by Lomi Kriel, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, and Mica Rosenberg, ProPublica

This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief Weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues.

It started with a call. A man identifying himself as a federal immigration agent contacted a Venezuelan father in San Antonio, interrogating him about his teenage son. The agent said officials planned to visit the family’s apartment to assess the boy’s living conditions.

Later that day, federal agents descended on his complex and covered the door’s peephole with black tape, the father recalled. Agents repeatedly yelled the father’s and son’s names, demanded they open the door and waited hours before leaving, according to the family. Terrified, the father, 37, texted an immigration attorney, who warned that the visit could be a pretext for deportation. The agents returned the next two days, causing the father such alarm that he skipped work at a mechanic shop. His son stayed home from school.

Department of Homeland Security agents have carried out dozens of such visits across the country in recent months as part of a systematic search for children who arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border by themselves, and the sponsors who care for them while they pursue their immigration cases. The Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is responsible for the children’s care and for screening their sponsors, has assisted in the checks.

The agency’s welfare mission appears to be undergoing a stark transformation as President Donald Trump seeks to ramp up deportation numbers in his second term, a dozen current and former government officials told ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. They say that one of the clearest indications of that shift is the scale of the checks that immigration agents are conducting using information provided by the resettlement agency to target sponsors and children for deportation.

Trump officials maintain that the administration is ensuring children are not abused or trafficked. But current and former agency employees, immigration lawyers and child advocates say the resettlement agency is drifting from its humanitarian mandate. Just last week, the Trump administration fired the agency’s ombudsman, who had been hired by Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration to act as its first watchdog.

“Congress set up a system to protect migrant children, in part by giving them to an agency that isn’t part of immigration enforcement,” said Scott Shuchart, a former official with Homeland Security and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement during Trump’s first term and later under Biden. The Trump administration, Shuchart said, is “trying to use that protective arrangement as a bludgeon to hurt the kids and the adults who are willing to step forward to take care of them.”

Republicans have called out ORR in the past, pointing to instances of children working in dangerous jobs as examples of the........

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