care. Demand that they defend the Flores Agreement if they have even a shred of humanity left in them.

You can:

• Use the free 5 Calls app, available on Google Play and the App Store

• Look up your elected officials at usa.gov/elected-officials

• Call the U.S. Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and ask to be connected to your senator or representative

• Visit house.gov or senate.gov to find contact information directly

You don’t need to be eloquent. You just need to be loud. Tell them we see what they’re doing, and we will not be silent.

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This attack on migrants was never about “deporting bad guys.” This was never about law and order. It was always about skin color and their attacks on children solidify that. It was always about power. When you put racists and xenophobes in charge, when you hand a deportation machine to people who believe their whiteness makes them superior, this is what you get.

But I am not corporate media. I will not soften the truth. I will not be bought. I will keep telling these stories, no matter how brutal they are, because someone has to. I will continue to expose the human cost of this administration’s violence.

If you want to keep seeing these stories, subscribe for free. If you’re able, consider a paid subscription to help me keep going. But know this: I will never put the truth behind a paywall. Because the world needs to know and I will not stop telling it.