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In early March,<\/span> a seven-year-old boy in immigration custody received good news: He would finally be released to his mother\u2019s care. Months earlier, he had been apprehended as an unaccompanied minor while crossing the US-Mexico border. Since then, he had been staying in a facility run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, waiting for his mother, who was already in the United States, to be approved as his sponsor. She had painstakingly jumped through the necessary hoops, submitting the required documents and undergoing a home study to show that she was a safe caregiver. But soon after the boy learned of his imminent release, a new federal policy abruptly made his mother ineligible as a sponsor.<\/p>\n Confused about why he is still in custody, the boy recently told his mother, through tears, that she must not want him after all.<\/p>\n Across the country, thousands of children are quietly lingering in ORR facilities, unable to reunite with parents or relatives because of new Trump administration policies limiting who can sponsor them. According to a class action lawsuit<\/a> filed by immigration advocacy groups last week, children are \u201cbeing separated from their loving families, while the government denies their release, unnecessarily prolonging their detention.\u201d <\/p>\n Some of the kids in custody are appearing in immigration court alone, as a result of recent cuts to federal funding for legal representation for unaccompanied children.<\/p>\n \u201cWe don\u2019t know when, if ever, they will be able to reunite with their family.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n \u201cThey\u2019re crying, having a lot of anxiety and distress that they are expressing,\u201d says Mickey Donovan-Kaloust, director of legal services at the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, one of the lawsuit plaintiffs. \u201cIt\u2019s heartbreaking for our team.\u201d<\/p>\n When kids cross the border without a legal guardian and are detained by the Border Patrol, they\u2019re transferred into the care of ORR while they wait for a sponsor\u2014usually a parent or relative\u2014to jump through the necessary hoops to take them in. Teenagers in ORR custody are confined to shelters, which take the form of campuses with a school and recreational areas, while younger children often stay in foster homes. Historically, the kids have been released from ORR to live with their sponsors while immigration courts weigh their cases to remain in the country.<\/p>\n But over the past three months, the Trump administration has rolled out a series of new screening rules that make it nearly impossible for undocumented people to become sponsors. There are now about 2,000 children<\/a> in custody, far fewer than there were when Trump was elected, reflecting the sharp downturn in people trying to enter the country. Yet those children who are in custody, many of whom arrived at the end of the Biden administration or the beginning of Trump\u2019s second term, are staying much longer.<\/p>\n\n