A Young Immigrant’s Deportation Nightmare
ICE is going to war against kids who have a special legal status.
Samantha Michaels
The plane was stuck on the tarmac of a Louisiana airport, but Yurin Quiroa Ralda, 21, was not particularly eager to take off. He was being deported, based in part on misinterpreted records. And not to his birthplace, Guatemala, but to Ecuador, where he’d never even been.
That alone was a nightmare, but Yurin’s situation was even more frustrating: After he’d crossed the US-Mexico border alone at age 16, the US government told him that if he waited patiently, he could apply for a green card because he had Special Immigrant Juvenile status, a classification reserved for kids who were abused, abandoned, or neglected by a parent. Congress created SIJ status in 1990, to give these kids a pathway to legal permanent residency so they wouldn’t have to go back to families that harmed them. Yurin, whose dad had abandoned him before he was born, had followed the rules and waited—and he’d recently became eligible to apply for a green card. Yet here he was on a plane bound for Ecuador.
Thousands of kids with SIJ status live in the United States, though many have grown into young adults. Like Yurin, whom I wasn’t able to interview directly for this story, they’ve spent years on waitlists because the government has a cap on visas that it can issue each year. While they waited, the Biden administration gave them deferred action, a designation that temporarily shields a person from deportation and allows them to work. But despite this safeguard, President Trump’s immigration officers detained about 400 people with SIJ status and deported 132 of them during his first year back in office, according to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) data shared with Congress.
These kids were told, “‘You should stay here; here’s your protection,” says Molly Huffaker, an attorney who represents Yurin at the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center. “All they’ve gotten is a broken promise,” adds Ellie Norton, an attorney at the National Immigration Project who focuses on SIJ cases.
The Trump administration officially ended Biden’s policy for SIJ youth in June 2025, saying it would no longer offer deferred action to people on the government waitlists. A court blocked that move on the grounds that DHS hadn’t jumped through the necessary bureaucratic hoops. The administration tried again in April (a lawsuit against its second attempt is ongoing), emphasizing that the restrictions would only apply to new cases, and that people who already had deferred action, like Yurin, could keep their status.
Yet Trump’s immigration officers are detaining those young men and women anyway, says Rachel Davidson, who directs the End SIJS Backlog Coalition at the National Immigration Project, which helped file the aforementioned lawsuit. “If the courts are going to impede [DHS] on a systemic level from terminating the policy writ large,” she told me, “then what they’re doing is going after young people individually, one by one.”
Yurin’s nightmare began last November, when local law enforcement pulled over his cousin for speeding in West Virginia. Yurin, a passenger, had an immigration background that should have helped him: He’d gotten SIJ status because his dad had abandoned him and his mom in Guatemala, leaving them financially insecure and facing eviction. He had to drop out of school at age 12 to work construction. He arrived in the United States in 2021, fleeing gang violence and seeking asylum. Most recently, he’d lived in Michigan with relatives and in Maryland, taking English classes and dreaming of becoming a mechanic.
The cops called ICE, which shipped him to a detention center in Pennsylvania hundreds of miles away. For months, he was trapped in bureaucratic hell: The legal status he’d obtained seemed meaningless, and deferred action wasn’t enough to get him out of detention. And though there was good news on the horizon—he would become eligible to apply for a green card in March, after years of waiting—a judge ordered him deported in February.
When his attorneys pushed back, the judge said—confusingly—that he couldn’t budge because Yurin had a criminal record. Three years earlier, when he was 18, he’d gotten into a car accident while driving his cousin’s kids to school and wound up with a misdemeanor. He’d allegedly rear-ended someone and then run a stop sign, whereupon another car hit him, injuring the kids. His relatively minor offense—a moving violation resulting in physical injury—didn’t affect his SIJ status, according to his attorneys.
But immigration officials were now claiming he had four assault charges from the same year. Yurin insisted he had no idea what they were talking about. His attorney, Molly Huffaker, reached out to the relevant police department for clarification and requested records of the alleged incident, but nobody responded.
I recently obtained those records, along with records from the county sheriff and local prosecutors. It’s now clear that federal officials either mischaracterized or misunderstood the situation, or that they had bad documentation. On August 12, 2023, the same day they claimed four assault charges were filed against him, Yurin had reported to the jail for booking on four initial charges related to the car accident. None of them involved assault, and he was never charged with assault in the police records I obtained. In other words, Yurin was being blamed for a crime that never happened.
“It’s devastating that that mischaracterization may be the only reason he was detained and deported,” his attorney Huffaker told me after I showed her the records. She says a witness at the scene of his arrest in West Virginia overheard the officers say they were specifically detaining Yurin for his “assault record.”
