At the Homestead Temporary Shelter for Unaccompanied Minors, young immigrants are handcuffed by ICE on their 18th birthdays and taken to an adult jail.

When one of his abusive mother's gangbanger friends held a gun to his chest and threatened to pull the trigger, Nolbiz Orellana knew he'd die in Honduras. So this past January, the then-17-year-old made the harrowing journey to the U.S.-Mexico border, crossed over, and asked for asylum.

Instead of releasing him to his relatives in Nebraska, though, the feds sent him to the Homestead Temporary Shelter for Unaccompanied Children. Orellana spent three months in the remote South Miami-Dade facility until April 8 — his birthday.

That's when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents showed up at the children's shelter, slapped handcuffs on Orellana's wrists, chained them to his waist, and shackled his legs together. The agents drove Orellana to the Broward Transitional Center, an infamous immigration jail in Pompano Beach, where he was thrown into a cell with men twice his age.

Orellana's saga isn't just shocking — it's also illegal, say Miami immigration attorneys who have succeeded in forcing ICE to release several other 18-year-olds in recent months. Even worse, they say what happened to the Honduran refugee seems to have become ICE's national policy.

"When they turn 18, it's basically, 'Happy birthday,' and then they slap on handcuffs and take them off to adult detention centers," says Lisa Lehner, an attorney with the nonprofit Americans for Immigrant Justice who is representing Orellana.

Since April, at least 14 children at the Homestead center have been handcuffed on their 18th birthdays and taken to a jail cell in Broward, Lehner says. And at least one of those kids had been separated from his father under the Trump administration's since-abandoned policy to rip apart families that crossed the border together.

Lehner and her colleagues have filed seven lawsuits since early July on behalf of those 18-year-old immigrants. In five of those cases, ICE has quickly released the immigrants to relatives or guardians while their cases work through the courts. (Two cases are still pending, and Lehner expects to file several more in the coming weeks.)

"We've been successful in filing these petitions and getting ICE to act, but it would be much better if ICE would just stop this process in the first place," Lehner says. "The law is crystal clear."

Asked about the cases, Nestor Yglesias, a Miami-based ICE spokesperson, says the agency "conducts targeted enforcement in compliance with federal law and agency policy."

But Lehner says there are actually three legal precedents that should prevent ICE from throwing immigrants like Orellana who crossed the border as juveniles into lockup when they turn 18 without seriously working to release them to family members instead.

The first dates to 1997, when a group of immigrant children in detention centers sued the federal government; in settling the case of a young El Salvadoran named Jenny Flores, the government agreed to begin releasing juveniles as quickly as possible, preferably to family — but always into the "least restrictive" setting available.

Those protections grew even stronger in 2008 under the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, which set into law the rule that unaccompanied minors should be sent to the "least restrictive" option as soon as possible.

In 2013, Congress amended the law so it also applies to immigrant children who turn 18 and are transferred into ICE's custody.

The Obama administration mostly followed those rules, advocates say. In 2014, only 1 percent of young people in shelters run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) "aged out" by turning 18, meaning ICE had to take them into custody, according to data compiled by Documented, an immigration news site; in the 2017 fiscal year, the number of kids handed to ICE on their 18th birthdays more than doubled.

Why? Because ORR is making less effort to hand kids off to relatives, activists told Documented, and also because many of their family members are also undocumented and hesitant to come forward under Trump's aggressive ICE policies.

Now it's clear that once those kids are handed over to ICE, they're immediately being thrown into adult jails without a day in court or any attempt to find the least restrictive option required by law, Lehner says. The crisis intensified in April, when ICE began separating families in immigration proceedings, leading to thousands of children — including infants — being taken from their parents and placed in shelters. Since then, more than 1,000 kids have been sent to the Homestead facility. Some of them have been separated from their families, and some crossed the border alone.

Although Trump said he would abandon his separation policy, his administration requested leeway to keep kids in detention indefinitely. A federal judge denied that request in July, citing the Flores settlement. The White House has said it plans to appeal.

These days, ICE is outright ignoring the rules set out by the Flores agreement and later put into law by Congress, Lehner says. Instead of trying to release the 18-year-old migrants to relatives or guardians, ICE is simply putting them in jail cells at facilities such as the Broward Transitional Center without due process.

"They're supposed to find the least restrictive setting, and instead of that, they're putting them in the most restrictive place," she says. "It's clear that this is a nationwide problem."