Children separated from their parents under Trump’s deportation campaign

New research estimates that between 150,000 and 200,000 children have been separated from one or both parents since the beginning of President Trump’s second term.

By The Immigrant Times

US civil rights organisations: A society that emphasises the importance of family values should not condone the separation of families.

July 2026: Over 146,000 American children are estimated to have had one or both parents detained since President Trump's mass deportation campaign began in January 2025, including around 22,000 left with no parent at all in the household. In addition to children with US citizenship, it is thought that another 50,000 children without citizenship are affected. The Brookings Institution, which published its research in May 2026, estimates the scale of these separations at nearly twenty times that of the ‘zero tolerance’ border policy during the first Trump administration, which separated about 5,500 children from their parents in 2018.

The methodology behind these troubling numbers

Brookings, the authors of the research, describe its findings as estimates because there are no official figures. The US government does not systematically track how many children have a parent in immigration detention, nor what happens to those children afterwards.

Brookings researchers, led by economist Tara Watson, built their figures by matching demographic data on the roughly 400,000 people detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) since January 2025 against Census Bureau data on the likely undocumented population, using the American Community Survey to estimate how many detainees have children living with them in the United States.

The method is necessarily approximate, and Brookings admits the true figure could be somewhat higher or lower. However, the researchers contend it is more reliable than the alternative: official Department of Homeland Security (DHS) data, which the report states substantially undercounts the real number because of the way the government records detentions.

The extent of the enforcement effort is undisputed. An estimated 13 million adults in the United States are undocumented or have only a marginal legal status that offers limited protection. Brookings estimates that their households include over 4.6 million US citizen children living with a parent at risk of deportation, including about 2.5 million who could, in a worst-case scenario, see all parents in their household detained.

A brutal upheaval of young lives

Of the children Brookings estimates have already been affected, just over a third (36.5%) are under six years old, a similar proportion (36.1%) are aged six to twelve, and the remainder (27.4%) are teenagers. More than half have a detained parent from Mexico (53.7%), followed by Guatemala (15%) and Honduras (10.7%).

The report's most alarming finding concerns what happens next. Of the approximately 22,000 children left without a parent in the household, Brookings estimates that only about five per cent, roughly 1,000 children, have received any support from the child welfare system. The rest are left with relatives, friends, or, in an unknown number of cases, travel abroad with a deported parent to a country they may never have lived in. No government agency tracks how often this occurs.

This lack of oversight is intentional rather than a failure of oversight. ICE does not see it as part of its responsibility to protect a detainee's children, referring cases to child protection services only when children are present at the time of arrest, and no alternative carer is immediately available. Local child welfare agencies, for their part, generally do not consider immigration status at all and often lack systematic means of identifying children in their jurisdiction who have a detained or deported parent.

Two studies: The same conclusion

Brookings is not the only organisation to have assessed how children are affected by parents’ detention or deportation. ProPublica, an independent group of investigative journalists, obtained detention records through a public records lawsuit brought by the University of Washington and employed a more conservative, records-based approach rather than demographic estimates.

During the first seven months of the current Trump administration, it identified at least 11,000 American children with a parent in detention, and estimated that mothers of US citizen children were being deported at roughly four times the daily rate recorded under the Biden administration (2021 to 2025).

The two figures do not conflict but instead measure different aspects using separate methods: Brookings estimates the overall impact over a longer period through population-level modelling, while ProPublica counts a shorter, earlier timeframe using confirmed case records. Together, they support the same underlying trend from two viewpoints, one a broader modelled estimate, the other a narrower confirmed baseline, and both indicate a level of family separation that official reports alone would not reveal.

ICE removes the word ‘humane’ from its language

The language ICE uses internally has evolved alongside the policy. Guidance formerly known as the ‘Parental Interests Directive’, which instructed officers to treat immigrant parents in a ‘humane’ manner, was renamed the ‘Detained Parents Directive’ and had the word ‘humane’ removed from its preamble.

Asked about the Brookings findings, DHS reiterated its usual stance: that ICE "does not separate families," and that parents can choose between removal with their children or having those children placed with a person of their choosing.

The department states this aligns with the practices of previous administrations. However, Brookings' findings on child welfare access indicate that, regardless of the choice parents are offered at the moment of arrest, few of the children left behind later receive any institutional support.

American children wake up in a foreign country

For a small but unknown number of children, separation leads to a different kind of displacement. Some children, mostly US citizens, leave the country with a deported parent, arriving in a country where they may never have known the language, schools, or extended family. 

Brookings notes that reunification with a detained parent sometimes occurs, but that, under current enforcement practices, detention more often results in removal than in release.

Because the government does not publish data on how many citizen children leave the United States in this way, this aspect of the policy is effectively invisible in official statistics, even as it creates a distinct category of migration in its own right: American children raised, in effect, as returnees to countries that are not their own.

Separation hidden from public view

Comparisons with the 2018 "zero tolerance" policy are unavoidable, but the two episodes differ in more than scale. The 2018 separations occurred at the southern border, were visible in real time, and were reversed within weeks under sustained public pressure.

The current wave is dispersed across the interior of the country, accumulates gradually rather than as a single policy event, and is not systematically recorded by the government responsible for it. Researchers argue this dispersal is precisely what has kept the numbers from earlier public attention, despite their far greater scale.

Outlook: The numbers are likely to get worse

Tara Watson, the lead author of the Brookings report, said she does not expect enforcement patterns to change materially during the remainder of the Trump administration. With the One Big Beautiful Bill Act allocating $54 billion toward expanded detention capacity, and around 60,000 people already held in ICE facilities at the time of the report's publication, the population of children affected is likely to grow rather than shrink.

Brookings' conclusion is clear: policymakers must recognise that hundreds of thousands of children are being left without one or both parents as a predictable result of current enforcement policy, regardless of whether that outcome is officially recognised.

Sources: This article draws on the Brookings Institution report "The administration has detained 400,000 immigrants: What do we know about their children?"; ProPublica's independent analysis "Over 100,000 American Kids Had Parents Detained in Immigration Sweeps, Report Estimates"; DHS statements as covered by the Associated Press, The Hill, and Here & Now (WBUR).

Further reading from The Immigrant Times: Under Trump: Foreign doctors in the US || American mayors confront Trump over immigration || Immigrant detention reaches record levels in Trump’s second term || Undocumented immigrants make America much richer, not poorer ||

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