Parents are giving up green card fights to get their kids out of immigrant jail

From The Marshall Project:

Editor’s Note: Hours after this story published, U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee made public her order appointing an independent monitor to oversee conditions for children in immigration detention, noting numerous violations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection under the Trump administration. She cited, among other violations, the prolonged time in detention and inadequate access to medical care at the Dilley lock-up, where the Kikabidze family and many others have been held. The story has been updated to note Gee’s order.

Ana Kikabidze braced herself for the immigration judge’s verdict. She and her children — 11-year-old Lizi and 14-year-old Nikoloz — had spent the better part of their first summer as U.S. residents in an immigrant detention camp in South Texas.

In a hearing piped in by video call, Immigration Judge Saul Greenstein ordered Kikabidze and her children to be deported to their native country of Georgia, according to audio of the hearing obtained by The Marshall Project. He cautioned her that appealing his decision could take months.

Kikabidze knew enough English to understand the implication: She and her kids could appeal the deportation order and stay in detention for the duration, or give up and go home.

The Trump administration has aggressively expanded detention, requiring that immigrants remain locked up while waiting for an immigration judge to decide their case. As a result, more than 66,000 parents and children have been detained and deported since Trump took office last year, according to an analysis of federal data by Austin Kocher, president of Relevant Research, which tracks how many people the government is holding in immigrant camps.

Congress has never passed a law governing the detention of children. But a decades-old case known as the Flores Settlement forbids the government from detaining children for longer than five days, or 20 days during a migration “surge,” without providing an individual justification. Court documents show, and a federal judge agrees, that the Trump administration has been repeatedly violating the settlement agreement, locking up many children well beyond the settlement’s limit.

This summer, while Kikabidze and her kids languished in the lockup in Dilley, Texas, a fight over the settlement’s terms was heating up in a federal courtroom in Los Angeles.

U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee warned Trump administration attorneys in June that she was displeased with the prolonged detention of kids at Dilley, according to a transcript of the hearing. She noted cases of minors confined for 50 days, 91 days or even 323 days. In mid-August, Gee, who oversees the settlement, appointed an independent monitor to conduct unannounced visits and track compliance at Dilley and border detention cells for at least a year, paid for by the government.

In her order, Gee wrote that children have been detained for more than 20 days on average for five consecutive months.

“Defendants cannot claim amnesia as to the history of the case and circumvent the extended 20-day time period,” she wrote, adding, “Defendants do not provide any detailed basis for why 20 days is insufficient to expeditiously process” children through the detention system.

Independent monitoring is considered an extraordinary measure: The last time Gee ordered it was during the first Trump administration, after six children died in the custody of U.S. Customs and Border Protection and another died after being detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

In calls from the immigrant camp this summer, Kikabidze told The Marshall Project that she believed she had a strong case to show her family’s residency documents were valid. She wanted to appeal. But the children had already been detained 38 days, and their despair was growing. Lizi would wake up sobbing, fearing they would lose their green cards. Nikoloz was showing flares of anger. Their days were marked by boredom, constant hunger and lights-out at 8 p.m.

The Department of Homeland Security told The Marshall Project that detained families receive due process. In practice, immigration advocates say parents face enormous pressure to give up their claims to remain in the United States in order to get their children out of jail.

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In July, more than half the children at Dilley had been held there longer than 20 days, according to court records.

“When families get to Dilley, there is no timeline,” said Leecia Welch, chief legal counsel for the nonprofit Children’s Rights and an attorney representing detained children in the Flores litigation. Their parents “can’t answer their children’s most basic questions,” she said. “‘Why are we here? When can we go home? What is going to happen to us?’ It’s profoundly traumatic for children.”

Detention has serious consequences for children’s physical and mental health, as The Marshall Project has previously reported. The Biden administration shut down the immigrant camp in Dilley and halted family detention altogether, opting instead to allow families to pursue legal status to stay in the country while living in the United States. Many were given alternatives to detention that included GPS monitoring or ICE check-ins.

Trump reopened Dilley last year to further his mass deportation goals.

Kikabidze’s children, Lizi and Nikoloz, during a 2025 visit to the Statue of Liberty. Courtesy of Ana Kikabidze

The nation’s immigration law says immigrants should only be detained if they represent a flight risk, a national security risk or pose a danger to the community. But last year, the Trump administration reinterpreted the law to let ICE keep a broad swath of noncitizens in detention — even those pursuing lawful immigration status. Before their final hearing, the Kikabidze family was denied release on bond; Greenstein said they were “arriving aliens” and therefore were ineligible for release.

“It’s a legal strategy to detain someone so they abandon or withdraw their case,” said Jeremiah Johnson, a former immigration judge.

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In 2013, Kikabidze won a U.S. immigration lottery. Out of some 20 million applicants each year, before Trump suspended the program, the State Department would randomly select 55,000 people to receive an immigrant visa that could be parlayed into legal permanent residency, often known as a green card. Winners were required to relocate to the United States.

