Immigration judge in Chicago orders 6 children deported after courts deemed them abandoned
An immigration court judge in Chicago on Wednesday ordered six children to be deported after they were deemed abandoned by state courts.
Judge Shawn Abraham was not in court for Wednesday's hearings. He appeared virtually while requiring kids to be there in person.
Ten children appeared for hearings without their parents, having been deemed abandoned by the state. Six were ordered removed from the country. Their ages ranged from 12 to 17 years old.
All of them had been designated abandoned by a state family court, meaning they were without one or both of their parents.
U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) attended the hearing to observe the proceedings, and criticized the Trump administration's efforts to deport the children.
"You remember how they explained it? We're going after the worst of the worst, the terrorists, the rapists, the murderers, the child predators, and we were going to once and forever remove them from America and make our streets safer. I wish the people who made those statements could see what we saw this morning," Durbin said.
Attorneys for each child argued they should legally be eligible to stay in the U.S., because of a federal classification called special immigrant juvenile status, which is designed to help kids who are neglected, abused, or abandoned. Each had a pending application for that status.
"Let's just be clear that all of this is brand new. So, up until June of 2026, even a pending application for special immigrant juvenile status meant termination of removal proceedings," said Laura Smith, an attorney and executive director of the Chicago-based Children's Legal Center.
Abraham ordered them removed anyway, arguing the time it would take for them to acquire valid visas was too long to justify them staying in the U.S.
"When the Trump administration said that they were going to target people who were criminals or people who didn't have a right to be here in the United States, they were lying," said Keren Zwick, executive director of the National Immigrant Justice Center.
Critics also have raised concerns about the speed of these proceedings. Previously, there might be months between court dates, but for the four children who were not ordered removed on Wednesday, they were scheduled to be back in court in as little as two weeks, which experts said is an unheard-of turnaround time, especially for kids in these situations.
Abraham was appointed as an immigration judge by the Justice Department in May. Before that, he spent more than 12 years as a prosecutor at the Cook County State's Attorney's Office, and most recently as an attorney for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
CBS News Chicago is told there are at least 20,000 unaccompanied immigrant children in the U.S. currently working their way through the legal system, including approximately 1,000 in the Chicago area without a parent or guardian, who are represented by organizations around the city.
