Washington, DC – Below is a column by Maribel Hastings from America’s Voice en Español translated to English from Spanish. It ran in several Spanish-language media outlets earlier this week:
As voters head to the polls on November 3, 2026, many will consider the damage—sometimes irreparable—that Donald Trump’s immigration policies inflict not only on migrant children but also on U.S. citizen children in families with mixed immigration status.
Trump’s detention and deportation machine spares no one—not even children.
Last week, while attempting to make an arrest during a traffic stop in New York, ICE agents shot a Dominican immigrant while his five-year-old son was in the car.
But this is not just about the violence of immigration raids and detentions. These are practices and public policies that are intentionally designed to instill fear, cause harm, or deprive minor U.S. citizens or legal residents of access to nutritional, medical, or educational assistance programs.
There are raids in churches, government buildings—where children accompany their parents to immigration appointments—and in and around schools. The situation has reached the point where children, including U.S. citizen children, are no longer attending school, receiving medical care, or accessing food assistance programs to which they are entitled because their parents fear being detained and eventually deported.
The Marshall Project has compiled much of this data from the Deportation Data Project at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, Los Angeles.
The numbers are alarming. Between January and August 2026, 8,592 children were arrested by ICE; ICE detained 8,755 children and 562 infants and toddlers. Furthermore, on average, 198 children are in ICE custody each day. At least 54% of the children who were released from detention centers were eventually deported. The federal government has deported 22,565 minors, and 1,460 of those deported were detained in the interior of the country, not at the border.
After the trauma of detention—whether in a church, a government building, a school, or in the sanctity of their own homes—many of these minors face family separation and not only emotional but also economic consequences when one or both breadwinners are detained and deported.
Other minors end up with their parents in detention centers where they do not receive adequate food or medical care when they need it, especially for their mental health. They cannot sleep because the lights remain on or because the cold is unbearable.
Then there are unaccompanied children without adequate legal representation. There are numerous press reports of minors being brought to hearings before immigration judges without an attorney for the proceedings that will determine whether or not they will be deported. Some are as young as 2 or 3 years old.
This cruelty is also evident in public policies promoted by Trump, who revived a version of the “public charge” rule on September 18 that applies to those seeking a green card through a family member, or to permanent residents who have been outside the United States for more than six months and wish to re-enter.
The idea is to give immigration officials greater authority to determine whether an applicant for permanent residency could become a “public charge.”
But these are legal residents entitled to certain types of income-based public assistance that they would stop applying for out of fear of jeopardizing their permanent residency application. Or the U.S. citizen children of these immigrants may receive or have received public assistance they are entitled to, which could jeopardize their parents’ application for permanent residency.
More examples of cruelty? Never forget that the first Trump administration separated some 5,000 children from their parents at the border through the “zero-tolerance” policy to deter other immigrants from attempting to enter the United States without documents. Public pressure led to the practice being discontinued, but thousands of minors were left trapped in a bureaucratic system without even knowing exactly where they were. In 2023, on the fifth anniversary of this shameful policy, some 1,000 minors were still waiting to be reunited with their parents.
It is this cruelty that seems to have eroded support among certain voters for Trump and the Republican Party regarding their handling of immigration issues—as is the case with Hispanic voters, who have been particularly hard-hit by immigration policies even if they are not undocumented. Citizens and authorized residents have suffered from racial profiling and harassment by immigration agents.
On November 3, voters will decide.
The original Spanish version is here.
