When Mary Giovagnoli was in law school, she spent a year working as a junior public defender representing people accused of misdemeanors. “I really liked the work, but it was emotionally devastating, because you got very wrapped up in your clients’ cases,” Giovagnoli said. She felt that only the prosecutors held real power; Giovagnoli would make her clients’ cases, but the final decision was out of her hands. Then something clicked. “I realized that public service for me probably meant trying to be within the government to improve things,” she said.
With this in mind, Giovagnoli became an attorney for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and spent the next two decades switching between jobs with the government and nonprofits, eventually focusing on the welfare of unaccompanied children, meaning any child under 18 who arrives in the United States without a parent or guardian. Since 1997, a legal settlement called the Flores agreement has enshrined basic rights and protections for children held in federal immigration custody. “The agreement acknowledged that children have unique needs and response and we have a unique responsibility to them,” Giovagnoli said. “That the goal should not be to keep children in detention, but to release them to a family member as quickly and as safely as possible, keep them in as least restrictive a setting as possible.”
Over the proceeding decades, various administrations have attempted to codify the Flores settlement into law. (The first Trump administration tried to terminate the agreement.) In 2024, the Biden administration finally codified the Flores agreement and created an oversight agency called the Unaccompanied Children Office of the Ombuds, which received complaints and questions about the treatment of children in federal custody, including processes like discharge and legal representation. In October, Giovagnoli was appointed to run this office. On February 14, she and half her staff were fired for being probationary, under the orders of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Giovagnoli was reinstated to administrative leave after a court order, only to be fired again on May 8 on the basis that her work did not advance public interest.
Under Trump, layoffs are not the only threat facing government agencies tasked with protecting immigrant children, such as the Unaccompanied Children Office of the Ombuds, and the Office of Refugee Resettlement, or ORR. Current and former ORR staff told ProPublica that the agency is being transformed into an agency focused on deportation, not welfare. And the new administration has enacted a wave of harsher policies that make it more difficult to reunite families, such as mandatory fingerprinting requirements and more restrictive guidelines on documents required as proof of identification. In October 2024, children were held an average of 35 days in ORR custody. In March 2025, that average leapt to 112 days.
I spoke with Giovagnoli about the idea that children are children first, her fears for the agency’s future, and the principle that the government exists to serve the public.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Could you tell me a little bit about your path towards public service and when you first became interested in working for the government?
Early on I was interested in public service in part because I had grown up in a household where doing good work, being accountable to your community, things like that [were] important. As I started to learn about the world and everything, I think it became pretty clear to me that I wanted to be in some kind of helping profession.
When I went to college, I started as a journalist, switched from journalism to speech communication, and then went on to graduate school [with the intention of teaching]. … At some point, I turned my attention to becoming a lawyer, in large part because I had started doing a lot of advocacy work around El Salvador. This was the late ’80s, and there was just a lot going on in terms of opposition to the U.S. support for the Salvadoran government.
I went to work for the [Immigration and Naturalization Service], which I don’t think most people would think of as improving things. But I had really deep conversations with activists in Madison, where I was living at the time, about how being on the inside was really an opportunity to help shape not just an individual case, but the outcome for many, many people. So I went into government with that idea, and have never really lost that thread. In terms of the work I do, whether I’ve been inside government or outside government, it’s really always been at some level about holding the government and myself accountable to something higher, and keeping the notion of serving the public in play.
I just became increasingly convinced that the way forward for children and for immigrants generally, was rethinking how we talk about the system, how we talk about immigration. Not as some … discrete and sort of siloed issue, but as a really critical part of who we are as a country and how we succeed as a country. So then I began working on a campaign for KIND that was called Keeping Kids Safe. It was focused on the notion that children are children first, and that’s what should matter. That helped me explore a lot more of the issues around the connections between child welfare and protection, and how many people … in the country really believed and valued children but maybe hadn’t seen the connections between what was going on in their own work and what was going on in the unaccompanied children’s space.
When the opportunity for the ombuds position opened up. I was reading through the the job description, and I realized that it was a concrete version of so many of the things that I believed in. Because it dealt with the specific issues of unaccompanied children, but it did it in a way that was really trying to move towards good government—accountability to child safety and child protection, but also giving a confidential space to people to be able to raise concerns and have somebody there who really did understand both sides and could both mediate and help to advance changes for individuals and for the system.
