A federal judge ordered the Department of Homeland Security to stop using “coercive” and threatening language to convince unaccompanied immigrant children to agree to deportation, court documents show.
The judge said earlier this week that by using threats of prosecution and coercive language, the U.S. government violated a 40-year-old court order that bans immigration agents from attempting to coerce unaccompanied children to voluntarily leave the country after being detained.
In a separate order, the court also denied government lawyers’ request to end those same longstanding protections.
The two decisions were issued Monday by Judge Michael W. Fitzgerald, who wrote in the orders that the government’s threat of prolonged detention for immigrant children who choose not to self-deport “disturbingly mirrors the testimony” of Jose Antonio Perez-Funez, whose trial in 1985 led the court to first order the protections for children the following year. Perez-Funez and others in that class action case testified that they were not informed of their rights to apply for bail or asylum, leading them to involuntarily waive their rights while they were detained by immigration agents as children.
Mark Rosenbaum, a lawyer for the nonprofit law firm Public Counsel has been representing immigrant children who were detained by the government for decades and helped win the 1986 court order in the Perez-Funez case.
He said the case has now shown new evidence that the Trump administration has no intention of respecting the rule of law.
The administration’s goal, as Rosenbaum sees it, “is to amp up [deportation] statistics of children who represent no threat to the national interest, who are among the least culpable individuals on the planet.”
LAist reached out to DHS for comment but has not heard back.
The language that has been banned
Last October, LAist reported that DHS had begun targeting unaccompanied children with a “voluntary option” to return them to their countries of origin. Through court documents in the current case, more has been confirmed about how this so-called “voluntary option” was actually presented to children.
Unaccompanied children who are detained for suspected immigration violations are first held by DHS, before generally being turned over to Office of Refugee Resettlement, or ORR, which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services. At ORR, children are required by federal law to be provided a confidential legal consultation within 10 days, along with other support.
Court documents show DHS was presenting children with the option to self-deport, along with threats of prosecution and prolonged detainment if they refused, before they were transferred to ORR and guaranteed the chance to speak with an attorney.
Fitzgerald wrote that presenting this ultimatum to children violated the 1986 court order.
“It is difficult to imagine a scenario more coercive than the one faced by [unaccompanied immigrant children] in the 72 hours before they are transferred into ORR custody,” Fitzgerald wrote in court documents, “particularly for noncitizen children who likely do not know whether they possess any rights at all.”
According to evidence presented in court, children were told that if they did not accept voluntary deportation, they would be detained “for a prolonged period of time” and if they turned 18 years old while in custody they would “be turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement for removal.”
They were also told they may be “barred from legally applying for a visa” and that their sponsor in the U.S. “may be subject to criminal prosecution” if they didn’t agree to voluntary deportation.
This information was read to children or presented to them in a document DHS called the “UAC Pathway Processing Advisal”, but Rosenbaum told LAist he sees even the document’s name as misleading.
”It wasn't an advisal, it was a coercive document,” Rosenbaum said. The government has admitted it used the document since September 2025, according to the court order that now bans its use.
How did it come to this?
Rosenbaum said that after the 1986 court order, which also requires unaccompanied children to be allowed telephone access to relatives or legal support, organizations like Public Counsel and the National Immigration Law Center monitored the government’s compliance with the order.
Other than a few exceptions, he said, the injunction had been followed until recent years.
“ When the Trump administration began its immigration activities in the second term of the president, that all changed,” Rosenbaum said, “and it changed in a hurry.”
Court records show that DHS notified the court last November that they would be asking for the 1986 court ordered protections for children in the department’s custody to be ended. When organizations monitoring compliance with the order saw this, Rosenbaum said they investigated and found that in nearly all circumstances, children were no longer allowed to talk to lawyers and were being coerced to take voluntary departures from the country.
Despite the court order, Rosenbaum said, children were “separated from family, separated from their communities and separated from their constitutional rights.”
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Peter McGraw, deputy legal director at the National Immigration Law Center, told LAist that the court order was issued to specifically protect children’s Fifth Amendment rights to due process.
He said that when unaccompanied children arrive in the U.S., they don’t have an adult there with them to help them understand their decisions about whether to pursue a number of protections that may keep them from being deported.
“ What due process requires is that the government provide children with notice of their ability to apply for asylum or for other protections — withholding from removal or protection from removal under the convention against torture — to ensure that they are not sent back to countries where they would be in danger,” McGraw said.
