A horrific number of U.S. citizen children have been separated from a parent under the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda, a new study reveals
A May 18 report from the Brookings Institution estimates that nearly 147,000 American citizen kids have seen a parent detained under the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant obsessions, which have already endangered children’s safety by diverting federal resources away from investigating predators and traffickers in order to target hardworking moms and dads. The think tank found that of that number, more than 22,000 of these American kids have experienced the detention of both of their parents.
“Roughly 36% were younger than six years old, underscoring a hardline immigration enforcement strategy that has drawn widespread criticism from civil rights and immigrant advocacy groups,” The Guardian noted.
The think tank’s estimate is over 25 times larger than the number of weeping migrant children who were ripped from the arms of parents and guardians under the first Trump administration’s chaotic and intentionally traumatizing “zero tolerance” policy at the southern border, which ultimately resulted in the forcible separation of 5,500 kids. In 2024, experts with Human Rights Watch (HRW) said that as many as 1,360 children had still not been reunited with their parents six years after the administration’s human rights catastrophe was stopped under both court orders and massive public backlash.
We now run the risk of repeating this permanent family separation – but on an even larger scale. “Families are also now being split up in ways that are more dispersed, more hidden and harder to track,” as ProPublica noted.
While some deported parents may take their U.S. citizen children with them, others have been forced to make the agonizing decision to leave their children behind with a family member or close friend. This is not callousness; this is a parent feeling that their child may have the best chance of personal success in the U.S. even if it means being apart. Even so, the mass deportation officials plucking parents from their homes don’t keep track of this. “In many of these cases, the government is unaware of children left behind,” the study noted.
Other parents may decide to tell federal agents nothing about their children, knowing the vindictive nature of the mass deportation agenda. The CoreCivic-operated migrant family jail in Texas, for example, has been under fire for abhorrent conditions. And then this week, New Jersey’s Delaney Hall also denied state health inspectors full access to the GEO Group-operated site. “As I’ve said repeatedly, refusing to provide full access raises serious questions about what ICE is trying to hide from public view,” commented Gov. Mikie Sherrill.
When it comes to family separation, another recent report from the HRW and the Women’s Refugee Commission (WRC) revealed that ICE is also not following its own policy regarding family units, “including a requirement that they ask anyone they arrest if they have children and ensure that parents have an opportunity to decide what happens to their children if they are deported.”
“Some parents reported trying to tell their arresting officers that they had children and being ignored,” the report said. “One mother, who was arrested outside a hospital after a medical appointment, had three of her children with her and three others at home. According to the physician who recounted her story, she repeatedly told her arresting officers that she had three other children whom she would want to come with her, but she was dismissed. The family is now separated, with three children in Honduras and three left behind in the US.”
“Last Monday, I was dropping off my son—who has a disability— at school,” said another deported mother. “I left him and when I came back, I saw that some men were coming. They didn’t ask me anything, they just put me in handcuffs, and I couldn’t say even a word. That’s how they detained me.”
In one of the earliest investigative reports last year detailing this emerging humanitarian crisis, one separated family shared how siblings Febe and Angelo Perez were asleep in their beds when mass deportation agents in full tactical gear invaded their home and abducted their mom, Kenia, who had just arrived home from work.
“‘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,” CNN reported at the time. “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, said that she asked her children “to be strong.”
“‘There are a lot of families that are in the situation that are not being written down,’ said Tara Watson, one of the authors of the Brookings report,” ProPublica continued. “It’s ‘important both for transparency and from a child health and wellbeing perspective to know what’s happening to the kids. How many of them are leaving the U.S.? How many of them are staying in the U.S. with close family? How many of them do we really not know what their situation is?’”
We do know that the administration’s anti-immigrant obsessions – which are also targeting immigrants with valid protections and many others applying for a green card in addition to long-settled undocumented neighbors – put millions of U.S. citizen children at risk. One 2024 analysis from the Center for Migration Studies found that an estimated 5.5 million American-born kids live in a household with at least one undocumented family member. Of this number, nearly two million U.S.-born children live with two undocumented parents.
“For both logistical and political reasons, the administration will not achieve its stated goal of removing every unauthorized immigrant from the United States,” the Brookings Institution report concluded. “But hundreds of thousands of children are likely to be directly impacted by the current immigration enforcement policy. Policymakers must reckon with the fact that many children are left without one or both parents as a result of immigration enforcement, that this is unlikely to change in the near term, and that no government entity is responsible for their well-being.”
And, we must also reckon with the fact that when even short amounts of separation can be harmful, mass deportation policy that could soon see billions more in spending will be forcing these children to endure a mental health crisis that may last for years to come.