Could you talk briefly about some of the specific needs and things to consider in thinking about unaccompanied children?
Immigration is such a polarizing issue these days, and it shouldn’t be for any number of reasons. One of them is that study after study demonstrates that immigration is really vital to a country’s growth and survival. Clearly, for the United States, there’s been many, many, many studies. The success of the country has been built on people from all different parts of the world coming and having the opportunities to build and grow and thrive. You can get a bunch of people in a room, and when you when you start to press them on why say they they are suspicious of immigration or don’t like immigrants or whatever, it’s never really about immigration. It’s about fear. It’s about change. It’s about a shifting economic system that has winners and losers, and when people feel like they’re losing out, they look for somebody to blame. Historically—and not just in this country, but around the world—immigrants have been an easy scapegoat for really difficult problems that society doesn’t want to reflect on. So you walk into immigration with all these heavy, heavy things already at play.
My sort of top-line analysis is that solving the immigration puzzle is like solving a Rubik’s Cube. If you just focus on one side, you’re not ever going to have a cohesive system. You’ll get one side “right” and everything else will be a mess. And what’s happened in the U.S. over the last 30 years has been such an emphasis on enforcement, national security, all this kind of stuff, that we just haven’t kept pace in terms of what the country needs in terms of a working visa system, the kind of humanitarian capacity [for] refugees … with how society is changing in terms of different perspectives of family.
With unaccompanied children, what happened almost 30 years ago now was that there were starting to be kids who showed up [at the border] with no parent. Maybe the parent was already in the country. They were arriving at the border, and so suddenly the government had this responsibility to take care of kids, and was completely ill-equipped to do it. [They] were housing children in detention facilities like local jails and stuff with criminals. So that generated a lawsuit called Flores … [that] set the standard for what the government’s accountability was to children.
There needed to be another oversight mechanism. So my office was created to be that advocate … to both protect the interests of children in the system, or who interacted with with ORR through services that they got after they were released. … When people had concerns about the way things were being done—either because they thought policies were being violated or because they thought there was a better way to do something, or that children weren’t getting what they needed—they could come to my office. We could investigate. We could make recommendations.
It was definitely about children’s safety and well-being. It was also about making sure that the government was doing the best possible job it could, and holding everyone accountable to that standard.
What does an average day for you look like on the job as an Unaccompanied Children Ombuds?
There was a chunk of my day that was always the mundane administrative stuff, because I was the head of the office. But the other parts of my day could vary from holding a stakeholder engagement where a bunch of different advocates would get on the phone and talk to us about their concerns, or talking to somebody individually. We didn’t have a lot of investigators as I first started, so going through files and looking at a complaint, those kinds of things. As we brought more people on board, my role became more of holding us together in terms of the vision and really listening to what folks were saying and trying to help them figure out their roles or cases.
Then the Trump administration came in and just radically changed everything. Suddenly my job became much more about trying to fend off all the attacks and criticisms and things like that, and trying to explain to people what we did, to try to keep the office, than to [actually] be able to do the work.
Could you give some examples of the nature of the threats and criticisms? Were these coming from within the government?
I think that we were basically, in our own tiny way, a target from the beginning. One of the first things that we learned was that not only had the White House directed that the government go back to referring to unaccompanied children as “unaccompanied alien children,” which technically is the statutory term. But everybody understands what unaccompanied children are.
I learned that they also directed the communications department to take down the information about our office that was on the front page of the Office of Refugee Resettlement [the information is now back elsewhere on the site]. … How can you have an ombuds office and not have a way for people to contact them? I mean, we have our own website, but you kind of have to know that we exist to even know that we’re doing it.
Could you talk about your experience of being fired?
I was notified that I was removed from my position on Feb. 14 and that I would be terminated on March 14. So I was technically not yet fired when the court decision said that we all had to be brought back to work. [I] got a letter a few days after that March 14 deadline saying there’s been this court decision and because of that … we are canceling your termination and we are keeping you on administrative leave with no assigned duty station, basically. So we’re going to pay you and such, because we have to, but we’re not going to let you do any work.
[On May 8] in my organization, a number of us who had been reinstated received, on the same day, in the same envelope, the letter saying you weren’t fired for poor performance … [then] we got a second one that said, well, now we’ve determined that your work is no longer advancing the public interest, and so we’re firing you. That one hurt a lot more.
