Washington, DC – Over the past year since Trump took office, this administration’s mass deportation and sweeping anti-immigration crusade has targeted parents, workers, and long-settled families in American communities across the country. Now, Trump and Miller have their sights set squarely on the most vulnerable among us: our children and young people.
Recently The Marshall Project and MS Now reported that, “ICE has dramatically increased detentions of children aged 3 and under, holding 25 of them in custody on an average day between January 2025 and March of this year.”
Not content with the harm of oppressive federal actions, Steve Miller is bringing his anti-immigrant bandwagon to the states. Earlier this spring, Tennessee Republican lawmakers aligned with Trump/Miller’s mass deportation agenda, passing legislation requiring state and local agencies to “verify whether anyone receiving a public benefit is in the country legally,” putting families with undocumented, critically ill, or severely disabled children at risk of being reported to immigration authorities and being cut off from lifesaving medical care.
Across the nation, undocumented children and teenagers are also being forced into extremely difficult situations, including navigating a broken immigration legal system — often alone. As E. Tammy Kim recently wrote in The New Yorker, “unaccompanied kids are being treated like adults, despite laws and policies meant to give them extra consideration… Trump’s effort to remove more children and teens is expansive; the courts are, in a sense, the least opaque piece of a wider plan.”
According to Vanessa Cárdenas, Executive Director of America’s Voice:
“Children are the latest target of the cruel and hate-filled, anti-immigrant obsession of this administration. Tennessee is the latest example where disabled children are being stripped of life-saving healthcare and elsewhere in the country, they are forcing toddlers to appear in court alone. Using the windfall in funding from Congressional Republicans, they are inflicting as much pain as possible no matter the cost. The cruelty is not incidental; it is the point.”
