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Children are almost always treated with special deference in American law, because lawmakers understand and respect the significance of adolescence and the necessity of parental guidance. President Donald Trump has upended this long-standing, universal understanding in a particularly insidious way during his second term. For the first time in our nation’s history, tens of thousands of children are being separated from their parents, who, at the hands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, are being violently arrested inside of the country, then detained, and quickly deported without their kids. These children are essentially left to fend for themselves or are placed with an unknown caregiver, which in some cases has led to horrific endings. Although this may sound awfully similar to Trump’s 2018 “zero-tolerance” policy, it is worse, because there is no explicit family separation policy this time around, making it harder to challenge in court. Instead, family separation has become just another devastating consequence of the president’s mass deportation agenda.

Under past administrations, ICE policy held that any detainees who were parents should be reunited with their children before being deported, or agents must get confirmation that there is a designated caregiver in place for their children in the parents’ absence. Last year, upon Trump returning to the White House, ICE revised this policy to make it only applicable “when operationally feasible,” which gave agents all the leeway they needed to ignore the historical guidance in order to prioritize mass deportations. “This loosening of guidelines, combined with scaled-up immigration enforcement, has resulted in the detention of thousands of parents, many of whose minor children are U.S. citizens,” a recent analysis by the Migration Policy Institute concluded.

Under Trump 2.0, the Department of Homeland Security no longer provides reliable data on its immigration enforcement, but the Brookings Institution estimates that as of April 2026 about 205,000 children have likely experienced a parental detention since Trump began his second term and about 145,000 of these children are U.S. citizens. Mothers in particular seem to be affected, with ProPublica finding that the Trump administration is deporting about four times as many moms of U.S. citizen children per day as the Biden administration did, most of whom have minor or no........

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