CHICAGO — Rep. Mike Quigley, D-Ill., likened the entryway to Chicago’s immigration court to the gates of hell. To reporters, he invoked the ominous quote that appears in Dante’s “Inferno” on signage before souls enter the underworld.
“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,” Quigley said. “That’s what I saw firsthand today: a sense that there is absolutely no hope under this kind of Trump justice system for the least fortunate, for the most vulnerable.”
An absence of hope was palpable among the immigration attorneys, advocates and lawmakers who attended hearings on Wednesday for the most vulnerable of undocumented immigrants: unaccompanied minors.
But the specific cohort of minors who came before Immigration Court Judge Shawn Abraham on Wednesday, advocates and court observers say, reflects a shift in the administration’s deportation drive. The minors who President Donald Trump once indicated he meant to protect with his hard-line border policies — unaccompanied children who are victims of abuse, neglect or abandonment — have now become the target.
MS NOW watched for two hours as more than a dozen children, some as young as 12, attended their immigration court hearings, competing for space with the hundreds of adults and families lining hallways to attend “mega-master” hearings. Such hearings, which cram dozens of unrepresented undocumented immigrants into a single courtroom at the same time, have become yet another vehicle the administration has adopted to accelerate deportations.
Nearly all of the children who attended Wednesday’s hearing had pending applications for a status adjustment to classify them as “Special Immigrant Juveniles,” a category reserved for young victims of abuse, abandonment or parental neglect who would be at risk if returned to their country of origin. The classification was created in 2008 as a provision of the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act. In past administrations, even a pending application for an SIJ classification was enough not only to delay a deportation order but perhaps to put a child on an expedited path toward citizenship. The Trump administration rescinded that policy in April. As of June, more than 33,000 SIJ petitions were awaiting review, according to quarterly data from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
With the rescission, attorneys say, minors who would typically appear in court three or four times a year are returning every two weeks, an accelerated pace that aids the administration’s effort to fast-track deportations.
The effects of the rescission were clear as Abraham, emotionless and mechanical, issued removal orders virtually to a majority of the children in his courtroom, even as their attorneys presented Illinois state court findings that sending the children back to their native countries would not be in their best interest.
Among the children who received a removal order was a 12-year-old wearing a baggy white Air Jordan T-shirt, who fidgeted with a toy handed to him by his immigration advocate. He entered the country when he was 10, and on Wednesday he sat expressionless as Abraham told him through a translator that he would be removed to his home country of El Salvador.
The boy’s advocate, facilitated by the National Immigrant Justice Center, offered Abraham several pleas as she protested the decision: He is a “vulnerable, tender-age child” who has experienced trauma; an Illinois state judge determined reunification is not a “viable option” for him, as his parents abandoned him; and his safety would be threatened if he were returned to El Salvador.
Abraham, glancing around through his Webex screen as the advocate spoke, was unmoved and told the 12-year-old that he would be returned to his home country, though his attorney could appeal the decision to the Board of Immigration Appeals, or BIA. That board, like the immigration court itself, operates under the executive branch, not the judicial.
Quigley, who sat in court throughout most of the proceedings, objected strongly to Abraham’s decision to appear virtually, a departure from his predecessor Elizabeth Crites, who was fired by the Trump administration last month after five years of service. Abraham is a member of the Illinois State Bar and last year served in the Cook County State Attorney’s Office in Chicago.
“I have a plausible theory for why the administrator this morning wasn’t there in person,” Quigley said. “It would be virtually impossible for anyone, even someone without a soul, to look a kid in the eye and say, ‘I’m sending you back, without your parents, without anyone, with absolutely nothing there, without any justice done.’”
The 12-year-old was one of five migrant children represented by Laura Smith, the executive director of the Children’s Legal Center, who received removal orders despite having pending applications for Special Immigrant Juvenile Status. She described her young clients as “devastated.”
“They came here because they’re terrified. They have faced horrors in their home country, and they’re coming for protection, and they qualify for that protection,” Smith said. “They’re doing everything right, they’re following the law, and yet they’re going to be taken back to a situation that they fled from, a situation that harmed them.”
Smith’s organization, the Children’s Legal Center, is one of roughly 100 legal service providers that have been adversely affected by the Trump administration’s decision to end a federal contract with the Acacia Center for Justice, which had provided counsel to more than 20,000 unaccompanied migrant children.
“It’s an extreme effect on our ability to do our job,” Smith said. “Without the funding, we can’t hire new people, we can’t actually pay the people who we currently have, and so we’re not taking on new cases.”
The Office of Refugee Resettlement, which oversees unaccompanied minors, instead sought to award a $150 million contract to Burke Law Group, a Texas-based firm with 26 employees, only two of whom list immigration as a practice area. The company’s founder, Marcella Burke, served in the first Trump administration as a lawyer for the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of the Interior. Following backlash, however, the group announced this month it had declined to take on the contract.
Ultimately, the office awarded the contract to anti-trafficking group Our Rescue. The organization’s website does not list legal counsel among the services it provides — a point that has frustrated groups previously contracted to provide the aid.
“If the children don’t have representation, they will more quickly be ordered removed,” Smith said. “They won’t be able to appeal to the BIA and preserve their due process rights, and they won’t be able to eventually get to an actual court, an Article 3 court, to have that court decide whether the policies of this administration are in violation of the law.”
Smith, along with other immigration attorneys, says June marked a turning point in the pace of the Trump administration’s deportations; they saw a significant increase in the issuance of removal orders.
Joy Olson, a Milwaukee-based child advocate and an Acacia board member, has been observing Chicago juvenile court proceedings for the past 15 months. “Since last spring, I’ve only witnessed one or two removals,” she told MS NOW after the hearing ended. On Wednesday, she saw eight. Data backs the claim.
Immigrants in Chicago’s immigration court saw a 120% increase in the number of removals ordered between March and June, according to TRAC reports. That is four times the national average and the largest spike in the country. While publicly available data does not break down those removals by age, it is evident that the deportation of undocumented children is part of what is helping the government maintain that pace. It’s a departure from Trump’s pledge to pursue the “worst of the worst,” said Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, who also attended Wednesday’s hearing.
“Do you remember how they explained it? We were going after the worst of the worst: the terrorists, the rapists, the murderers, the child predators,” Durbin said. “I wish the people who made those statements could see what we saw this morning.”
The last case on the docket Wednesday was a high-school-age Guatemalan. There was a delay in finding a translator who spoke K’iche’, a Mayan indigenous language. After Abraham issued his removal order, he rattled off a litany of directives through the translator.
“Sir, stay in communications with your attorney. She has the ability to appeal this decision to a higher court. Your appeal would need to be filed by Sept. 25, 2026,” Abraham said. Then he asked the child if he had any questions.
Unlike the majority of children before the judge that day, the minor spoke up through his translator.
“Yes. Why are you sending me back to Guatemala? What did I do?”
Kayla McCormick contributed reporting.
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