The Trump administration has arrested the parents of at least 27,000 children within just seven months, as federal immigration authorities increasingly target families with kids to bolster the president's mass deportation campaign. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deported twice as many parents each month compared to one year earlier, according to an analysis of government documents obtained by The Guardian. The administration has arrested as many as 2,300 parents and deported roughly 1,400 every month, the analysis found.
The Guardian uncovered thousands of cases in which ICE sought to deport parents who had a different citizenship than their children, many of whom are U.S. citizens. This underscores the massive legal and logistical hurdles to retain family units under the president's sweeping anti-immigration platform. The latest reporting adds to a growing body of evidence alleging a return to 'family separation' from Trump's first term and the infamous 'zero tolerance' era that separated thousands of migrant children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border, a policy effectively blocked by a settlement in a federal court case.
Today, Trump's second administration has launched an unprecedented expansion of family separation that targets mixed-status families in the country's interior — including people who have lived in the U.S. for years — and instilling deep generational trauma, advocates warn. Documents revealed the arrests of 15,000 fathers and 3,000 mothers who are the parents of 27,000 to 32,000 children, including 12,000 U.S. citizen children. Nearly 7,500 fathers and 1,000 mothers have a different nationality than at least one of their children, according to The Guardian's analysis.
Records obtained by the outlet do not detail how many children were detained or deported with their families but illustrate how the administration's efforts to rapidly arrest and remove tens of thousands of people from the country have ripped apart immigrant families and their communities in the U.S. The findings are also likely an undercount; ICE has failed to follow its own policies requiring officers to ask people they arrest about their children to ensure they have an opportunity to decide what happens to them when they're deported, The Independent previously reported.
Last year, the administration made a critical change to Joe Biden-era guidelines for detained parents that has radically shifted how ICE handles families. Deported parents previously could decide whether they wanted their children to join them. Now, ICE will only support those arrangements if they are 'operationally feasible.' But ICE is still required to ask anyone they arrest if they have children and 'must allow those parents to decide what happens to their children if they are deported, even if they are not required to help facilitate choice,' according to a recent report from the Women's Refugee Commission and Physicians for Human Rights.
Advocates say the administration is relying on apparent threats of family separation to force them to drop their immigration cases and leave the country voluntarily. Homeland Security has repeatedly denied separating families and insists that immigration detention 'is a choice' as the agency encourages people to 'self-deport' instead. DHS spokesperson Lauren Bis told The Guardian that 'parents are asked if they want to be removed with their children.'
'It is unconscionable that the U.S. government is inflicting these abuses once again on families, even after the well-documented harms caused by separations under the first Trump administration's 'zero tolerance' policy,' Dr. Michele Heisler, medical director at Physicians for Human Rights and professor of internal medicine and public health at University of Michigan, said earlier this year. A lawsuit against the policy filed earlier this year accuses the administration of causing 'tremendous, long-lasting harm,' according to Mishan Wroe, directing attorney with the National Center for Youth Law.
'Children who were living with safe, vetted family members are now being held in prolonged detention — missing school and far away from their loved ones — all because the government is prioritizing arrest quotas over children's safety,' she said. Faisal Al-Juburi with legal advocacy group RAICES told The Guardian that the U.S. has not yet grappled with the 'impact of this type of immigration enforcement and the domino effect it will have.'
The surge in family detentions and separations has brought heightened scrutiny into a sprawling facility in rural Texas that has detained hundreds of immigrant children within the last year. Nearly 600 immigrant children have been held inside the Dilley Immigration Processing Center with inadequate food and medical care, often far beyond court-mandated limits on how long children can be detained, according to court documents filed earlier this year. Emergency crews have been dispatched to Dilley nearly a dozen times over the last several months, according to call logs reviewed by ProPublica and NBC News. Staff at the detention center have dialed 911 to report children with severe fever, broken bones, respiratory distress, seizures, plunging oxygen levels and other medical emergencies, including a pregnant woman who passed out.
