According to a CNN report published Tuesday, the Trump administration is seeking to fast-track the deportation of migrant children in US custody by abruptly advancing immigration court hearings, in some cases by weeks or months and with only days’ notice.

Children as young as four and five years old are being forced to appear repeatedly in immigration court, sometimes without legal counsel. Attorneys for the children warned that the rushed schedule makes it far more difficult to obtain legal relief, including Special Immigrant Juvenile status, which requires proceedings in state court before an application can be adjudicated by federal immigration authorities.

CNN reported that White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller recently pressed Health and Human Services officials to move faster to get migrant children out of custody and return them to their countries of origin.

The fascists in the Trump administration are presenting the policy in the language of “rescue,” claiming that accelerated deportations will protect children from trafficking and exploitation. In reality, the policy places traumatized children, many of whom fled abuse, abandonment, poverty or violence, on a fast track to removal before they can even understand the proceedings against them, much less secure counsel.

What meaning does “due process” have when a five-year-old is ordered into court without a lawyer and expected to answer for themselves? The Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process applies to “persons,” not only citizens. Yet the government is compelling traumatized children to participate in adversarial proceedings they cannot possibly understand, while accelerating deadlines so their attorneys cannot obtain relief.

In the US immigration system, there is no universal government-appointed counsel for children facing deportation. The official fiction is that these proceedings are “civil,” not criminal, and therefore do not trigger the same right to counsel as a criminal prosecution. But the practical consequence is that children are forced to defend themselves against trained government lawyers while facing exile, family separation, or return to poverty and violence.

The same administration that refuses to release the Epstein files, pardons and commutes the sentences of fascist militia members and wages illegal war around the world is now pressuring immigrant children and families into abandoning their legal rights.

This policy did not emerge suddenly. A January 13 policy brief by Kids in Need of Defense (KIND) documented how the Trump administration has repeatedly justified attacks on migrant children and their families as anti-trafficking measures. KIND wrote that the administration’s enforcement efforts “increasingly center the fear and devastation of separation as a strategy to advance deportations and to reduce immigration of children and families.” The report warned that the government was “significantly compromising children’s safety, best interests, and critical legal protections.”

The KIND report documented how the Trump administration “upended the reunification and release process” and eroded the distinction between the Office of Refugee Resettlement’s child welfare mission and DHS’s enforcement functions, in order “to target immigration enforcement against children and their sponsors and thwart or disrupt reunifications.”

KIND also documented the administration’s use of so-called “wellness checks” and the “UAC Safety Verification Initiative,” measures presented as efforts to locate children supposedly “missing” under the Biden administration. In reality, KIND wrote, these initiatives proceed “almost exclusively from an immigration and law enforcement lens,” with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) agents questioning children and caregivers, issuing removal notices and, in some cases, taking sponsors or children into custody.

The figures cited by KIND underscore the scale of the operation. By November 2025, some 3,000 people had reportedly been arrested as part of DHS initiatives targeting parents, legal guardians and caretakers of migrant children, while HSI had arrested more than 450 sponsors of unaccompanied children. KIND also noted that some 600 children, the highest number on record, had been referred by ICE to Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) shelters.

The same day CNN reported the administration’s move to accelerate the deportation of children, federal agents carried out 22 raids across the Twin Cities as part of bogus investigations into alleged fraud in Minnesota’s social welfare programs. The FBI and Homeland Security Investigations executed the warrants, while the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension partnered with federal investigators and the state attorney general’s Medicaid fraud unit to participate in searches at autism-related facilities.

These “fraud” investigations are a bogus pretext through which the Trump administration is seeking to justify sweeping attacks on the democratic rights of the working class, regardless of immigration status. For months, Trump has seized on allegations of fraud in Minnesota’s social programs to whip up a racist campaign against Somali immigrants and Somali Americans, denouncing them as “garbage” and demanding that they be sent “back to where they came from.”

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz responded not by opposing the federal operation but by endorsing it. “Today’s raids by state and federal law enforcement happened because our state agencies caught irregular behavior and reported it,” Walz declared. “That’s how the system is supposed to work, and our agencies will keep at it as long as there are fraudsters around to put behind bars.”

In a separate post, Walz added that “joint investigations work,” while also calling for a joint investigation into the killings of Alex Pretti and Renée Nicole Good.

This is a revealing admission. The Democratic governor is boasting of the collaboration of state agencies with Kash Patel’s FBI and other federal police forces under conditions in which the Trump administration has systematically inflated allegations of “fraud” in Minnesota to justify the federal occupation of the state and cut millions in federal funding.

The raids are being used to lend legitimacy to the administration’s broader claims that social programs are riddled with criminality and must be placed under police supervision or stripped of funding altogether. The real target is not “fraud” but the social rights of the working class. Programs for children, the disabled, the poor and immigrants are being treated as suspect and expendable, while hundreds of billions are funneled into war, repression and the enrichment of the corporate oligarchy. As Trump himself said earlier this month while appointing Vice President JD Vance as his “fraud czar,” “Don’t send any money for daycare,” because “we’re fighting wars.”

He added, “You gotta let states take care of daycare and they should pay for it too ... Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things.” The only concern of the US government, Trump stated, should be “one thing, military protection.”

Walz’s call for a joint investigation into the killings of Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti only underscores the fraudulence of his position. When federal agents killed Good in Minneapolis on January 7, the FBI did not work transparently with Minnesota investigators.

On Tuesday the Daily Beast reported that Good’s killer, ICE agent Jonathan Ross, has been quietly relocated to another state and allowed to resume work while the FBI investigation has stalled. Senior DHS officials told the outlet that ICE’s own internal review cannot begin until the FBI probe is completed, effectively and conveniently, freezing the agency’s accountability process.

The report confirmed that the FBI “investigation” into Good’s death was compromised from the outset. FBI supervisor Tracee Mergen resigned from the Minneapolis field office after saying she was pressured to reclassify her civil rights inquiry into Ross as an investigation into Good herself. Whistleblower accounts obtained by Senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Dick Durbin described FBI Director Patel as directing agents to reframe warrant language so that Good would be portrayed as a suspect rather than a victim.

Multiple senior DHS officials also told the outlet that the decision to exclude Minnesota state investigators from federal evidence and the crime scene was directed by the White House.

The real fraud is not in Minnesota clinics and daycare sites but the claim that the American justice system, the police and the immigration Gestapo exist to protect workers, children and their families. These institutions are not neutral bodies that can be reformed into instruments of democracy. They are instruments of class rule, directed against the working class, immigrants and all opposition to the policies of war and austerity. The defense of children, immigrants and democratic rights requires the independent political mobilization of the working class against the capitalist system and both parties that defend it.