Kikabidze and her husband had a good, middle-class life in Georgia, where she worked as an interior designer, and he was a manager at a bank. But Kikabidze had always dreamed of a life in America and was overjoyed at her luck. She and her husband and their 1-year-old son, Nikoloz, all obtained green cards and moved to New York City. They lived there for six months, until her father fell ill with cancer, and they returned to Georgia to care for him. Then she became pregnant with Lizi, COVID-19 got in the way and the years passed.

When life finally settled down, Kikabidze went through the arduous process of explaining her circumstances to the U.S. government. It took three years for her to recover her green card status and line up her children’s documentation, as well — a process that she estimates cost more than $18,000. In January, the State Department denied her husband a new travel visa, indicating that Kikabidze needed to file a separate immigration petition for him as her spouse.

Kikabidze had hoped to keep her family together. She postponed their move to let her children finish their school year; then they would relocate without her husband. Close friends in a suburb of Birmingham, Alabama, offered to host them while they got settled.

The State Department denied Kikabidze’s husband, Mirian, pictured with their family, a new travel visa to the United States. Courtesy of Ana Kikabidze

The law required Kikabidze to spend at least half the year in the United States. She did not meet that condition in the lead-up to her family’s planned move, but she had reason to believe it wouldn’t derail them: Since 2024, she had traveled between Georgia and the United States three times without a problem, according to her account and Department of Homeland Security records. In fact, the visits were required by the U.S. government: She had to fly to New York and Birmingham, Alabama, so that the government could take fingerprints from her and Nikoloz and run FBI background checks. She flew to Los Angeles to activate Lizi’s residency after she received an immigrant visa.

But by the time she and the kids landed at Chicago O’Hare International Airport in May, they had been out of the country for 229 days — about six weeks longer than permitted.

“Whenever I watched videos of ICE arresting people, I always thought it would never happen to me,” Kikabidze said.

A Homeland Security spokesperson said in an emailed response to The Marshall Project that the family was “detained for not having valid documents.”

Kikabidze “failed to maintain her permanent residence status in the United States due to prolonged absence from the country and was placed into removal proceedings,” the spokesperson said.

In past presidential administrations, experts say, the Kikabidze family might have gotten their green cards revoked and been turned back, or they might have been released with a notice to explain the delay to an immigration judge, said Elora Mukherjee, director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School.

“Before January 2025,” she said, “this family would never have been arrested.”

ICE arrested Kikabidze, Lizi and Nikoloz and transferred them to the immigrant camp in Dilley on May 17.

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The sprawling detention campus sits on an isolated plain, surrounded by high fencing. That its manufactured housing units are named for colorful animals — red parrot, brown bear, blue butterfly — belies its purpose, advocates say. U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, a Texas Democrat whose district includes Dilley, has dubbed the facility a “trailer prison.”

Their days in detention bled into a mind-numbing sameness, Kikabidze said.

They lived alone in a room with white walls and bunk beds. They weren’t allowed to roam; they could only go to designated areas, the bathroom or a playroom. They had a two-hour window for each meal: breakfast at 6 a.m., lunch at 11 a.m. and dinner at 4 p.m. There was library time in the afternoon, Kikabidze said, but there were few books or games to interest her tween daughter and teenage son. Phone calls were expensive, video calls unavailable. The children were hungry every night and tired of the snacks available, mostly juice boxes and packaged cookies. Kikabidze didn’t want to complain, she said, knowing that some people around the world have no food at all, but her daughter had become uncharacteristically quiet and unhappy; her son was often angry.

Nikoloz asked her, “‘Why are we here? Why? I love this country. Why are we here if this country is good?’” she told The Marshall Project during a call from Dilley. “I don’t know how to explain.”

Had they been released after their encounter with customs officers at the airport, Kikabidze said, she would have had a chance to enroll her children in school and secure an apartment. From detention, all she could submit were emails showing her intentions to integrate into the community: correspondence with the school district and apartment managers; notes to a local Humane Society about Lizi volunteering and with a Catholic youth ministry for her son.

She met with her lawyer by telephone only once, she said, on the day before her court date. After hearing the judge’s warning, Kikabdidze decided not to appeal his deportation order.

Later, she told The Marshall Project, “It felt as though the decision to deny us had already been made in advance, and that nothing I said would have changed the outcome.”

She and her children spent another 20 days at Dilley — 58 days in total — with no information or idea about when they would be put on a plane.

At dawn on July 13, three ICE contractors from MVM Inc. escorted them on the first leg of a two-day deportation ordeal that included an overnight stay at the Crowne Plaza hotel near Washington’s Dulles International Airport. The contractors, two women and one man, took turns staying inside the room with Kikabidze and her children. In the morning, Kikabidze said, she woke up to find the male contractor sleeping on the floor beside her bed.

When she finally arrived back home at the family apartment in Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital, Kikabidze went through the pile of documents ICE had returned to her.

Her son’s passport with the shiny immigrant visa pasted in. The judge’s removal orders. A document banning their return to the United States for 10 years. And though ICE would normally confiscate them, there were two green, plastic residency cards belonging to Kikabidze and Lizi, not set to expire till the 2030s.

“They gave us our green cards,” Kikabidze said. “I still have them.”