The Guardian reported on September 19, 2026 that “Stephen Miller is leading an unprecedented and intense White House drive across a host of government departments to accelerate the removal of undocumented immigrant children from the US, using tactics that critics say are cruel and racist and, in some cases, flout federal law.”
Miller's personal role rests on the Guardian's unnamed sources and should be read that way. One described how instructions arrived: implementers “are told, 'These instructions came directly from the White House,' or 'These instructions came directly from Stephen Miller,' as a way of conveying, you know, the importance of implementing them in a timely fashion.” The White House did not deny his involvement; it said the effort “was not new.”
The individual mechanisms are better established, and several are confirmed outside the Guardian's account.
The wall between child welfare and immigration enforcement has come down. A source told the Guardian: “If ICE wants access to literally every single child's identifiable information, mental health records, behavioral records, all of that, they have it. I mean, it's not about sharing at this point. They just have access to it.” The Office of Refugee Resettlement's acting director came from ICE's Homeland Security Investigations, which the agency's own website confirms.
Trafficking reports have been rerouted. The Associated Press reported that a September 10 memo “ordered caregivers for migrant children to stop reporting human trafficking concerns directly to the office created to help victims, a change that critics say could make some vulnerable minors easier to deport,” and that it “could mean that some victims would be denied services and face tougher odds of obtaining asylum and visas.” The office says the change followed a review finding that 95 percent of more than 9,000 reports “were determined not to be viable trafficking leads.” Jen Smyers, who was the office's deputy director under Biden, put the objection plainly: “What they are trying to do is deport as many as possible. What interferes with deporting children is if they are eligible for protections Congress has given them.”
The children have lost their lawyers. NPR reported in August that “An estimated 26,000 children who entered the U.S. without parents or guardians are expected to be left without independent legal representation” after a federal contract ended. Alexa Sendukas of the Galveston-Houston Immigrant Representation Project supplied the number that matters: “We know that without a lawyer, unaccompanied children win the right to stay in the United States less than 1% of the time.”
The administration's account is that this is child protection. A spokeswoman said the departments “are working to locate and rescue these children. We are ensuring these children are reunited with their parents and families in their home countries.” A health department spokesperson said the office “is not involved in the enforcement of immigration law or in the removal process,” but is part of an effort to find children released to “poorly vetted sponsors,” some of whom “exploited the unaccompanied children in their care, including through trafficking.”
Claire Trickler-McNulty, a former assistant director at ICE and senior counselor at USCIS, disputes the premise: “A facade of trafficking is sort of a convenient, feel-good cover that has nothing to do with trafficking and everything to do with reducing the program, getting rid of services, getting rid of things they don't like, and then removing kids.”
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) said the administration “has sacrificed every element of ORR's child welfare mission on the altar of higher deportation numbers.”
One detail in the Guardian's account the department confirmed and then walked back: it “considered recruiting and detailing military lawyers for temporary augmentation of capacity but is no longer pursuing this option.”