Federal Court Rejects Trump Administration Bid to Strip Rights Protections for Immigrant Children

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 7, 2026 

CONTACT
Juan Gastelum, NILC, [email protected], 213-375-3149
Alex Comisar, Public Counsel, [email protected]  

Federal Court Rejects Trump Administration Bid to Strip Rights Protections for Immigrant Children

Historic Ruling Preserves 40-Year Safeguards; Judge Finds Government’s New Advisal Coercive and Unconstitutional  

LOS ANGELES — A federal district court has rejected the Trump administration’s attempt to eliminate a 40-year-old court order protecting the due process rights of unaccompanied immigrant children in government custody. The ruling preserves critical safeguards — including the right to speak with a parent, relative, or attorney before being pressured to sign forms waiving their legal rights. The National Immigration Law Center, Public Counsel, Gilbert Carrasco, Quinn Emanuel, and Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll, argued against termination. 

“Four decades ago, we went to court because the government was coercing children — alone, frightened, and without counsel — into signing away their rights. We won that fight,” said Mark Rosenbaum, senior special counsel for strategic litigation at Public Counsel. “This ruling shows we will win this one too. But the fact that we are here again, watching this administration try to dismantle protections that have safeguarded vulnerable children for forty years, tells you everything you need to know about how far it is willing to go to strip immigrants of the rights our Constitution guarantees them.” 

“Unaccompanied children in the United States today face immense pressure from the government to relinquish their claims to asylum and other forms of relief from removal,” said Peter McGraw, deputy legal director at the National Immigration Law Center. “The court’s orders affirm what has been true for decades — efforts to coerce and intimidate vulnerable children into giving up their claims violate due process. We look forward to defending this historic injunction and upholding the constitutional rights of unaccompanied children.” 

“This ruling is a victory, but it should not have been necessary,” said Rebecca Brown, an immigrants’ rights attorney at Public Counsel. “The government didn’t just try to eliminate these protections — it replaced them with a document designed to frighten children away from exercising their rights. That is not an oversight. That is a policy. And it is part of a broader, deliberate effort to ensure that immigrant children face the most consequential decisions of their lives without anyone in their corner. We will not let that stand.” 

The case, Perez-Funez v. Department of Homeland Security, dates to 1981, when unaccompanied minors filed a class action suit alleging that immigration agents were coercing children into signing away their right to a deportation hearing and access to counsel. Rosenbaum was a part of the original trial and argued for the injunction. Following that bench trial, the judge entered a permanent injunction in 1985 — the first court order ever requiring that children in immigration custody be advised of their legal rights as a matter of basic due process. That protection, which evolved into the rights advisal still provided to migrant children today, stood unchallenged for four decades. 

Earlier this year, the Department of Homeland Security moved to extinguish the injunction entirely. In preparing to oppose that motion, attorneys learned that the original rights advisal was no longer being uniformly provided to children. In its place, DHS had substituted a new notification — one that warned of dire consequences, including prolonged detention and the potential criminal prosecution of their parents, if a child chose to seek legal representation or request a hearing on their immigration status. 

Federal District Judge Michael Fitzgerald, who presided over the February 11 hearing, found that legal developments during the last four decades did not justify terminating the injunction in its entirety and that DHS’s new advisal is coercive and violates the terms of the original injunction.  

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