In 2023, the Center for Immigration Law and Policy (CILP) at UCLA School of Law released a damning report documenting what it called “grave injustices” for children facing immigration court proceedings under then-President Joe Biden’s administration.
The report claimed tens of thousands of children were deported without legal representation, with more than 13,000 unaccompanied children ordered removed in absentia between 2022 and 2023.
Despite the scale of the issue—with nearly one-third of all immigration court cases in early 2022 involving children, including over 30,000 under the age of five—the report received almost no mainstream media attention at the time of its release.
Fast forward to 2025, and the Trump administration’s halt of taxpayer funded legal aid for some illegal immigrants has generated widespread media outrage, with headlines howling about the vulnerability of “children as young as 2” going into courts alone.
Rules for thee, but not for me is the motto of the Democrats.
Indeed, the Biden administration’s final year saw average deportations of about 750 people per day, compared to the Trump administration’s recent average of approximately 600 daily deportations.
While the difference is largely attributable to much higher border crossing numbers under Biden, it’s never mentioned by Trump’s media critics.
The UCLA report specifically noted that under Biden, “children are ordered to appear in immigration court against trained government prosecutors, even if they have no lawyer to represent them”—a practice that has been done since the Obama administration, but received almost no critical coverage until this year.
The CILP report found that 86% of removal orders issued against unaccompanied children under the Biden administration were for failure to appear in court — a statistic that received zero media attention in 2023, but is now all the rage under Trump.