A sitting U.S. senator is sounding the alarm: the Trump administration is preparing to secretly remove more than 500 unaccompanied migrant children from U.S. custody — possibly within days — without following the legal process designed to protect them.

Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) sent an urgent letter to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on June 25, 2026, saying he had "credible information" that the Department of Health and Human Services had compiled a list of more than 500 children and was racing to remove them through a fast-track process that bypasses their legal rights. These children — from countries including Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Afghanistan — have been in U.S. government care, many in foster homes, for at least six months.

This is not the first time. On Labor Day weekend in 2025, the administration bused dozens of migrant children to Texas airfields in the middle of the night, bound for Guatemala, before a federal judge woke up and stopped the planes. Lawyers who represented those children described them "crying, praying, vomiting." One child was hospitalized for days. Another refused to board buses for months afterward — for medical appointments, for court dates. As Lauren Fisher Flores of the American Bar Association's ProBar project put it: "All the rules and laws that exist to protect these children were unable to prevent them from experiencing something deeply traumatic."

Congress passed the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act specifically to ensure these children have legal protections. The administration is trying to end-run those protections again — on a larger scale, across more countries.

Sign this petition to demand an immediate halt to any plans to remove these 500+ children outside of legal process. These kids are already in U.S. custody. They deserve protection, not a secret midnight deportation flight.