A 21-year-old college student in New York, who asked to be identified only by her middle name, Nicole, journeyed on foot to the United States from Honduras in 2019.
"I saw that young people were wasting their lives and I wanted something different in my life,” Nicole said.
For months she walked northward through Mexico with her aunt and cousin, eventually hopping aboard a cargo train for part of the trip.
"A train called the Beast,” Nicole said. "And to get off that train, you have to jump. You really put your life at risk when you come to the country.”
She was 15 years old, one of hundreds of thousands of young immigrants who came to the U.S. without their parents in the past decade. The U.S. government classified them as unaccompanied children, allowing them to remain in the United States with adult sponsors.
For Nicole, that was her father in Texas.
RELATED STORY | ICE locking up more parents and children at for-profit detention center in Texas
The program included regular visits by social workers sent by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services checking to ensure the children were safe and attending school.
Nicole recalls multiple home visits over the years.
"To see if everything was okay, if where I lived was comfortable, and if there was food and all that,” she said.
Now in the second Trump administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has launched a new major effort to locate and contact unaccompanied minors.
A March 2025 report by the DHS inspector general found missing or incomplete addresses for 31,000 unaccompanied minors, leading to concerns about their whereabouts.
Scripps News has learned ICE awarded contracts to 18 private companies tasked with visiting addresses on file for 100,000 unaccompanied children and 250,000 former unaccompanied children who are now 18 to 21 years old.
The contracts are part of the Safety Verification Initiative program to document the location and wellbeing of unaccompanied children.
The program “represents ICE’s commitment to protect vulnerable children from sexual abuse and exploitation,” a DHS spokesman said in a statement emailed to Scripps News.
The contracts are sparking concern among immigration advocates who question whether the real aim of the home visits is to identify more immigrants to detain and deport.
“This is a facade so that DHS can find children and try and bully them into self-deportation, to find out who they're living with and to make collateral arrests,” said Michael Lukens, executive director of the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights.
The contracts say each company will go to a minimum of 1,000 homes.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT | 'Mom, what did we do?' Parents recall weeks in ICE family detention
During the visits, the companies must assess and document any signs of abuse, abandonment, neglect, or trafficking, according to contracting documents. But the companies are also required to inform the children and sponsors about their legal responsibilities, confirm the address listed in immigration court records and update ICE systems of record.
Scripps News' review of the 18 companies granted contracts turned up no references to child-welfare services on websites or publicly available information listed for 12 of the businesses.
National Protective Services, which lists an address in a Texas strip mall, won a contract worth $1.2 million that has the potential to balloon to $207 million. Online the company doesn’t mention any experience with child services but does advertise fugitive recovery, self-defense karate and locksmith services.
Severance Security Services Inc. is based out of a house in Foley, Ala.
The company won a contract worth $4.8 million and up to $358 million.
Its website shows they offer armed security, disaster response, workplace violence prevention services, but lists nothing about child welfare.
No one from National Protective Services or Severance Security would respond to multiple requests for comment.
DHS defended contracts.
“Awards were made to all qualified vendors that were determined to represent the best value to the government,” a DHS spokesman said.
The contracting documents show all 18 companies will get paid based on the number of current and former unaccompanied minors they are able to visit.
“So what we're talking about is essentially bounty hunting,” Lukens said. "I think that the government wants to deport lots of children. And this is the easiest path forward.”
Nicole is now in college studying to become a teacher while working part-time in an eye doctor’s office.
She has protection known as Special Immigrant Juvenile status with deferred action and she also has authorization to work in the U.S., but has been waiting years now to be able to apply for a green card.
She worries she could become a target for deportation.
“I see a car and I feel like, oh it's ICE,” Nicole said. “You have in your mind, like, this is going to happen to me. Here you have your future, basically. A dream that you can fulfill.”
