If you’re trying to arrest an 18-year-old who has driven themselves to a federal immigration office for a standard check-in, it’s best not to alarm them.

“You pretend it’s a nice, casual interview,” one Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer told HuffPost recently.

“And you wait until the very last second, until the interview’s done, to let someone know that actually, they’re not allowed to leave, and they probably should call people about their car.”

The officer knows from experience. In recent months, he said, ICE agents around the country have been tasked with targeting young people for arrest during check-ins. Specifically, they’re zeroing in on young people who initially arrived in the United States as children, without status and without a parent or guardian, and were placed for a time in the federal government’s shelter system. (The ICE officer spoke to HuffPost on the condition of anonymity so he could frankly discuss the agency’s work.)

To the government, these young people are known as “UACs,” or “unaccompanied alien children.” And thanks to laws passed by both parties in Congress and several presidents, they’re typically given special protections, including when it comes to applying for asylum and other protections from deportation. Having partially grown up in U.S. government custody, they have reason to expect their check-ins with federal officials to be uneventful.

To the Trump administration, the “UAC” designation means two things: lots of information about where these young people are, and the ability to call them in to immigration offices without much fanfare.

“Nobody shows up to these meetings thinking that they’re going to be detained,” said Priscilla Monico Marín, executive director of the New Jersey Consortium for Immigrant Children, which has had multiple 18- to 21-year-old clients who have been targeted by ICE. These clients have no “aggravating” factors like criminal histories, but were apparently singled out due to the simple fact that they entered the country as unaccompanied children.

“Nobody is like, ‘Today I’m going to turn myself in.’ That’s not what’s happening,” she continued. “It’s young people who think they’re going to be checking in, or having a conversation. And then, wham.”

“It’s a bait and switch,” Monico Marín said.

“It’s very easy to get targeting packages together for these UAC programs,” the ICE officer said. “I don’t know if it’s an automated system, but basically, the field offices get sheets of potential UACs to go and contact. That’s coordinated from headquarters and then disseminated.”

The officer said he knew of multiple ICE field offices with dedicated “UAC teams” whose work includes arresting young adults at their homes. Other offices might not have a full-time team — but do receive ad hoc assignments, or “taskers,” from DHS headquarters telling them “this is what you’re doing this week,” he said.

The officer said the efforts seemed to be about juicing deportation numbers.

“This program is supposed to go and find at-risk minors who’ve been wandering the United States for years without any kind of support,” he said, clarifying he was referring to people who’d since turned 18.

“In practice, we end up arresting a lot of the people we find.”

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Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, told HuffPost in an email that ICE is “NOT” targeting young people. Multiple attorneys told HuffPost that although they were aware of multiple young adult “UACs” being arrested, it wasn’t clear if there was any trend to the arrests. Just as with arrests taking place in immigration courts, it’s not the case that every person who shows up to a check-in is being detained.

Still, the administration has also been clear that these young people are not off limits for arrest.

In October, the administration enacted a new policy, in which migrant children who turn 18 in the government’s shelter system for unaccompanied youth — many of whom have relatives actively attempting to take them in — were to be transferred directly to adult ICE detention centers, except under certain exceptions. A wave of such transfers followed, despite approximately 98% of 18-year-old “age-outs” having been released over the past four years rather than sent to ICE detention, government records show. (The federal government contracts a network of shelters for migrant youth through the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement.)

Attorneys for the teens sued, saying the administration had violated a 2021 permanent injunction stopping the practice. Under existing child welfare law, the government must consider the “least restrictive setting” in these circumstances.

And on Friday night, U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras, who issued the 2021 judgment, found that the Trump administration had violated the injunction. He ordered the government to release any “age-outs” who had been re-arrested and detained without there having been any change in their flight risk or risk to themselves or others — and to provide information on those who had been re-arrested since July.

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to questions Monday morning about how it intended to comply with those orders. DHS has arguably defied many court orders under President Donald Trump.

Trump administration attorneys have argued that undocumented kids who turn 18 “are subject to the government’s authority to detain, just like any other adult alien in the United States.”

Suchita Mathur, a senior litigation attorney with the American Immigration Council — one of several litigators involved in the suit — said she was aware of “dozens” of young people who had either been transferred from shelter custody to ICE detention, or were arrested by ICE after living with sponsors outside of custody.

DHS “is targeting a population that is super vulnerable, and has a very low tolerance for being detained, so many kids are quickly accepting voluntary departure, or removal — and maybe that’s the point,” she said.

This fall, attorneys around the country began to see ICE agents picking up kids at government-contracted shelters as soon as they turned 18 and taking them to adult ICE jails, despite the 2021 court order that requires authorities to first consider placing kids aging out of the shelter system in the least restrictive setting possible.

