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Increased criminalization and deportations exacerbate family separation by creating the conditions used to justify state intervention and forcible removal.
Washington, DC is already the most policed city in the US, through resourcing policing more than any other major US city to the dozens of local and federal law enforcement agencies that residents encounter in our daily lives. These conditions and increased criminalization contribute to the stopping, arrests, sentencing, incarceration, and deportation of disproportionately Black and brown youth and adults. These circumstances contribute to forcible family separation. As a former foster youth I’ve seen how this exacerbates harms rather than pathways to safety for too many families.
Since August, additional presence of federal law enforcement and the National Guard have blanketed the city. Though Mayor Muriel Bowser claims that the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) is not cooperating with immigration enforcement, numerous local accounts show MPD and federal agencies working alongside each other on. Local legal service and mutual aid organizations have declared MPD’s collaboration with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) a violation of the Sanctuary Values Amendment Act (which DC Council Chair Phil Mendelson revealed Mayor Bowser secretly tried to repeal), calling the decision by DC Police Chief Pamela Smith a “betrayal of the city’s residents.”
The current conditions that DC residents are living under have rippling effects that will be felt long after the current occupation, including exacerbating family separation through deportation, incarceration of youth and adults, and forced removal under the guise of care.
Like the presence of federal agencies, Child Protective Services (CPS) are framed as protectors. But what DC families have felt is not protected, but increasingly unsafe conditions. What DC families have experienced is not security or sanctuary, but the very real consequences from a manufactured crisis that justifies the conditions for family separation in the state’s eye.
As DC residents, we must ask: What does true family safety look like for us?
Since the “surge” of the presence of federal agencies, community documentation and data project Courtwatch DC has reported a sharp increase in people detained who appear during arraignment court proceedings, which have gone as late as 1:00 am the following day. When a parent or guardian is arrested or incarcerated, even if for only one night, CPS often intervenes by displacing their children into the foster system, a pipeline that predominantly impacts youth of color. The increased criminalization of DC residents puts families at risk of separation due to parental incarceration.
ICE agencies are employing historic tactics of family separation as CPS continues a legacy of using immigration policies to separate families. When parents or guardians are detained and disappeared by ICE, children may be left with no caregivers and become vulnerable to CPS intervention. The justification of forcible removal of children while parents are indefinitely detained is a state-created problem, unnecessarily perpetuating family separation.
Residents have additionally reported that parents of immigrant students are afraid to send their children to school for fear of kidnapping by ICE. Making the choice to keep immigrant children away from school may be a double-edged sword, where the absence that is meant to protect them may be met by punitive attendance policies, putting both students and their parents at risk of intervention from CPS and law enforcement.
With or without youth programs, young people should be able to exist safely outside, in public, in their own city. Punitive tactics that directly target DC youth exacerbate the impacts of local law enforcement cooperation with federal agencies. Criminalizing existing as a young person in public, Mayor Bowser has continued to implement and threaten to implement youth curfew zones which target areas Black youth choose to spend time together in public.
When youth are criminalized and subsequently arrested, this may be considered a form of child endangerment or neglect—a justification for forcible removal of children from family care. While the city’s Black and brown youth are funneled into foster, jail, and prison pipelines, their Black and brown parents are blamed for the removal of their own children, justifying the expansion of state intervention and family separation.
One’s home, from the living room, neighborhood, to the city, should feel safe—like a sanctuary. When families are separated, missingness is a constant reminder that we live in unsafe conditions. As DC residents, we must ask: What does true family safety look like for us? Residents have been clear that they recognize that the federal “surge” is not about crime or safety, but about control, extraction, and repression of the most vulnerable. As DC residents, we must make this demand: If DC’s lawmakers care about the security and wellness of families, they must end the cooperation of MPD with federal agencies.
U.S. immigration authorities are once again separating children from their undocumented parents in "what appears to be a more targeted version of one of the most explosive policies" of President Donald Trump's first term, The New York Times revealed on Tuesday.
The Times "uncovered at least nine cases in which parents have been separated from their children after they refused to comply with deportation orders, according to internal government documents, case files, and interviews," wrote exposé author Hamed Aleaziz.
