These Young New Yorkers Thought Their Future Was Secure. They’re Facing Deportation Instead.

Thierno is one of an untold number of people with special immigrant juvenile status, or SIJ, who have received deportation orders in New York and across the country in recent months. 

As recently as last year, it was rare for judges to order SIJ recipients deported. They understood that the program offered a path to eventual permanent residency and generally gave applicants time for that process to play out. But recent opinions by the immigration court system’s top administrative court have largely invalidated that approach.

The changes are set to hit New York — home to over a fifth of all SIJ petitioners — particularly hard. They’re part of the Trump administration’s ongoing assault on immigration protections, during which it has detained people indefinitely and facilitated rapid-fire in-absentia deportation orders. The administration is also trying to send immigrants to countries that they have no connections to. Uganda, where a judge has sought to send Thierno, is 3,000 miles from his home country.

With the changes to SIJ, young people like Thierno who thought they could build a life in the United States are instead fighting to stay.

“The fact that a young person had an upcoming court appearance really was not cause for concern for a while for us,” said Ellie Rutkey, an attorney at the youth support nonprofit The Door who represents Thierno. “We would just send them to court, tell them to tell the judge, ‘I’m eligible,’ and that would be enough. Now, it is the complete opposite.”

In the past, Immigration and Customs Enforcement generally didn’t arrest people with SIJ, and immigration judges would pause their deportation cases while they waited to apply for a green card. Recent decisions by the Board of Immigration Appeals — a precedent-setting administrative court inside the Justice Department that the Trump administration has stacked with its appointees —  have concluded that the wait for a visa for many SIJ recipients is too long to justify pausing their deportation proceedings.

“We’re seeing immigration judges saying, ‘You’re too far along in the backlog, it’s too speculative that you are eventually going to adjust your status, and so we’re going to order you removed,” said Ellie Norton, senior staff attorney at the National Immigration Project, a nonprofit that litigates immigration cases.

The new approach to SIJ is one of the many ways the Trump administration is working toward fulfilling Trump’s promise of “mass deportations.” It also aligns with the administration’s efforts to eliminate the backlog in immigration courts — now of nearly 3.3 million cases — said Andrew Arthur, a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for stricter limits on immigration. Judges refusing to order the deportations of people with SIJ but no green card was “an impediment to the removal of potentially tens of thousands, maybe 100,000 people,” he said. The Board of Immigration Appeals decisions have largely eliminated that impediment.

Judges could still use their discretion to delay or terminate immigration cases for SIJ-eligible youth who are waiting their turn to apply for a visa, according to Olivia Cassin, who served as an immigration judge from 2015 until the Trump administration fired her last year. Instead, judges seem to be following the rulings of the Board of Immigration Appeals, she said.

The Justice Department told New York Focus that it doesn’t track how many people with SIJ have so far received deportation orders. People like Thierno can still appeal, and federal appellate courts could eventually wind up hearing their cases.

It’s also unclear how many SIJ recipients have been arrested or deported. Last year, ICE deported at least 132 people with SIJ and detained 265, according to data the Department of Homeland Security sent to US Senator Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada and her office shared with New York Focus.

Ordering SIJ recipients deported “directly contradicts Congress’s intent to provide humanitarian protection from deportation to vulnerable youth,” said Cassin, who now works as the legal director of ICARE, a coalition of organizations that represent immigrant kids.

In a statement to New York Focus, a Department of Justice spokesperson said the Executive Office for Immigration Review is “restoring integrity” to immigration courts.

“Board of Immigration Appeals decisions reflect straightforward interpretations of clear statutory language,” the statement said. The agency also referred New York Focus to a US Citizenship and Immigration Services report that claimed SIJ posed “national security threats.”

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment.

That’s what happened to A, a 21-year-old from central Mexico who has lived in the United States since 2021. Shortly after arriving in Brooklyn and moving in with his aunt, he applied for SIJ, receiving the status, along with deferred action, in 2024.

The day after Christmas last year, A spent the day watching his 1-year-old nephew. Around 4 pm, he left for his shift at a Mexican restaurant. As he was walking to the subway station, two cars pulled up next to him and ICE agents jumped out, screaming at him that he was in the US illegally, he told New York Focus. A was afraid, but felt confident that he couldn’t be detained.

“Because I had deferred action and a work permit, and since I was legally protected with that deferred action, I thought they weren’t going to arrest me,” he said in Spanish.

The ICE agents took him to the holding facility at Manhattan’s 26 Federal Plaza, then to a detention center in New Jersey. ICE eventually transferred A to Mississippi, to one of the largest ICE detention centers in the country, where he slept in a dorm with up to 300 others, he said. He made friends with men from Venezuela, Guatemala, Mexico, China, and the Middle East, and watched one by one as they lost their court cases and were ordered deported.

When A’s court date finally arrived, an immigration judge acknowledged his deferred action and terminated his deportation proceedings. While still in detention, he then received paperwork saying that the Trump administration had revoked his deferred action and restarted his deportation case. A new judge terminated that case, too, writing that the cancellation of A’s deferred action revealed “a disregard for the lawful orders of this Court.” But because immigration judges lack jurisdiction over deferred action, the judge could not restore it.

Thirty days later, ICE finally released A. With no other option in rural Adams County, Mississippi, A and two other men paid a driver $300 each to take them to a bus station. His cousin sent him money for a ticket, and after two sleepless days on the road, A arrived back in New York City in April. He’d been away for over three months.