I’ve always maintained that if they had just followed all the rules, it would have been so much more difficult for anyone to challenge them. But of course they wouldn’t have been able to fire everybody in the first 20 minutes of the administration, basically. So my own hope is that impatience and arrogance is … their downfall.
Understanding that your office was largely probationary workers because of its recency, do you know how many people still work there?
Of the original seven, three are there. And it’s my understanding that they moved someone else into a position there, so they have four people. But seven [already] wasn’t enough to do what we needed to do. That was just what we had.
It’s very disturbing. I can only speculate, but if they don’t eliminate the office, then they will probably, in the reorganization, move it into some context where it is an office that primarily looks at abuse and fraud. That seems to be the direction they wanted to take everything related to oversight. And when I say abuse and fraud, I don’t mean internal government stuff. I mean they’re looking for the traffickers that they imagine to be behind every sponsor’s application and things like that. So … even if the office is allowed to continue to exist, the dynamic will be much different.
I’m hopeful that they might recognize that … a neutral third party is a valuable tool for anyone, any government. But that remains to be seen. I know that systemic issues that are already arising, like the length of time children are staying in custody now, which has just skyrocketed because of new requirements that this administration has put into place. Those are the kinds of things that an ombuds office should be able to investigate and discuss. … And as it becomes more and more difficult to know what’s going on, the more likely all different kinds of abuses are to happen. And it will be hard for anyone to really monitor it.
What are your fears are for the unaccompanied children that you advocated for and the communities you serve amid these cuts?
They are very much trying to reshape the unaccompanied children’s program into something that is designed to discourage unaccompanied children from arriving in the U.S., by making it difficult for parents to be able to be reunited with their children. By imposing all different kinds of requirements on identification and other proof of income and things—not that those things aren’t important, but by almost deliberately setting up systems that mean that a person who’s undocumented couldn’t get custody of their own child. I think, ultimately, they want to keep children in custody rather than release them, because of the perceived—and I really don’t know that it makes any difference at all—but the perceived deterrent effect of that. The punishment factor for parents and for kids.
[They also want] to mine all that data that does exist about sponsors and unaccompanied children who are in the communities today, to be able to arrest undocumented people. To be able to more or less force people into voluntarily departing or being deported. For the kids, their health and wellbeing is dramatically affected the longer they stay in custodial care. For the parents, the anguish and the frustration of trying to do everything you can to get your kid back. They still have rights as parents, and yet they don’t really have a way to vindicate them in this model that’s being developed. So it has really significant consequences for the future wellbeing of those families, many of whom are likely to be long-term residents of the United States, or could be. And to think somehow or other that you could use children as a weapon to drive parents out of the country, which is I think what’s happening? It’s just, well, it’s despicable. But it also is such an unrealistic view of how communities work, and how people try to live their lives. It’s a very Machiavellian view of it, that if they make it painful enough they can push people out.
On the unaccompanied children scale, on a broader scale, it’s just more and more iterations of that, really pushing the envelope on every law. Just seeing how far they can go violating the Constitution before somebody notices. I’ve been really heartened by the many courts who have said, “No, you know this is wrong.” And I have hope that that will continue to protect kids and other immigrants. But what I think is really, really disturbing, is that if you go back to that idea that I talked about early on, about children are children first, if this is how this administration treats incredibly vulnerable children who are in their care and custody, what does it say about their regard for children generally? All you have to do is look at all the cuts to services and programs that benefit children from Head Start to to reproductive health to education, and you know what the message is. But it is perhaps most stark and obvious, and therefore a warning to people about what’s to come, in terms of valuing our most precious resource, which is children.
Was there anything that we haven’t had a chance to talk about?
Losing your job is traumatic, and I think it’s humbling too. I’m sympathetic, I think, to some folks who have said, “Well that’s the real world. You federal workers have had it easy with all the job protections and everything.” And it really concerns me when I hear that—not because I don’t get it. I mean, I get it. Many people have it rough. But the protections that were built into the civil service, they weren’t designed to protect me or other people working in the government. They were designed to protect the public. They were designed so that there could be continuity and services, so that every time an administration changed, we wouldn’t have so much upheaval and policy and such that you couldn’t count on the government to deliver your mail on time, to process your income tax returns on time, to provide updates on vaccines in time, all that sort of stuff. And by so aggressively attacking the civil service, they’re really attacking the people. They’re attacking the bedrock principle that government exists to serve the public.