The story of a 3-year-old girl separated from her mother at the U.S. border has taken shape through court filings, lawyers’ accounts and a father’s allegations about what happened while the girl was under federal care. The father, a legal permanent resident, said he waited for months for his daughter’s release from custody after they crossed near El Paso and immigration officials separated the child from her mother.
He described turning to the courts only after delays stalled reunification. “She was so long in there,” the father said. “I just think that if they would have moved faster, nothing like that would have happened.” He spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity to avoid identifying the girl, who the reporting describes as a victim of sexual abuse. (The Associated Press said it does not typically name people who have said they were sexually abused.)
According to court documents described by the AP, the girl told a caregiver that an older child staying with her in foster care in Harlingen, Texas sexually abused her multiple times and that it caused bleeding. The lawsuit said a caregiver noticed the child’s underwear was on backward, and federal Office of Refugee Resettlement officials later told the father there had been an “accident,” the father said in the interview.
The lawyer representing the girl, Lauren Fisher Flores, said the alleged abuse was reported to local law enforcement. She also said the girl underwent a forensic exam and interview, and that the older child accused of the abuse was removed from the foster program, according to the lawsuit. Fisher Flores said the ORR and its parent agency, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, did not respond to emails seeking comment.
Flores said the father was not told the outcome of the investigation, and she framed the case around children’s safety and the right to reunite with their parents. “To have your child abused while in the government’s care, to not understand what has happened or how to protect them, to not even be told about the abuse, it is unimaginable,” she said. “Children deserve safety and they belong with their parents.”
The custody timeline described in the reporting begins with the family’s border crossing near El Paso on Sept. 16 of the prior year. After the girl’s mother was charged with making false statements, officials separated the toddler, and the child was sent to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which places unaccompanied immigrant children in shelters or foster settings.
The AP report said the release process for children in ORR care has become more extensive under the Trump administration, and that stricter rules have affected what documentation sponsors must provide. The reporting also said border agents pressured unaccompanied children to self-deport before transfers to shelters and that Immigration and Customs Enforcement began arresting some sponsors during the release process. Legal advocates have filed lawsuits challenging those policy changes, they said, anticipating longer detention for children.
The AP report said average custody time for children cared for by ORR grew from 37 days when Trump took office in January 2025 to almost 200 days in February. The total number of children in ORR custody fell by about half during the same period. Attorneys, the report said, have turned to habeas petitions—emergency lawsuits—to try to speed up the release of children to parents and sponsors.
Fisher Flores, legal director of the American Bar Association’s ProBar project, said that this year her organization worked on eight habeas corpus petitions representing children held in federal custody for an average of 225 days. She said her group had not filed these kinds of petitions for children before the start of this Trump administration. She also said legal intervention helped prompt the federal government to respond to the father’s sponsorship application.
According to the reporting, the father’s attempts to complete reunification stalled after months in custody, including delays in getting appointments needed for fingerprinting background checks and other steps. Attorneys sent a letter in February seeking to allow the father to receive appointments for fingerprinting, a home visit and a DNA test, but the reporting said ORR again offered no timeline. The report said attorneys filed a habeas petition in federal court, and ORR released the girl to her father two days later, while attorneys were preparing the lawsuit.
As the case unfolded, the father learned that the “accident” officials had mentioned involved alleged sexual abuse, according to the AP report. Neha Desai, managing director of Children’s Human Rights and Dignity at the National Center for Youth Law, described the case as a form of family separation and said a bipartisan Congress had designed protections so children would be released quickly and safely, adding that the administration was flouting its legal obligations.
After the release, the AP report said the father reunited with his daughter and later observed changes in her behavior and sleep, and that the pair now live in Chicago with her grandparents while the case proceeds in immigration court.