In April, stuck in detention with his deportation looming, Yurin filed a habeas corpus petition arguing that his incarceration was unlawful because he had deferred action. The court dismissed his petition on a technicality—federal law says that anyone with a final deportation order is subject to mandatory detention for 90 days, and he was still within that 90-day window; he could resubmit his petition when the window ended June 11.
If only.
Less than a week before June 11, the administration terminated Yurin’s deferred action. This was always a possibility. Deferred action is a temporary protection and the government has discretion to end it on a case by case basis, typically if a person’s circumstances change significantly and they’re no longer eligible for SIJ. But the timing, so long after his alleged criminal offenses and his arrest by ICE, and just days before he could refile his habeas petition, seemed suspicious.
Yurin’s attorneys accused the administration of retaliating against him for pursuing habeas claims, in violation of his First Amendment rights as well as his Fifth Amendment right to due process. Its actions in this case were hardly a one-off, according to the National Immigration Project: “It’s an unwritten practice,” says attorney Norton.
In March, a federal judge in New York slammed the administration for doing something similar to Garcia Lanza, a 24-year-old from Honduras who came to the country at age 9, graduated magna cum laude from the New York City College of Technology, and had no criminal record. US District Judge Gary Brown described the termination of Lanza’s deferred action as “seemingly retaliatory”: It appeared the government was trying to “rationalize his illegal arrest and detention,” he wrote, calling the termination a “reprehensible act of unimaginable cruelty.”
“This isn’t how things are supposed to work in America,” the judge wrote. “Unquestionably, the laws of human decency condemn such villainy.” He reinstated Lanza’s deferred action.
That precedent might have helped Yurin. Unfortunately, the jurist overseeing his case in Louisiana, US District Judge Jerry Edwards Jr., paid more attention to a less favorable ruling in Tennessee that essentially says people don’t have due process rights when it comes to discretionary benefits like deferred action. On that basis, Edwards declined to reinstate Yurin’s deferred action, writing that the government “owed him no notice or opportunity to be heard before terminating it.”
“It’s so sad and problematic,” attorney Norton says of the ruling. These young immigrants “followed all the rules and did everything right—they were on the path to lawful status, and the government promised them that unlike when they were let down by their parents, someone was going to protect them and cared about what was best for them. It’s difficult for them to be in detention and not understand what they did wrong and what they did to deserve that.”
DHS defended its decision. “Special Immigrant Juvenile classification or providing a path to a Green Card does NOT confer lawful status,” a department spokesperson told me. “This is standard procedure and there is nothing retaliatory about enforcing the nation’s immigration laws. Yurin was afforded due process before the Executive Office for Immigration Review.”
The DHS spokesperson emphasized Yurin’s alleged assault history. When I showed them the records indicating that the assault never happened, they declined to comment other than referring me to the local police department and adding that Yurin would have been eligible for deportation anyway. The spokesperson also said that “hundreds of suspected and confirmed adult gang members” were let into the country under the SIJ program, and that the program is “infected with fraud and abuses.” A DHS report last year made similar claims and accused people of lying to receive the status.
Before his deportation, Yurin’s attorneys begged the court to reconsider. The judge had opted to send him to Ecuador because his asylum application said Guatemala was too dangerous. The attorneys pointed out that he had no status in Ecuador, had never been there, and knew nobody. “He cannot understand why the same government that once granted him protection,” they had written earlier, “is now trying to send him to a foreign country.”
The judge held firm, and on June 11, seven months after he was detained, Yurin boarded the plane in Louisiana. It was not what he wanted, but he figured at least his bureaucratic hell might finally be over.
Or not.
As he waited for the plane to take off, an officer approached and told him to get up. He would not be going to Ecuador after all. (Huffaker, his attorney, isn’t sure why, but notes that sending someone to a country where they have no history is more difficult and requires certain paperwork.)
Yurin called his cousins the next day to let them know he was still in the United States. Then the family lost touch with him. Huffaker reached out to all the government contacts she could think of to ask where he was.
Almost a week later, he called his cousins again—from Guatemala.
Soon after, ICE reached out to Huffaker with an offer: The agency admitted that Guatemala was not listed on Yurin’s official removal order; he should not have been sent there. So if he wanted, they would bring him back to the United States.
But there was a caveat: If Yurin agreed to return, the agency said, they would keep him in detention until they found a way to deport him again. The nightmare would continue.
Huffaker hasn’t had the opportunity to relay the offer, in any case. She hasn’t been able to reach Yurin since he was shipped back to Guatemala.
