A 3-Year-Old suffered alleged sexual abuse in ICE custody

She was allegedly abused in a foster home after ICE separated her from her mother.

A father in the United States spent months trying to get his three-year-old daughter out of federal custody after she was separated from her mother at the border. He kept asking for movement. He kept trying to complete the steps required to bring her home. Instead, he ran into delay after delay from a system that controls reunification from start to finish and faces almost no immediate consequence when that delay turns into harm.

Only after attorneys went to federal court did he learn what had allegedly happened while his daughter was still in government care: she had been sexually abused in the foster placement where she was being held.

According to court filings and reporting, the child crossed the US-Mexico border near El Paso with her mother in September. After her mother was charged with making false statements, the two were separated, and the girl was transferred to the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the federal agency responsible for immigrant children held by the government. Her father, a legal permanent resident of the United States, began trying to secure her release to his care.

What followed was not a fast-moving child welfare process. It was a prolonged detention pipeline shaped by rules that have grown harsher, slower, and more punitive under Donald Trump’s second administration.

The father said officials repeatedly told him they could not schedule his fingerprinting appointment, a basic requirement in the release process. That delay stretched on for months. During that time, his daughter remained in a foster placement in Harlingen, Texas, away from both parents and under federal supervision.

According to the lawsuit, a caregiver later noticed that the girl’s underwear was on backward. The child then reported that an older child in the foster placement had sexually abused her multiple times and that the abuse caused bleeding. She was given a forensic exam and interview. The allegations were reported to local law enforcement, according to her attorney. The older child accused of the abuse was removed from that foster program.

But the father says federal officials did not tell him that his daughter had allegedly been sexually abused. Instead, he said they told him only that there had been an “accident” and that she would be examined. When he pushed for more information, he said he was told that nothing further could be shared because the matter was under investigation.

That detail alone should stop any attempt to reduce this case to paperwork or delay. A three-year-old child was allegedly abused while in federal custody, and her father says the government did not fully tell him what had happened to her. He was left trying to get answers from the same system that had already kept her from him for months.

This case does not sit outside policy. It is what policy looks like when it reaches the level of a child.

Under Trump’s 2025 immigration changes, the release process for children in ORR custody has become more restrictive and more difficult to navigate. Sponsors and parents face stricter documentation demands, additional procedural barriers, and longer delays. Legal advocates warned when those changes were introduced that children would remain in federal custody longer. That is exactly what happened.

Average custody times for children in ORR care reportedly rose from 37 days in January 2025 to nearly 200 days by February of this year. During that same period, the number of children in ORR custody was cut roughly in half. Fewer children were being held overall, yet those who remained in custody were being kept there far longer. The system did not become more protective. It became more restrictive.

Advocates also describe a broader pattern of escalation. Border officials have been accused of pressuring unaccompanied children to self-deport before they are even transferred to shelters. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has arrested some sponsors during the release process. At the same time, the administration has sought to dismantle longstanding protections that limit how immigrant children can be detained. The combined message is unmistakable: detention is no longer being treated as a temporary step toward family reunification. It is being used as a pressure system.

That is the environment in which this child remained trapped.

The father’s efforts only moved forward after legal intervention forced the government to act. According to the reporting, attorneys sent a letter in February that finally prompted officials to schedule his fingerprinting background check, a home visit, and a DNA test. Then the process stalled again. There was still no clear timeline for his daughter’s release.

Attorneys then filed a habeas corpus petition in federal court.

Two days later, ORR released the child to her father.

That timeline matters. After months of obstruction, after repeated delay, after a child had already remained in federal custody long enough to allegedly suffer sexual abuse, the government moved within forty-eight hours once a court petition was filed. That does not read like an unavoidable administrative backlog. It reads like a system that responds more urgently to litigation than to a parent trying to protect his child.

Attorneys representing detained children say this case reflects a broader shift. Emergency habeas petitions, once uncommon in this area, are now being used to force the release of children who have been held in federal custody for extreme periods of time. Lawyers with the American Bar Association’s ProBar project said they had already worked on multiple habeas petitions this year involving children who had been held for an average of 225 days. Before this administration, they had not needed to file these kinds of petitions for children in custody.

That is not a narrow procedural problem. It is a structural warning.

Every additional day a child remains in government custody expands the possibility of harm. That harm may take different forms. It may appear as fear, confusion, developmental regression, sleep disruption, or lasting psychological distress. It may also, as alleged here, become direct physical and sexual harm while the child is still inside the care of the very system claiming authority over her safety.

When the father was finally reunited with his daughter, he cried. She was happy to see him. But he also noticed that she had changed. After five months in detention and foster care, he said she had nightmares and became easily upset. He said she had never been like that before.

That is what prolonged detention does long before the public ever sees the court filing or the headline. It leaves damage that follows children out of custody and into the rest of their lives.

The government and its defenders often rely on the language of order, vetting, and security. But that language collapses under the facts. There is nothing orderly about forcing a father to wait months for fingerprinting while his toddler remains in custody. There is nothing protective about failing to clearly tell a parent that his child has reported abuse. There is nothing secure about a system so slow and so punitive that federal court becomes the only way to force a child’s release.

This is another form of family separation. It may look more administrative than the first Trump-era images that shocked the country, but the result is the same: children kept from their families, parents blocked from protecting them, and federal agencies exercising extraordinary power with devastating consequences.

When the government takes custody of a child, it assumes a duty that goes beyond transport, shelter, and documentation. It assumes responsibility for that child’s safety. If a child is harmed while in that custody, and if the parent is not plainly told the truth, that is not a minor bureaucratic failure. It is a collapse of duty by the state itself.

The girl in this case now lives in Chicago with her father and grandparents while her immigration case continues. But reunification does not erase what happened in those months. The delay remains. The alleged abuse remains. The lack of disclosure remains. The trauma remains. The fact that the system only moved once lawyers went to court remains.

This is what happens when an administration hardens immigration policy by making release slower and detention longer. Children absorb the first blow. Families absorb the next one. And by the time the truth surfaces, the damage is already built into the record.

The administration can call it procedure. It can call it enforcement. It can call it policy.

But when a three-year-old is kept from her father for months and allegedly sexually abused while the government delays her release, the language gets much simpler.

The system failed a child it was holding in its own care.

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A system this dangerous should never be allowed to keep children in its care.

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