by Mica Rosenberg

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In handwritten cursive, a Russian immigrant named Marina wrote out the story of the day U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents took away her 1-year-old baby while she was being held in a detention facility in southern California. “I cried and begged, kneeling, not to do this, that this was a mistake, not justice and not right,” she wrote. “She was so little that no one knew anything about her. I was very afraid for her and still am!”

This didn’t happen during the Trump administration, which separated more than 4,000 migrant children from their families under its controversial “zero tolerance” policy. Marina was separated from her baby in April of this year. The 40-year-old former restaurant manager came to the U.S.-Mexico border with her husband, mother-in-law and child to seek asylum. More than eight months later, she and her mother-in-law remain in federal immigration custody in Louisiana. Her husband is detained at a different Louisiana immigration facility. And Aleksandra is over a thousand miles away, being cared for by strangers in foster care in California.

Aleksandra is one of around 300 children the Biden administration has separated from their parents or legal guardians this year, according to two government sources who asked not to be identified because they hadn’t been authorized to speak about the separations. Most of the cases involved families crossing the southwestern border, the sources said. These numbers haven’t previously been reported.

Similarly, 298 children were separated from their parents in 2023, according to a government report to Congress published on Tuesday, even as overall migrant crossings have declined. According to the report, the average amount of time children separated between April 2018 and October 2024 have spent in federal custody before being released to a sponsor is 75 days.

The Department of Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the numbers or on Marina’s case.

Those officials who did speak about the separations did so on the condition they not be identified. They said the current separations are not similar — in either character or scale — to what was happening during the Trump administration. Its zero tolerance policy directed authorities to detain and criminally prosecute all immigrants caught illegally crossing the border and to separate them from their children if they were travelling together. Biden administration officials say they have only separated families for reasons according to longstanding immigration practices, including when they have concerns about the parents or the safety of the children. Some of those concerns are related to suspicions about abuse, criminal histories or threats to national security.

The administration reports the numbers of separations to Congress and to lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union who have been charged with providing oversight. However, those reports give few details about the reasons for the separations, especially in cases where parents have been flagged for national security reasons. Around 80 of the children separated between December 2023 and November 2024 were in that category, one of the government sources said, and some 50 of those were Russian, like Aleksandra. The second source said at least 10 of the Russian children who were separated this year are still in government custody.

In cases involving national security, the government can withhold its rationale even from the families themselves, making it hard for them and their lawyers to contest the separations or mount a defense. And some advocates have been reluctant to talk publicly about the current separations, much less call out President Joe Biden’s administration, as they press for the government to resolve their clients’ cases and fear the incoming Trump administration could apply the same standards more broadly to separate more........

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