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ICE is offering children as young as 5 years old $3,000 “incentives” to voluntarily depart the country, legal advocates have reported, as the Trump administration works to separate immigrant families under the hammer of their mass deportation machine.
Bloomberg Law first reported on the offers, citing attorneys and immigrant advocacy groups who say that the offers are sometimes given to children who lack legal representation. The offers, they say, are a method of forcing children to take a deal so that they drop their legal challenges before they have gone through their time in the court system.
Shaina Aber, executive director for the Acacia Center for Justice, told Bloomberg Law that the tactic is “part of a larger pattern of really trying to coerce children, bully children, intensify pressure on children so that they abandon their cases.”
“It’s part of this deport-at-all-costs policy that seems to be in particular targeting children,” Aber went on.
The offer is being made by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) attorneys as well as immigration judges. In some cases, judges are telling children that it is a one-time offer and giving them no time to consider it, forcing them to make a decision “on the spot” even though “they might not understand what the longer term consequences are down the line,” Aber said.
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Another group, the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, said that it and similar groups have received the emails from ICE’s Office of the Principal Legal Advisor offering a “$3,000 incentive” for children. Michael Lukens, head of Amica, told Bloomberg Law that the latest offer came to his office this week for an 11-year-old.
The reporting shows that the Trump administration’s policies toward child deportations are even more extreme than previously thought. Last year, NBC reported that the Trump administration was offering children aged 14 and older $2,500 to self-deport or voluntarily leave the country, according to a Department of Health and Human Services memo.
Indeed, reports have since found that the Trump administration is carrying out this policy even in cases where the children were living with their families, in cases likened to President Donald Trump’s family separation policies from his first term.
The Department of Homeland Security didn’t confirm or deny the payments, saying that the administration is supposedly working to reunite children who come to the U.S. unaccompanied with their families.
According to a tracker maintained by the Marshall Project, as of August, the federal government has deported over 22,500 children since January 1, 2025. ICE arrests of children have only continued to escalate throughout Trump’s second term, with over 8,500 children having been arrested thus far — including 562 children and babies under 4.
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