In Its Second Term, Trump Administration Quietly Expands Family Separation

With minimal public scrutiny, U.S. authorities have separated an unknown but likely significant number of children from their parents as part of the Trump administration’s mass deportations effort during its second term. While perhaps occurring with greater frequency, these separations are happening in more diffuse ways and locations than the dramatic, border-related incidents of the first term, which resulted in troubling images of young children huddled behind chain-link fencing in warehouse-like shelters.

Unlike in the first Trump term, recent separations are a largely indirect consequence of heightened enforcement, rather than an intentional policy choice. They are the result of the assertive enforcement push and looser restrictions on arresting parents, as many unauthorized immigrants have been swiftly deported, leaving their children behind, or, facing the threat of deportation, have conceded to voluntarily depart the United States. The separations also stem from different practices than in the first term, often occurring after parents are detained in traffic stops, at workplaces, and elsewhere in U.S. communities, rather than at the U.S.-Mexico border.

For these and other reasons, the public response has been more muted. Whereas public backlash and global attention led to the quick termination of the “zero-tolerance” policy that drove thousands of parent-child separations during the first Trump term, the current approach has unfolded quietly for well more than a year.

Because of the decentralized nature of these separations and the general opacity about the arrests, detention, and removals occurring during the second Trump term, it is unclear precisely how many parents have been deported without their children or how often the threat of separation has been used to induce “self-deportation,” with or without the children.

For many families, however—including many U.S.-citizen children—the consequences are the same as before. Frequently, separated children have been left in the care of extended family or handed over to the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), where they are classified as unaccompanied minors. Research has shown that the trauma of separation can have lifelong repercussions, including on mental and physical health and development.1

At the same time, the administration has seemed to deprioritize reconnecting the children who were separated from their parents during its first term, which was a focus of the Biden administration. It has also slashed federal funding for children’s legal representation in immigration court and connected child-welfare efforts with its immigration enforcement mission, not least by involving agents in welfare checks and sharing sensitive ORR data with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), leading to more than 12,000 arrests according to internal government data reviewed by Reuters.2

This article provides an overview of family separations and the welfare policies governing the wellbeing of migrant children during President Donald Trump’s second term. It traces the rise in detention and removal of noncitizen parents and compares it with the era of separations linked to the first term’s zero-tolerance policy. It also tracks the changing focus for reunification and child-protection mechanisms and the emergence of child-linked enforcement initiatives.

How the Mass Deportation Push Separates Families

After the major controversy over family separation during the first Trump term, during which several thousand children were separated from a parent, the Biden administration declared that unauthorized immigrants in immigration proceedings who are parents be detained only in “limited circumstances.”3 A July 2025 ICE directive rescinded those limitations, gave broad discretion to detain and remove parents, and abolished a requirement to place detained parents as “close as practicable” to their minor children.4

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. Of the 320,000 book-ins to detention that ICE has reported so far in fiscal year (FY) 2026, nearly 17,900 (6 percent) were of people who self-reported they were parents of U.S.-citizen children—an almost twofold increase over FY 2024 (see Figure 1).5 This is likely a dramatic undercount given that many parents may decline to identify themselves as such, potentially out of fear of further involvement with immigration enforcement. This number also does not include the parents of noncitizen children, who may or may not also be targeted for enforcement, nor would it include the detention in state and local jails of noncitizens identified for removal by state and local law enforcement working with ICE but not yet in ICE’s database. As such, it is unclear how many children in total have had a parent detained by immigration enforcement officials during this administration.

There is evidence that the number of children separated from their parents has far surpassed that of the first Trump term. The Brookings Institution has estimated that approximately 205,000 children, 71 percent of them U.S. citizens, had a parent detained by immigration officials as of May 2026.6 In total, the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) estimates that 6.3 million children in the United States were living with at least one parent who was an unauthorized immigrant as of mid-2023, 84 percent of whom were U.S. citizens.7

ICE also appears to be using the threat of separation as leverage to convince unauthorized immigrant parents to voluntarily leave the United States with their children. Journalists, lawyers, and others have documented cases of detained parents given the option to leave voluntarily with their children or contest their removal in immigration court and see their children sent to a federal shelter.8 To avoid separation, some parents have left the United States even if they have an asylum claim or another basis to remain in the United States, in a practice critics describe as coercive.9

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has denied that this approach amounts to a family separation policy, stating that parents have the choice to either depart the country as a family or refuse and face immigration enforcement consequences.10

After the Biden administration’s closure in 2021 of all federal family detention facilities, located in Texas and Pennsylvania, the Trump administration in 2025 reopened family detention space in Texas. It has sought to expand detention capacity to hold families and unaccompanied children, including with a proposed facility in Alexandria, Louisiana that is being set up as a holding center for families that have agreed to departure.11 The planned 528-bed facility is near an airport hub that has been used to facilitate thousands of deportation flights.