That court order — which arose out of litigation referred to as Garcia Ramirez, et al. v. ICE, et al. — is based on the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, which contains significant protections for migrant youth. The Garcia Ramirez litigation began during the first Trump administration, when ICE repeatedly transferred minors who turned 18 directly to ICE jails.

On Oct. 3, the local Pittsburgh ICE office approved a plan for one such teen to be transferred to a shelter for unhoused youth, in Philadelphia, when he turned 18 the next day.

But a few hours later, ICE told the shelter where he’d been living that it would not honor that plan, Marcy Hilty, an immigration attorney with the nonprofit Jewish Family and Community Services of Pittsburgh, later recounted in federal court filings and told HuffPost in an interview. The teen would be going to immigration detention instead, the ICE office said.

The next morning, on the teen’s 18th birthday, ICE agents showed up to arrest him. Someone at the shelter, which Hilty described as a collegial group home setting, called her on speakerphone. Hilty told the agents about the existing court order that ought to have prevented them from showing up in the first place. She relayed that attorneys had already asked Contreras to reinforce that order in light of ICE’s new policy, which had been issued on Oct. 1.

“I do not care,” one agent told her, Hilty said. “No matter what you tell me, I am going to take the kid.”

The teen was patted down and put in shackles that bound his wrists and ankles together. There was hardly any need: Hilty described him as “very small,” with no criminal record or reason to be considered a flight risk. A preliminary determination from OTIF, the government’s Office on Trafficking in Persons, had stated that the boy was previously the victim of human trafficking, she said.

Hilty was stunned. Normally, she deals with a special team of ICE agents tasked to work with kids, transporting them from the border to shelters, and within the shelter system. Now, that same team was arresting her freshly 18-year-old client on his birthday.

The ICE agent she was speaking to refused to identify themselves, or even read the 2021 permanent injunction saying kids should be placed in the least restrictive setting possible. The agent also refused to read the document her own office had signed just a day earlier, which had authorized Hilty’s client’s transfer not to an adult jail, but to the shelter for unhoused youth in Philadelphia.

The teen disappeared into the black hole of adult ICE detention. Hilty was not informed of his whereabouts, she said. In Washington, D.C., Contreras held a hearing with the government and attorneys for unaccompanied children who’d been transferred to ICE detention as a result of the policy change. When Contreras asked the government if the new policy was available for review, an attorney for the government responded, “I… was advised I was not authorized to share at this time, but obviously you could order me to do so. So that’s where I’m at.”

Soon, as expected, Contreras issued a temporary restraining order, pressing ICE to “rescind any determinations to detain based on this directive.”

Hilty heard from her client for the first time almost 10 hours after his arrest, when he called her to ask for a ride from detention. A community partner picked him up. He had only one birthday wish, and he soon sent Hilty evidence of it: a picture of himself sitting in a restaurant, smiling, eating a cheeseburger and fries.

Hilty’s client was one of several who were detained pursuant to the administration’s new policy in October, in which they claimed authority to jail kids aging out of government custody in all but very limited parole circumstances. Given the administration’s parallel effort to, by default, jail everyone who’s in the country with an immigration status issue, the policy was set to jail scores of vulnerable young people.

But on Friday, Contreras followed up his temporary restraining order with a more muscular decree, granting plaintiffs’ motion to enforce his 2021 permanent injunction. He ordered the Trump administration to release class members who’d been re-arrested absent changes in their circumstances, and to produce information about who had been arrested since July.

There are many questions about how the court order may actually change the administration’s actions. For example, what will happen to unaccompanied children who were released to a sponsor’s custody before their 18th birthdays and who were arrested after them? Will they remain behind bars, even if they pose no risk to themselves or others, and show no prospect of skipping immigration court dates?

Mathur noted that parts of the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act consider protected youth to include those aged 21 and under. In general, she said, the law takes a “capacious” view of who is considered a child.

Seemingly every decision governing the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement agenda is driven by one priority: arresting and deporting as many people as possible.

That has meant doing away with past Democratic administrations’ policies of prioritizing targeting people deemed public safety threats, or those who have recently crossed the border. Over 65,000 people now sit in immigration detention, an all-time record, and the vast majority have no serious criminal history at all.

The administration’s claim that it is prioritizing the “worst of the worst” for arrest is simply not true. While McLaughlin repeated her claim that “70% of ICE arrests are of criminal illegal aliens convicted or charged with a crime in the U.S.,” figures like that include minor offenses like traffic violations.

Trump has certainly delivered immense harm to young immigrants in the past — he separated thousands of children from their parents in the most infamous cruelty of his first term — but as a group, unaccompanied children have historically enjoyed unique protections.

Those protections are now under attack.

