Refugee children in Massachusetts targeted for removal

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“I’m really sorry to tell you this country wants to desperately get rid of you, I don’t know why.”

Those are words that S., a foster parent living in central Massachusetts who spoke to The Shoestring on the condition of anonymity because of fear of reprisal from the federal government, recalled using to tell her teenage daughter that she had been ordered removed from the country.

S. fosters her daughter through Ascentria Care Alliance, a Worcester-based non-profit that administers foster care services through the state’s Unaccompanied Refugee Minors program.

The Massachusetts Department of Children and Families, who jointly administers that program with the state Office for Refugees and Immigrants did not return a request for comment.

Now, S. and other foster parents to immigrant children are on high alert as the Trump administration accelerates its targeting of children for deportation, including those who already have been granted humanitarian relief.

Last month, immigration courts in Massachusetts ordered 62 people who came to the United States alone as children to be deported, bringing the total number of such removal orders to 545 since January 2025.

That’s according to data released by the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), which runs the country’s immigration courts. The Shoestring analyzed EOIR data that had been processed by the Deportation Data Project.

The data show that removal orders at Massachusetts immigration courts have skyrocketed in recent months across the board. Between January and May of this year, judges at the immigration court in Chelmsford handed down 1,242 removal orders to people of all ages; then between June and September, it ordered 3,484 people deported.

Advocates say it’s only going to get worse.

Last April, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services rescinded a policy that deferred removal proceedings for minors and certain young adults with “Special Immigrant Juvenile Status” who were awaiting green cards. The status is intended as a form of humanitarian protection for children who have survived abuse, abandonment, or neglect, and for whom a state court has decided that they cannot safely return to their home country.

The new USCIS policy says the agency will not grant deferred action determinations “solely because an immigrant visa is not immediately available.” That’s a problem for the more than 200,000 people with pending special immigrant juvenile status petitions for green cards, who wait years for their turn to receive the much smaller share of approvals doled out annually, by law limited to 7.1% of all green cards. In 2026, that amounts to 13,229 visas.

After becoming a foster parent to two children from South America six years ago, Grace, another western Mass parent who agreed to use her first name only for fear of reprisal, says her boys have adjusted well to her home community.

“Having the kids here is a joy,” she said. “My boys are super sarcastic, and so am I. I think they fit in really well here in New England because most folks in New England are pretty sarcastic, and they’re just funny.”

But after hearing from other foster parents that they were starting to get removal notices, Grace began to worry for the safety of the two boys in her own care. Starting around August, she said, other foster parents started reporting that their own kids had been summoned to attend routine hearings, where previously it had been sufficient for Ascentria’s lawyers to be present in their place. She said she felt the kids were being “set up” by officials, who were intent on “ripping away support services that are essential to the function of these kids’ lives.”

S. translated the following statement from her foster daughter: “It’s true that we are migrants. But we are not here to hurt anyone. I am just here to study and do good in the community. We are all human and we should all have a right to make a better life for ourselves.”

They said the logic the court gave for approving the removal order made no sense, because the Massachusetts courts already approved her SIJ status. She must have an approved status since she has, for example, access to health insurance through MassHealth.

“But now the federal government is saying, ‘You don’t have a status and you need to leave the country?’” they asked.

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Angela Snyder, an immigration attorney with Ascentria Care Alliance, told The Shoestring that the position the court is taking is “not something that has ever happened in immigration court before.”

The courts, she says, have argued that because green card timelines are indeterminate — unaccompanied youth often wait years for work authorizations after attaining special immigrant juvenile status — the relief that deferred action grants for her clients is “speculative.”

Snyder said she watched one judge this month grant the Department of Homeland Security’s request for removals in every single case the judge heard, except for a small handful where the defendant already had asylum protections, which is different from special immigrant juvenile status.

Unlike the traditional court system, immigration courts are administrative, and judges are employees of the U.S. Department of Justice, and the Trump administration DOJ has not been subtle about removing judges who don’t rule the way they want. In April, GBH reported the firing of three immigration judges who had been appointed by former President Joe Biden while they were in the middle of hearings.

One of the fired judges had terminated deportation proceedings against Rümeysa Öztürk, the Tufts University Ph.D student whose student visa the Trump administration revoked after she co-authored an op-ed in the school’s newspaper calling for Tufts to divest from companies tied to Israel and to acknowledge the genocide in Palestine.

The firings came a day after the White House announced its intentions to replace judges who “slow-walked deportations and granted asylum at sky-high rates.”

“Our only option at this point is to ring every alarm bell and to get this out there because it’s just horrifying,” Amy Moore, a spokesperson for Ascentria Care Alliance, told The Shoestring.

Moore told The Shoestring that none of the youth in the program have been deported yet.

Between August and October, 168 hearings for unaccompanied minors were moved up on the court’s schedule by, on average, by 88 days, but in some cases hearings were moved up by almost two years.

“These kids already have these state court underlying orders saying that it’s not in their best interest to return to their home country, these kids are not an enforcement priority, which is why they would move so slow,” Snyder said.

Federal funding for Ascentria’s legal services is gone. In February 2025, the Office of Refugee Resettlement issued a stop-work order on all of Ascentria’s unaccompanied minor cases. While that order was reversed just a few days later, the following month a federal contract with Acacia Center for Justice, the legal services non-profit of which Ascentria’s legal team is a subcontractor, was terminated early, federal procurement records show. Then in July, a bridge grant that had been funding the unaccompanied minors legal representation ended.

“The good news is that we do have the ability to appeal these decisions,” Snyder added. That buys 30 days. After that, the Board of Immigration appeals has to issue a briefing schedule. That might push things an additional 60 days or so, “if we’re lucky,” Snyder said.

Essentially, they’re treading water.

“We’re just hopeful that something is going to change that we can use that to our advantage because right now, these judges are getting away with just implementing DHS’s wishes at every hearing,” Snyder said.

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