More than 145,000 U.S. citizen children have had one or both parents detained in immigration sweeps
The Trump administration has made detention and deportation the centerpieces of its immigration policy. Around 60,000 people are being held in detention currently, and around 400,000 people have been booked into Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention from an interior arrest since the administration began. Detention capacity is likely to expand, with $45 billion allocated to expanding detention facilities in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Though it is mostly adults who are detained and deported, many children are impacted by separation from their parents. However, there are no reliable data on how many detainees or deportees have children in the U.S., nor on what happens to them once their parent is taken into custody. Here we focus on detainees, about whom we have better information than deportees. Even a short separation from a parent is likely traumatic for a child, but a majority of detentions are not short-lived separations. A ProPublica study following ICE arrests of mothers of U.S. citizen children over the first seven months of the administration found that 60% had been removed and 17% remained in custody at the study’s conclusion.
To estimate the number of children affected by parental detention, we rely on demographic characteristics of detainees matched with likely unauthorized immigrants in the American Community Survey. Our analysis (detailed below) suggests that more than 145,000 U.S. citizen children have likely experienced a parent booked into detention since the administration began, with more than 22,000 of those experiencing detention of all their co-resident parents. [Continue reading…]
President Trump talks sympathetically about the country’s 500,000 Dreamers — but his administration is putting them in the crosshairs for deportation.
Why it matters: The recipients of the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program are finding it no longer reliably protects them from deportation or disruptions to their ability to work legally.
- Trump officials are slowing renewals, narrowing deportation protections and ramping up enforcement against some DACA recipients.
- And in Texas, the Fifth Circuit Court has delivered the program’s biggest challenge yet, ruling that DACA is illegal. Ongoing litigation is expected to stop Texas-based Dreamers from getting work authorization in the future.