ICE Hired a Firm Accused of Torture to Track Children — Then Called It a Wellness Check
ICE hired MVM Inc. to help locate unaccompanied children, even as the company faces a federal lawsuit alleging torture and enforced disappearance.
ICE is expanding one of the most alarming parts of the immigration enforcement system: the tracking of unaccompanied immigrant children who entered the United States alone and were later released from government custody while their immigration cases continued.
The agency describes the work as “safety and wellness checks.” That language sounds protective. It suggests that the government is checking whether children are safe, enrolled in school, living where expected, and not being abused or trafficked. But the reality described in reporting and internal records is far more disturbing. ICE has used these operations to locate children, pursue deportation, and build cases against children or the adult sponsors sheltering them in the United States.
Now ICE has awarded a contract to MVM Inc., a private security contractor with a long history in federal immigration work and a pending lawsuit alleging torture, enforced disappearance, and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment connected to family separation under the first Trump administration. The company is being brought into a program focused on finding immigrant children.
That is not a small administrative choice. It is a decision about who gets sent to the door when the federal government says it is checking on a child.
MVM is based in Ashburn, Virginia, and has worked for federal immigration agencies providing detention and transportation services. It has also previously provided security services to the CIA. According to the contracting document, ICE selected MVM because it had the “boots on the ground” child welfare personnel and infrastructure needed to physically locate children and conduct these so-called wellness checks.
That phrase matters. “Boots on the ground” means this is not just data review or administrative follow-up. It means people being deployed to physically locate children who were previously released from government custody. It means a private contractor helping ICE extend the reach of its child-tracking operations into homes, neighborhoods, schools, and sponsor networks.
ICE says the purpose is child safety. But that explanation has already been challenged by immigrant-rights advocates and prior reporting. An internal ICE document reviewed by the Guardian last year showed that the agency runs these operations with the aim of deporting children or pursuing criminal cases against them or their adult sponsors. Critics have described the effort as “backdoor family separation.”
That is the contradiction at the heart of the program. ICE calls the visits safety checks, but the enforcement system behind them is built around detention, deportation, prosecution, and family separation. When a child is located by ICE, the child is not simply being checked on by a neutral welfare agency. The child is being pulled into the orbit of the same agency responsible for immigration enforcement.
The children targeted by this program are not abstract case files. They are unaccompanied minors who came to the United States alone, often after fleeing violence, instability, poverty, or danger. Many arrive at the U.S.-Mexico border and either turn themselves in or are apprehended by border officials. After entering the country, they are placed under the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement. While their immigration cases continue, ORR may place them with relatives, sponsors, foster homes, or shelters.
Those sponsors usually complete assessment processes and background checks. In many cases, they are family members already living in the United States. These are the people now being pulled into ICE’s expanded tracking effort under the language of child welfare.
That is what makes the program so dangerous. A child can be released to a sponsor through one government system, then later located by another government system that frames the visit as welfare while using the information for enforcement. The result is a climate of fear around children who are already vulnerable and families who may be afraid that any contact with the government can become a pathway to deportation.
ICE and DHS have defended the program by saying children may be at risk of abuse, trafficking, or exploitation and that the agency wants to verify their safety. Those concerns sound serious because children’s safety is serious. But the government’s own credibility is damaged when child-protection language is paired with enforcement goals, private security contractors, and a company facing grave allegations from the previous family separation era.
MVM’s history makes the contract especially alarming. In 2024, two Guatemalan fathers and their children sued MVM in federal court in California, alleging torture, enforced disappearance, and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment over the company’s role in the Trump administration’s family separation policy. The lawsuit says MVM physically took thousands of children away from their parents and transported them using unmarked vehicles, commercial airlines, and makeshift detention centers.
The company has asked the court to dismiss the case and has argued that it should not be held liable for a government policy, saying it openly denounced the family separation campaign. But the case continues. In March 2025, a judge dismissed some claims on procedural grounds while allowing the case to proceed on claims related to torture, enforced disappearance, and inhuman and degrading treatment.
That is the company ICE chose to help locate children.
This is not about assuming every contractor employee will commit harm. It is about the government’s judgment. When a company has faced allegations tied to the forced separation and movement of children, awarding that company a new role in locating immigrant children should raise immediate public alarm. The question is not only whether MVM has the personnel to conduct the work. The question is why ICE would treat that history as acceptable in a program involving vulnerable minors.
The broader pattern is familiar. ICE and DHS use humanitarian language to describe enforcement operations. “Wellness” becomes the front-facing word. “Safety” becomes the public justification. “Verification” becomes the administrative frame. But behind those words sits an enforcement agency with the power to detain, deport, investigate, and separate families.
That language does political work. It softens the operation before the public has time to question it. It makes locating children sound like care, even when the enforcement documents and advocacy concerns point to something harsher. It invites people to imagine a welfare check instead of a deportation pipeline. It makes a private security contract sound like child protection.
The children are the ones left carrying the risk.
A child who has already gone through federal custody may now face a contractor-assisted visit connected to ICE. A sponsor who agreed to care for a child may now be exposed to enforcement scrutiny. Families may become harder to reach because fear pushes them further away from services, schools, lawyers, and legitimate child-welfare support. If the government wants to protect children, it should not be building a system that makes families afraid of contact.
