One report has identified more than 100 U.S. citizen children who have been separated from their parents due to mass deportation—and there are likely more out there
Last year, a teen named Billy bravely spoke out in defense of other kids at risk of being separated from their families. Billy was just nine years old when U.S. immigration officials under the first Trump administration ripped him from his father at the southern border, initially telling him that they would be apart for the day because his dad had to go to court. But that was a lie. Billy would not see his dad again for 40 days. “We didn’t know that we were going to suffer the pain that we did,” Billy said last year. “We thought we had a better future planned ahead of us coming to this country.”
While the courts mandated that these children have access to mental health services to help them deal with their government-inflicted trauma, the pain of family separation still lingered for Billy and many other kids. “And after that, we still fear … I go to therapists,” he said. It was a major reason why he spoke out about Donald Trump’s potential return to power. “I don’t want this to happen to any more kids,” Billy said. “I was separated, and a lot more kids were separated, too.”
But despite Billy’s brave effort, the second Trump administration has resumed family separation – but this time on a national scale and endangering countless of the estimated 4.5 million American citizen children who have at least one undocumented immigrant parent. The trauma that Billy warned us about is assuredly playing out as well. “CNN identified more than 100 US citizen children, from newborns to teenagers, who have been left stranded without parents because of immigration actions this year,” the outlet reports. “This is the new family separation crisis,” said Zain Lakhani, director of migrant rights and justice at the Women’s Refugee Commission.
Among them are siblings Febe and Angelo Perez, who lost their dad to COVID five years ago. Then this year, ICE took their surviving parent as well. CNN reports that Febe, age six, and Angelo, age 9, were asleep in their beds when federal immigration agents in full tactical gear invaded their home and took their mom, Kenia, who had just arrived home from work. “ICE agents were waiting for her,” CNN reports.
“‘Run away as far as you can,’ she texted her 14-year-old son, Isaac, who jumped out the window. Since Isaac was also undocumented, she worried ICE would take him too — leaving Febe and Angelo without any family in the country,” the report said. “Desperate to keep her children out of foster care, her next call was to Jeff Chaney, a family friend and coworker who had agreed just a day earlier to take guardianship of the children if ICE came for her — something she had become increasingly nervous about under the Trump administration.”
“Unlike other cases examined by CNN, Perez said she was allowed to go into her apartment, wake her children, and tell them goodbye,” the report continued. Ms Perez, who was deported to Honduras just days after her arrest, tells CNN that she told her children “to be strong.”
But in some instances, ICE appears to have ignored official government guidelines that permit parents who are suddenly in immigration enforcement proceedings to try to find accommodations for their children. The National Immigration Law Center (NILC) told CNN that the organization knows of one child who was placed into foster care even though family members were ready to help care for her. “This ICE is not using their discretion,” said Heidi Altman, NILC’s vice president of policy.
“In some cases, the children themselves are asking for financial support to help pay for food, rent and utility bills,” CNN continued. “Teenagers describe being left on their own with younger siblings, and recent high school graduates say they have dropped out of college and returned home in the hopes of keeping their siblings housed, fed and out of the care of strangers.”
Romero is one of a growing number of young adults and teenagers who have had to take over as the breadwinner when a parent or loved one is arrested by ICE — and in some cases, even deported.
WGBH reports that Boston college student Yoana Pleitez Romero is among older siblings who have had to drop their lives in order to care for their younger siblings. Following their mom’s previous deportation, stepdad Alejandro Zamorano Deceano became the family’s sole breadwinner. He was leaving his second job at a pizza joint last month when he was suddenly swept up by ICE despite having no criminal record (the overwhelmingly majority of immigrants in ICE detention have no criminal record at all, according to TRAC Immigration data.)
Yoana has no doubt why they took Mr. Zamorano Deceano. “I think it was random — just they saw him and they saw that he was Hispanic and then that’s why they just grabbed him and asked him,” she told WGBH. “And then, obviously, he didn’t lie. He said the truth. He didn’t have any papers. And then they took him.”
While Yoana’s 12 and 9-year-old siblings know that Mr. Zamorano Deceano is detained, the youngest, four-year-old Taylor, has no idea. A local advocacy organization in Massachusetts “is figuring out how they can support Romero,” the report said.
CNN also interviewed Oregon resident Mimi Lettunich, a speaker from last month’s House shadow hearing on the administration’s brutal mass detention and deportation agenda. During that shadow hearing, Lettunich shared how she and her husband have been caring for four U.S. children following their mom and dad’s disappearances by ICE. In fact, their separation was so abrupt that the kids weren’t even able to get their pajamas for the first night at the Lettunich residence.
The four children – triplets David, Carlos, and Abby, little brother Jeffrey – have now spent more than 70 days away from their parents.
Lettunich said she and her husband have tried to make life as normal as possible for the four, including going to day camp. But they still fear for their parents, and Lettunich worries about the government-inflicted trauma already being exhibited. “One of the kids has been keeping everything bottled up, she said,” the report continues. “He doesn’t want to hear anything about what happened or talk about it, only wanting to ‘think of happy things.’ And all of the children have started talking with a psychiatrist to try to begin processing the trauma, she said.”
This is government-inflicted child abuse – and that’s the opinion of the experts. “Individual health professionals and numerous medical organizations actively opposed the policy of family separation due to the trauma that it was predicted to cause,” said a 2021 paper published in peer-reviewed journal PLOS One. “The American Academy of Pediatrics called it ‘government-sanctioned child abuse,’ and Physicians for Human Rights determined that the harms documented are consistent with the legal definition of torture and temporary enforced disappearance under international human rights law.”
One video from under the first Trump administration showed one family’s reunification after three months apart. In the clip, the child pushes away from his weeping mother. “Ever, what is wrong with my son?” she asked. “What happened to him? … My son is traumatized, Ever.”
Even short periods of separation can be damaging, the experts said. “Parent-child separation has long-term effects on child well-being, even if there is subsequent reunification,” said the Society for Research in Child Development. While Febe, Angelo, and Isaac have since reunited with their mom in Honduras (even though the U.S. is their home and this is where they belong), David, Carlos, Abby, and Jeffrey still don’t have their parents.
“It’s literally a kid’s worst nightmare having someone come take your parents in the middle of the night,” Wendy Cervantes, Director of Immigration and Immigrant Families at CLASP, told CNN. “No matter the outcome, you are turning a kid’s life upside down.”
