After U.S. officials separated a 3-year-old immigrant girl from her mother during processing near El Paso, the girl was placed under the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which places many unaccompanied immigrant children in shelter or foster settings. The child’s father, a legal permanent resident, spent months waiting for his daughter’s release and said he was told he could not receive appointments required to complete parts of the sponsorship process.
He said his daughter’s case took on a different character only after he turned to the courts. According to the Associated Press, the father learned that the “accident” officials had described to him was instead an alleged sexual abuse while the girl was in foster care in Harlingen, Texas, where she had been placed after separation. The AP reported that the father spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid identifying his child as a victim.
The allegations were described in the lawsuit and came alongside early observations by caregivers. The lawsuit said the girl told a caregiver she was sexually abused by an older child staying with her in foster care, and that the abuse caused bleeding, according to the AP report. The lawsuit also said a caregiver noticed the child’s underwear on backward, and the girl reported multiple incidents to the caregiver.
Lauren Fisher Flores, the lawyer representing the girl, said the abuse allegations were reported to local law enforcement. The Associated Press reported that the ORR and its parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services, were named in the child’s lawsuit but did not respond to emails seeking comment. Flores said children deserve safety and belong with their parents, characterizing the situation as “unimaginable” for a child to be abused while in government custody without being told what happened.
The father told the AP that his attempts to reunite with his daughter stalled for months, including delays tied to fingerprinting. He said federal officials told him they could not make an appointment for him to be fingerprinted and that ORR later offered no timeline for his child’s release while he sought to complete what the agency required for sponsorship.
According to the case described by the AP, attorneys then escalated legal pressure through an emergency court filing. Attorneys sent ORR a letter in February and sought to have the father receive appointments for fingerprinting, as well as a home visit and a DNA test, the AP reported. When ORR stalled again and offered no expected release date, attorneys filed a habeas petition in federal court, and ORR released the girl to her father two days later.
The AP also reported that it was during the process of preparing the lawsuit that the father realized the “accident” officials had mentioned was alleged sexual abuse. The AP said the girl underwent a forensic exam and interview, and that although her father was not told the outcome, the older child accused of the abuse was removed from that foster program, according to the lawsuit. After release, the father said his daughter returned home changed—experiencing nightmares and becoming more easily upset—while the pair moved to Chicago to live with the girl’s grandparents as the case continued in immigration court.
The case is set against a broader account of custody duration and release procedures. The AP reported that the Trump administration began targeting detained immigrant children last year after new rules and procedures were put in place, and it described a shift toward expanding family detention indefinitely through motions to terminate a policy meant to protect immigrant children in federal custody. It said average custody times for children cared for by ORR increased from 37 days when Trump took office in January 2025 to almost 200 days this February, while the total number of children in ORR custody fell by about half.
In response to those changes, lawyers said habeas petitions have become a tool to speed releases. Flores, legal director of the American Bar Association’s ProBar project, told the AP that this year the organization had worked on eight habeas corpus petitions representing children held in federal custody for an average of 225 days, and that the organization had not filed these kinds of petitions for children before the Trump administration began. Neha Desai, managing director at Children’s Human Rights and Dignity at the National Center for Youth Law, said the case represented another version of family separation, arguing that federal obligations to release children to their families quickly and safely have not been met.