The practice is not as widespread as it was under the first Trump administration's "zero tolerance" immigration policy, when the ACLU estimated that approximately 5,500 children—including some with physical and mental disabilities—were torn from their families.
"But the new cases suggest that the administration has decided to use family separation as a tool, at least in some instances, to persuade families to leave and to create a powerful deterrent for those who might come to the United States illegally," Aleaziz wrote.
The cruelty is the point. None of these #children will ever recover www.nytimes.com/2025/08/05/u... #immigration #refugees
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— Regina Rae Weiss (@reginagroks.bsky.social) August 5, 2025 at 6:58 AM
Aleaziz highlighted the case of Evgeny and Evgeniia, who fled Russia with their 8-year-old son Maksim to seek political asylum in the United States.
Evgeniia said via an interpreter while in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody that her family traveled to the U.S.-Mexico border seeking an appointment through a Biden-era program that allowed people to enter the United States at a port of entry if they registered using the glitch-plagued CBP One app.
However, Trump canceled that program on his first day of office, and the couple decided to present at a port of entry and request asylum. They were immediately detained. Then they were given a choice: leave the United States and return to Russia as a family, or remain in ICE custody while they pursued their asylum claim, but Maksim would be taken from them and placed in a shelter.
Fearing for their future in Russia, Evegeny and Evgeniia chose separation.
"A few days, right?" Maksim begged as he was taken away. "A few days?"
Evgeny replied, "Yes, yes, it will be just a few days."
That was on May 15.
Authorities later determined that risks faced by Evgeny and Evgeniia in Russia precluded their deportation. However, they remain in ICE detention—and Maksim in a foster home—pending the outcome of their asylum case.
"It's terrible, that's what I can say," Evgeniia told Aleaziz. "I wouldn't wish it even to an enemy. It's a constant grief and longing."
Responding to Aleaziz's article, Sarah Pierce, director of policy at the centrist think tank Third Way, wrote on the social media site Bluesky that "this administration is picking right back up where it left off with family separation—giving parents a 'binary choice' between imminent danger or surrendering their children."
The New York Immigration Coalition asserted on X that "the family separation policies of the first Trump administration were disastrous, and their resurgence cannot be tolerated."
U.S. Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told the Times that ICE "does not separate families," despite copious evidence to the contrary—including testimonials in Aleaziz's article and elsewhere.
"The parents had the right and the ability to depart the country as a family and willfully choose to not comply," McLaughlin said of Evgeny and Evgeniia.
However, there have been many cases in which no such choice was offered. Last week, Adam Isacson of the Washington Office on Latin America and Diana Flórez of the Women's Refugee Commission said that "the extent of involuntary family separation is far greater than we expected," including "hundreds" of U.S. citizen children who have been separated from undocumented parents after their arrest.
In their recent analysis, Isacson and Flórez pointed to the new ICE's new Detained Parents Directive that they said "substantially weakens ICE's obligation to help parents facilitate reunification with their children before removal, which raises grave concerns that these involuntary separations are going to increase."
According to Isacson and Flórez:
In some cases, parents report to service providers that they are being removed without even getting a chance to communicate with their families at all. "They want to punish them for entering the United States, and they do it by targeting what they love the most—separating them from their families. It's not a coincidence; it's something that's been well-planned," said a social worker who works with deported families.
"It's a lie that they're giving them the choice to bring kids back with them," one social worker told the authors. "Every day, women arrive crying, but what can we do? I don't know how to help."
While several previous administrations used family separation for a variety of reasons including child endangerment, public safety, and national security, Claire Trickler-McNulty, a former ICE official who has served in Republican and Democratic administrations, told the Times, "I'm not aware of ICE previously using family separation as a consequence for failure to comply."
ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt said his organization is once again investigating the legality of Trump's policy.
"That the Trump administration has found a new form of family separation is hardly surprising given they have yet to acknowledge the horrific harm caused by the original policy and are now blatantly breaching provisions of the settlement designed to provide relief to those abused families, many of whom to this day still remain separated," Gelernt told the Times.
Despite the creation of a Family Reunification Task Force during the Biden administration, a December 2024 report published by Human Rights Watch, the Texas Civil Rights Project, and the Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic at Yale Law School found that as many as 1,360 separated children had still not been reunited with their families.