The Recent History of Family Separations

While the government’s new approach is different than those of previous eras, it echoes features of prior policies for detaining unauthorized immigrant children, including those apprehended at the border traveling without a custodial adult. In 2014, under the Obama administration, rising numbers of Central American families and unaccompanied minors arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border strained U.S. Border Patrol facilities, which were not designed to care for them (see Figure 2). In conjunction with overwhelmed facilities, authorities also had to abide by the terms of a landmark 1997 legal settlement in the case Flores v. Reno, widely known as the Flores settlement, which limits the amount of time and conditions under which children can be kept in immigration detention. This dynamic resulted in many families being released from detention while they awaited their immigration court hearings. Many analysts saw this comparatively preferential treatment of families as a pull factor for migrants to come to the United States as a family or to send minors on their own.12

Amid rising family arrivals, the then executive associate director of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, Tom Homan, in 2014 reportedly proposed detaining parents, which would inevitably result in family separation and as a result act as a deterrent.13 This idea was dismissed by the Obama administration but was later implemented during the first Trump term. In 2018, the Justice Department announced a zero-tolerance policy at the U.S.-Mexico border, mandating criminal prosecution of everyone entering or re-entering the United States without authorization—primarily between ports of entry—including parents travelling with children.14

Because children cannot be criminally charged as adults for the standard immigration crimes of illegal entry or illegal re-entry or be detained in adult facilities, they were separated from their accompanying parent. DHS treated these children as having no parent or legal guardian in the United States able to provide care, and therefore legally designated them as unaccompanied. In accordance with the 2008 Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, the children were transferred within 72 hours to ORR, an office of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), until they could be released to a sponsoring parent or other qualified adult who could provide for their wellbeing.

ORR shelters were often overcrowded, featured chain-link fences, and resembled prison-like conditions that shocked the public. Scenes sometimes described as “kids in cages” became emblematic of what critics decried as the Trump administration’s harsh enforcement policies and resulted in widespread public opposition, in particular after audio of sobbing children in one facility was leaked.15 The administration terminated the policy in June 2018, only two months after it had been implemented.16 Days later, a federal judge ordered a halt to the zero-tolerance policy and demanded the reunification of separated families.

Still, for various reasons, many additional children were separated from their parents after the court order. The chaotic nature of the process meant that there are no complete, official data, and the true number of separations remains unclear. The Biden administration said in 2024 that it had identified 4,656 children who had been separated, although other estimates have stretched above 5,300.17 Roughly 39 percent of the 2,654 children recorded as separated by mid-2018 were under age 10.18

Failure to Reunite All Families

With hasty separations, officials struggled to identify, track, and reunite families after the zero-tolerance policy ended.19 Hundreds of parents had been deported by the time the government sought to reunite them, further complicating the effort.20 The Trump administration said in September 2018 that it had reunited or otherwise released 2,167 children over age 5, but public information about its reunification efforts is limited and how many children the administration actually reconnected with their families remains unconfirmed.21

Upon taking office, the Biden administration created a task force to identify and reunite families, contributing to the reunification of 3,225 children as of March 2024, the most recent date for which data are available.22 The Biden administration also issued a directive to avoid family separation except in the “most extreme” circumstances.23 The Trump administration rescinded that order on its first day in office.24 It is unclear whether it has continued reunification efforts, and, if so, how effective it has been.

The Trump administration has also sought to weaken family reunification mechanisms, including by terminating the Legal Access Services for Reunified Families (LASRF) Program, which provided free legal access and orientation services to separated families, following the 2018 lawsuit against the zero-tolerance policy. In its final ten months, the program served 1,200 participants.25 A federal court ordered the Justice Department to reinstate LASRF, but it is unclear the extent to which it had complied as of this writing.26

Changes Blur the Line Between Child Protection and Enforcement

Instead of reuniting families separated during its first term, the Trump administration has focused on locating children it alleges had been lost by the Biden administration as well as creating processes for increasing oversight of children’s welfare. At times, these efforts have dovetailed with its broader enforcement agenda.