The administration has threatened kids with “prolonged” government detention unless they return home. And children sent to government shelters from the border are now spending upwards of 170 days in them, according to HHS data, rather than days or weeks as was the case in the past.

The extended stays are thanks in part to new vetting requirements, including in-person interviews, for adult sponsors, who are usually family members. Thousands of parents, guardians and potential caretakers of migrant children have been arrested, CNN reported last month, including those with no criminal record and only immigration violations.

Several attorneys told HuffPost that releases of children to sponsors have slowed to a trickle, if they happen at all.

At least one of those sponsors arrested recently was a pregnant woman who was detained at an in-person identification check, Scott Bassett, managing attorney with the Amica Center’s Children’s Program, told HuffPost. Bassett said he didn’t believe the woman had any criminal history or a removal order against her, so it wasn’t clear why she was arrested.

“This administration is determined to detain as many people as possible, as quickly as possible and sponsors represent an easy target since the government knows exactly how to find them,” Neha Desai, managing director for children’s human rights and dignity at the National Center for Youth Law, told HuffPost in an email.

“The government has placed family members – including parents – in a cruel and impossible position of ‘choosing’ whether they should come forward and risk being detained, or not come forward, knowing that the children will never be released to them,” she added. “These policies come at an enormous cost to children’s physical and mental health, as they remain detained in ORR custody for longer and longer stretches of time, often with no viable options for release to anyone. Meanwhile, the process of releasing children to sponsors has come to a near halt since early November.”

Undocumented children are liable to end up in government custody if their caretakers are arrested. ICE has placed some 600 children in government shelters this year — more than the previous four years combined, ProPublica reported last month, citing government data. The majority of those cases were not due to child welfare concerns but to other circumstances, such as an adult being detained after an immigration appointment or traffic stop, the outlet reported.

“Hundreds of children who were living safely with their families, in the community are being inexplicably torn away from their family and re-detained in ORR custody, after an incident as minor as a traffic stop,” Desai said. “This scenario, which is playing out throughout the country, is a result of dramatically increased partnership between local law enforcement and ICE, and a determination to ensnare as many people as possible in federal immigration custody.”

“For most of these children, once re-detained back in ORR, they have little to any hope of being released back to their family. In years past, it was rare for a child to come back into ORR custody and in fact, the agency often took the position that they were unable to retake a child into their custody.”

The Trump administration has made plenty of noise about “rescuing” children it says were “lost” during the Biden administration. (In reality, they’re talking about a report concerning kids who never received a court appearance notice from the government.) But although there are serious cases of child abuse and trafficking among migrant youth, the administration has consistently lied about the scale of the problem.

What’s more, thanks to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, immigration authorities can now levy $5,000 fees on kids as young as 14 for crossing the border between ports of entry — adding to financial pressure that often leads to exploitation, as financial need often forces young people into vulnerable circumstances.

If the Trump administration’s targeting of UACs was really about combating trafficking, “you would not be fining kids $5,000 for entering the country and threatening to have their fine accrue to their sponsor, adding debt to that equation does not make anyone safer,” Bassett said.

Multiple children had relayed to the attorney that agents had either told or implied to them that their sponsors would be responsible for paying the fee, he said.

Federal agents who’ve increasingly begun interacting directly with children may really think their questions are helpful in trying to root out cases of exploitation and trafficking.

“I can tell you objectively that it was not,” Bassett said, referring to two federal agents who’d been pulled off a detail on a foot patrol in Washington, D.C., to interview the minors to determine their ties in the United States. The kids were bewildered. They’d been speaking with their would-be sponsors every week for months while languishing in the custody of a shelter, waiting to be released. The agents had no idea.

Sometimes, the encounters are more ominous.

Hilty told HuffPost that earlier this year, plainclothes federal agents with Homeland Security Investigations, ICE’s investigatory arm, attempted to “check in” on clients of hers in Pittsburgh while claiming to be child welfare workers. Her clients called her, and Hilty, who lives nearby, showed up at the house “and managed to make ICE go away.”

She “made a big stink about it” and the check-ins stopped for her clients, Hilty said — but agents are still “checking in” on kids around the country, sometimes leading to arrests for simple immigration violations rather than for child welfare concerns. (McLaughlin denied that ICE poses as welfare workers. A spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services said it had “not been able to confirm these alleged reports.”)

Separately, the government is currently looking for contractors who can track down kids who’ve been placed with sponsors.

A preliminary contracting document posted on the federal government’s contracting website last week requested information from potentially interested vendors “capable of performing in field safety verification services of unaccompanied alien children (UAC) released from the Office of Refugee Resettlement.” The document noted that the field services may include both confirming the location of children and their sponsors, as well as confirming the child “knows when they are expected to appear in court.” The goal, the document said, would be to investigate approximately 300,000 cases within a year. The administration is separately exploring the creation of a new call center to coordinate data sharing with local law enforcement about migrant children.

