ICE officers have arrived unannounced in recent days at the offices of nonprofit groups that provide legal representation to unaccompanied migrant children, the groups said.

The groups called the visits “the latest example of intimidation tactics” from the Trump administration, and detailed visits in which ICE investigators, as well as agents from the Department of Health and Human Services, arrived at their offices and sought access to “documents and financial records relating to the organizations’ child clients.”

“The agents were turned away each time and were not provided with any records, as they had no warrant or authority to make such unlawful requests,” the three groups — Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, Ayuda, and Kids in Need of Defense (KIND) — said in a statement Friday.

“This is a blatant abuse of power to try to intimidate child advocates who have dedicated their lives to advocating for unaccompanied immigrant children,” Amica Executive Director Michael Lukens said in the statement. “When federal agents show up unannounced at community-based legal service providers, it sends a chilling message to immigrant families who may already be afraid to seek help,” Ayuda’s executive director, Paula Fitzgerald, added.

Neither the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement nor the Department of Health and Human Services answered HuffPost’s questions about the groups’ claims.

Unlike people in the U.S. facing criminal proceedings, those in immigration legal proceedings, including children, are not guaranteed the right to a lawyer by the federal government.

In practice, that means children in immigration proceedings often appear in immigration court without a lawyer and are left to pursue their legal rights on their own.

The groups that got visits from ICE and HHS agents receive congressionally allocated funding to help provide legal assistance to thousands of kids in need. In Trump’s second term, though, the government has all but declared war on such groups.

In March of last year, the Trump administration attempted to cut the funding altogether, but a judge ordered that the funding be restored. More recently, the government has sought to force the groups to hand over sensitive information about their clients, raising concerns that the information would be used as part of deportation efforts.

Meanwhile, immigration agents have pressured unaccompanied migrant youth in government custody to “self-deport” and leave their legal cases behind, including with the threat of “prolonged” detention.

Kids who cross the border without an adult guardian are placed in a shelter system coordinated by the HHS Office of Refugee Resettlement. Time in these shelters has shot up during Trump’s second term, as the would-be sponsors of those children — usually family members — must now deal with new, onerous requirements and the threat of arrest and deportation themselves. ICE has placed a record number of kids into this shelter system in Trump’s second term — in part because it is arresting so many of their parents and other family members.

The Trump administration has framed its actions as seeking to find hundreds of thousands of supposedly “missing” immigrant kids. For example, at a press conference on Thursday, administration officials announced that they had found 146,000 “missing” immigrant children and suggested that many were the victims of sex and labor trafficking. While child abuse and trafficking do occur among the unaccompanied migrant youth population, the 146,000 figure the administration cited simply refers to children to whom the government had not served notices to appear in immigration court.

At Thursday’s press conference, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin seemed to acknowledge that his agency had made arrests and pursued the deportation of sponsors of undocumented children — as well as of former unaccompanied children themselves who had turned 18 — on the basis of their immigration status alone.

“Some, we couldn’t maybe prove that either the child was being [trafficked] because the child was refusing to speak. We have either found legal sponsors for the child, and then, have gone through the process of deporting the individuals,” Mullin said, adding: “Some of the individuals now that were brought over as children are now adults. The ones that are here as adults, we’re working on the process of sending them back.”

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