In responding to large numbers of unaccompanied minors arriving at the border, the Biden administration moved to quickly release children from ORR custody to free up limited bed space and avoid long stays. To do so, it relied on looser vetting of sponsors, who typically are a parent or other relative, leading some children to be placed in questionable or unverified situations. For instance, 16 percent of cases from early 2021 lacked any documentation that one or more required sponsor safety checks had been completed.27

A 2024 DHS inspector general report found that ICE did not serve notices to appear in immigration court to 291,000 children between 2019 and 2024; 32,000 unaccompanied minors also did not show up for their immigration court dates between 2019 and 2023.28 Trump has described these children as missing. “When you talk about separation, we have 325,000 children here during Democrats—and this was done by Democrats—who are right now slaves, sex slaves or dead,” he said in a 2024 TIME magazine interview, although there is no evidence for such outcomes and much of the period cited occurred during his first term.29

Although ICE has acknowledged that not issuing notices to appear limits its contact with migrant children, thereby reducing opportunities to verify their safety, it has not claimed that these children are unaccounted for or in danger.30

All the same, the Trump administration has invested significant resources into locating these children and establishing other child-safety oversight initiatives. It launched two separate efforts, the Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) Joint Initiative and the UAC Safety Verification Initiative, designed to ensure unaccompanied minors meet their reporting obligations and allow investigators to verify they are not being exploited, abused, or trafficked.31 The investigations include unannounced home visits by DHS and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) officials, which the Trump administration describes as “welfare checks” but which critics say serve as a pretext to carry out arrests and instill fear.32 In a two-month period this year, at least 100 children were transferred to ORR custody after their family members were detained or deported following a welfare check.33

Similarly, ORR in 2025 tightened requirements for potential sponsors, including mandating fingerprint-based background checks for every adult in the home and demanding DNA tests. While described as efforts to ensure children’s safety, advocates claim that the additional measures intimidate would-be sponsors and discourage some from reuniting with children.34 Amid these changes, the length of time that children have spent in ORR custody sharply increased, from an average of 30 days in FY 2024 to 117 days in FY 2025 (see Figure 3).

Elsewhere, the administration has altered protections for migrant children in ways that increase family members’ vulnerability to deportation and otherwise muddied the distinction between protecting children and conducting enforcement. It granted ICE access to an ORR database containing information on hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied minors and their sponsors, which agents have used for enforcement purposes.35 Since January 2025, ORR has shared with ICE more than 460,000 tips about unaccompanied children or their sponsors, leading to more than 12,000 people being arrested by immigration authorities.36

In 2025, the administration also sought to end the Flores settlement, which it claims incentivizes unauthorized migrants to travel with their children; it was blocked from doing so by a federal court.37 The administration had similarly sought to end the Flores settlement in 2019 but was unsuccessful.

Additionally, it abruptly slashed funding for programs providing legal and other court-related services to unaccompanied migrant children, leaving many—including toddlers—to navigate the complicated immigration proceedings alone.38 HHS terminated most contracts in the unaccompanied children legal services program, resulting in steep staffing cuts and, estimates suggest, depriving roughly 25,000 children of legal representation in immigration court.39 In place of full representation, the federal government has limited its funding to cover basic “know-your-rights” presentations and initial legal screenings. Federal courts have issued injunctions ordering the administration to restore legal services funding, yet it has repeatedly resisted full compliance.40

More recently, the administration withheld $65 million that Congress separately appropriated to reimburse providers of legal representation for unaccompanied children, reportedly conditioning release of funds on legal aid groups sharing sensitive client information, which attorneys say violates attorney-client privilege.41 Last December, a federal court issued an injunction against the federal government’s withholding of these funds. However, ORR has still not reimbursed dozens of providers for work provided since December, prompting more than 70 members of Congress to demand the administration release the money.42 In July 2026, a federal judge in California threatened to hold the administration in contempt for continued non-payment.43 Separately, legal aid groups reported that DHS and HHS agents had sought to intimidate them by appearing unannounced at their offices seeking information and records about minor clients.44

Separations in the Shadows

Children have regularly been separated from an unauthorized immigrant parent under the second Trump term, albeit with far less visibility and scrutiny than during the first term. Expanded discretion to detain and remove parents, the dismantling of reunification and legal representation programs, and child‑protection initiatives involving enforcement agents have resulted in an easier process for the government to separate families from within U.S. communities. Even in many cases where no separation has occurred, the threat of it has prompted some immigrants to depart the country voluntarily.

Whether separated at the border, during an ICE operation, in immigration court, or following a welfare visit, the mental, physical, and developmental effects on children and their loved ones are the same. The fact this new form of family separation is less visible does not make it less impactful.

The authors thank Andres Ayala for his research assistance.

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