That is why immigrant-rights advocates have warned that the program can do the opposite of what DHS claims. Michael Lukens, executive director of the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, described the effort as a ploy to find children or sponsors to arrest and deport, or to scare children into self-deporting. His criticism goes directly to the central problem: if the child-welfare language is being used to create fear, locate targets, and build enforcement cases, then the word “wellness” becomes cover.
The Trump administration and its allies have also used claims about “missing” unaccompanied children to justify these operations. A 2024 Homeland Security inspector general report found that ICE was not adequately tracking unaccompanied minors. But advocates have pushed back against the political narrative built from that report, arguing that many children were not truly missing from their families, lawyers, schools, or communities. Instead, ICE lacked updated information in its own files.
That distinction matters. A child not being properly tracked by ICE is not the same as a child being missing, trafficked, or abandoned. When the government blurs that distinction, it can convert administrative failure into justification for enforcement expansion. The agency’s own inability to maintain accurate records becomes the excuse to send contractors into communities to locate children.
That is not child protection. That is enforcement failure becoming enforcement power.
A real child-welfare response would be built around legal counsel, trusted service providers, safe reporting channels, trauma-informed support, school stability, medical care, language access, and separation from deportation enforcement. It would not be led by ICE. It would not depend on a private security contractor with a history in detention and transport. It would not make families wonder whether opening the door could lead to arrest, deportation, or separation.
The structure of this contract points in the opposite direction. ICE wanted a company with physical reach, personnel, and infrastructure to locate children. The amount being paid to MVM is redacted. The number of checks requested is redacted. The operation is supposed to run for a year. That means the public does not know how much money is being spent, how many children may be targeted, or how far the contractor’s work will extend.
That lack of transparency should concern everyone. When the government hires a private security contractor to help locate immigrant children, the public has a right to know the scale, the safeguards, the rules, the oversight, the complaint process, the data-sharing limits, and what happens after a child is found. Without those answers, the program becomes another hidden layer of immigration enforcement operating under protective language.
MVM’s broader record adds to that concern. Reporting has tied the company to immigration transport and detention-related work for years. During the first Trump administration’s family separation crisis, MVM was accused of holding immigrant children in a vacant office building for weeks. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the company detained immigrant children and families in hotels before they were removed from the country. It also previously held the contract to run the secretive Guantánamo Bay immigration detention center before that role shifted to another company in 2025.
These are not minor background details. They show the kind of enforcement infrastructure ICE continues to rely on: private contractors that can move, hold, transport, locate, and manage people at the edges of public visibility. When those contractors are placed near children, the danger is not only what one company has done before. The danger is the system that keeps creating new roles for private actors in the machinery of family separation and deportation.
ICE insists that MVM contractors have no immigration enforcement authority. But that does not erase the concern. A contractor does not need arrest authority to help an enforcement agency locate a child, confirm an address, identify a sponsor, gather information, or support an operation that later leads to deportation or criminal action. The danger is not only the final arrest. It is the data collection, the location tracking, the intimidation effect, and the way children and sponsors can be pulled deeper into an enforcement system through a visit labeled as care.
That is why the phrase “wellness check” deserves scrutiny. Wellness does not belong in quotation marks because safety is unimportant. It belongs in quotation marks because ICE is not a child-welfare agency. When an enforcement agency uses care language while pursuing enforcement goals, the public has to look past the label and examine the mechanism.
The mechanism here is clear enough to demand accountability. ICE is expanding operations to locate unaccompanied children. It has hired a private contractor with a history tied to immigration detention, transport, family separation, and serious allegations in federal court. The contract amount and scale are redacted. Advocates warn the program can lead to arrest, deportation, criminal cases, and fear. DHS denies that children are being targeted and frames the work as protection.
That conflict is the story.
A government that truly wants to protect immigrant children should not have to hide behind redactions, enforcement language, and contractors with records like this. It should provide counsel, services, family support, transparent child-welfare processes, and clear separation between care and deportation enforcement. Children should not have to fear that a knock on the door described as a wellness check could become the first step toward removal.
This is why the contract matters beyond MVM. It shows how ICE can turn child welfare into a field operation. It shows how the government can use the language of protection to extend enforcement into children’s lives. It shows how private contractors become part of the machinery, not at the margins but inside the operational structure.
The children at the center of this program deserve safety, legal support, stability, and care. They should not be treated as targets to locate, files to correct, or pathways to sponsors who can be investigated. They should not be placed in fear because the government failed to maintain its own records. And they should not be tracked by a contractor accused in federal court of participating in the machinery of family separation.
ICE calls it a wellness check.
The contract tells a darker story.
Americans Against ICE exists to document the machinery behind these operations before the language of care becomes another cover for enforcement.
When ICE uses child-welfare language to locate children, hire private security contractors, and expand deportation infrastructure, the public record has to stay visible. This work follows the contracts, the filings, the families, the children, and the systems that turn protection into surveillance.
Upgrade to a paid subscription to support independent documentation, investigation, and accountability work.
service to the pedophile predator class