At the same time, the administration has sought to defund a program to provide free legal counsel to thousands of unaccompanied children, who infamously sometimes appear in immigration court on their own. A judge has temporarily restored the funding, though the harms from the cut still linger, and legal service providers are ringing alarm bells about the administration sabotaging the program while still technically funding it.

The administration also sought to end a Biden-era deportation protection for abused, abandoned or neglected youth under 21, who fall into a green card-eligible category known as Special Immigrant Juvenile Status, which itself dates back to 1990. The change would’ve made hundreds of thousands of young people eligible to lose work authorization and face deportation. A judge paused the Trump administration’s action last month. Separately, government records lay out specific instructions for targeting certain groups of kids with deportation or criminal prosecution.

The administration seems always to be pursuing new methods of targeting, detaining and attempting to expel children, including offering them cash to self-deport. At one point, DHS attempted to fly dozens of Guatemalan children out of the country to “reunify” them with their families. A federal judge stopped that effort, writing that “there is no evidence before the court that the parents of these children sought their return.”

The various attempts to surveil and remove young people all point to an “attempt by the administration to target kids, and it’s very surprising to advocates because it’s not a population that other administrations have targeted, for I think obvious reasons,” said Mathur of the American Immigration Council.

The Trump administration has been quite clear that it is using the horrors of immigration jail — which is supposed to be a non-criminal, civil form of custody — to encourage immigrants to “self-deport” and give up their legal claim to remain in the United States.

“The conditions in detention are absolutely horrendous now, worse than anyone has really seen on a nationwide basis,” Mathur said.

For 18-year-olds facing the inside of a jail cell for the first time, the pressure of indefinite ICE detention is enough to force serious questions about giving up the fight to stay in the United States.

“We have seen a number of kids who we’ve found to be detained at their first check-in or shortly thereafter, their second check-in, have fairly quickly thereafter accepted voluntary departure during immigration court proceedings,” she added.

“Their appetite for being detained is very, very low. These are 18-year-olds who are detained alongside adults, who have for the most part never had contact with the criminal legal system before — never been in jail, never been in prison — and are just completely bewildered by the fact that they are in these horrific conditions. A lot of them are giving up very quickly and going home.”

And there’s still no relief in sight for those kids under 18 languishing in the government’s shelter system, despite many likely having vetted family members ready to take them in. To them, immigration agents are improperly encouraging “voluntary” removals.

In a document that the Trump administration previously confirmed to HuffPost has been passed out to unaccompanied children by Customs and Border Protection agents, the kids are warned of “prolonged” detention and the potential arrest and criminal prosecution of their sponsors, along with their own potential immigration consequences, if the children chose to exercise their legal right to see an immigration judge.

A CBP spokesperson previously denied to HuffPost that the document contained threats, saying instead that it “explains options available under the Immigration and Nationality Act on their path forward” and “ensures they understand their rights and options.”

Hilty, who often works with children who’ve just been transferred to government shelters after being detained crossing the border, told HuffPost that, in October and November, she’d spoken to a half-dozen children, some in tears, who had told her upon meeting her, “I need to speak to an attorney about voluntary departure.”

“Voluntary departure” is a legal term of art, she said, and she was surprised to hear the children using it. At least one child said someone along their journey had told them to ask an attorney about the phrase. When she pressed them on what they wanted, though, none actually wanted to leave the United States, she said.

Bassett told HuffPost his organization and others had increasingly heard youth clients relate “different versions of ‘CBP told me something while I was there about how I was going to have a bad time here,’ or ‘CBP told me I was going to be fined for entering the country, and if I don’t pay it, my sponsor’s going to have to pay for it.’”

“So, quasi threats,” the attorney said.

In years past, lawmakers have seen young people fleeing horrific, dangerous conditions in their home countries and taken extra steps to protect unaccompanied immigrant youth — creating a paper trail and a familiarity between these at-risk kids and young adults and the government workers tasked with looking after them.

Now, in a cruel irony, those same factors make unaccompanied immigrant children easier to control.

Just this week, Bassett said, a handful of kids had asked to meet and discuss voluntary departure. These kids — like most kids he works with — would have a solid shot at securing asylum or some other form of deportation protection, if they were assured continued access to an attorney and relief from burdensome fines. But the kids asking about voluntary departure were among those who’d been in their shelter the longest.

“That is straight up, hard, cold evidence of detention fatigue,” the attorney said. “They’re asking to meet with us to consult on voluntary departure. Because they see that there’s no light at the end of the tunnel.”