On his first day in office, Trump canceled the task force. Tom Homan, Trump's "border czar" who oversaw family separation during the president's first term, has followed through on his vow to resume family separation.
Homan also said the Trump administration would "need to construct family facilities"—a euphemism for what critics call concentration camps, which have been used to imprison and even kill off officially undesired populations throughout U.S. history.
Up to 1,360 children who were separated from their parents under the Trump administration have not been reunited six years later, according to the new report from a trio of human rights groups.
A report published Monday by a coalition of human rights groups estimates that as many as 1,360 children who were separated from their parents under the first Trump administration's "zero tolerance" policy have yet to be reunited, causing immense suffering for families ensnared in the punitive effort to deter border crossings.
The 135-page report was produced by Human Rights Watch (HRW), the Texas Civil Rights Project (TCRP), and the Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic at Yale Law School, and it comes as immigrant rights advocates brace for President-elect Donald Trump's return to power alongside officials who helped develop and implement the large-scale family separations.
"Forcible separation of children from their families inflicted harms that were severe and foreseeable," states the report, which examines public and internal government documents, materials from legal proceedings, and the findings of government investigations and features interviews with parents and children who were forcibly separated by the Trump administration.
"Once parents realized they would not be immediately reunited with their children, they were distraught," the report continues. "Some children sobbed uncontrollably. Many felt abandoned. Nearly all were bewildered, not least because immigration officials would not tell them where their parents were or gave responses that proved to be lies."
The groups estimate that the first Trump administration separated more than 4,600 children from their families during its four years in power, and nearly 30% of the children are unaccounted for and "may remain separated from their parents."
"A government should never target children to send a message to parents."
While family separations predated Trump's first term and have continued under President Joe Biden, experts argue the Trump administration's policy was uniquely expansive and cruel. The groups behind the new report said the Trump administration's family separation efforts "constituted enforced disappearance and may have constituted torture."
"We need to take away children," Jeff Sessions, then Trump's attorney general, reportedly said during a May 2018 call with five federal prosecutors, the report observes, citing handwritten notes from one of the prosecutors.
Michael Garcia Bochenek, senior children's rights counsel at HRW and an author of the new report, said in a statement Monday that "it's chilling to see, in document after document, the calculated cruelty that went into the forcible family separation policy."
"A government should never target children to send a message to parents," Bochenek added.
The separations traumatized both parents and children, according to the report.
"Migrant children who have been forcibly separated from their parents demonstrate greater emotional and behavioral difficulties than children who have never been separated," the report notes. "Parents repeatedly told Al Otro Lado, a legal services organization based in Tijuana, that forced separation from their children was 'the worst thing they had ever experienced' and reported 'continued disturbances in sleep, nightmares, loss of appetite, loss of interest, fear for the future, constant worry, hopelessness, and loss of the ability to concentrate.'"
"In May 2018," the report adds, "a man killed himself after [U.S. Customs and Border Protection] agents forcibly separated him from his children."
HRW, TCRP, and the Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic called on Congress and the Biden administration to "put in place comprehensive measures to remedy the wrongs these families suffered" and urged the U.S. Department of Homeland Security—soon to be led by far-right South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem—to "adopt standards that presumptively keep families together, separating them only when in a child's best interest."
Trump campaigned during the 2024 election on a pledge to launch the "largest domestic deportation operation in American history," and he said during an interview aired last week that "we don't have to separate families."
"We'll send the whole family, very humanely, back to the country where they came," Trump said, suggesting he'll also deport children who are U.S. citizens.
When pressed on whether he intends to revive the "zero tolerance" policy, Trump said, "We need deterrence."
"When somebody comes here illegally, they're going out. It's very simple," he added. "Now if they come here illegally but their family is here legally, then the family has a choice. The person that came in illegally can go out, or they can all go out together."
The ACLU, which has represented separated families in court, has pledged to take swift legal action if the incoming Trump administration brings back "zero tolerance."
"I am hopeful that the Trump administration recognized the outpouring from the American public and the worldwide revulsion to ripping little children away from their parents and will not try to separate families again," ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt told TIME magazine last month. "But if it does we will be back in court immediately."