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family separation
New York Times Reveals 'More Targeted Version' of Trump Family Separation Policy
"The family separation policies of the first Trump administration were disastrous, and their resurgence cannot be tolerated," said one critic.
Aug 05, 2025
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.
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'Calculated Cruelty': Report Details Lasting Harms of Trump Family Separation Policy
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.
Dec 16, 2024
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."
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Trump Spokesperson Affirms Day 1 Plans for Nation's 'Largest Mass Deportation Operation'
"As always, we will go to court to challenge illegal policies, but it is equally essential that the public push back, as it did with family separation," one rights advocate said.
Nov 07, 2024
President-elect Donald Trump is set to begin his promised mass deportation of undocumented immigrants as soon as he takes office on January 20, 2025, even as rights groups are mobilizing to stop him.
Trump national press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Fox News Wednesday morning that "the American people delivered a resounding victory for President Trump."
"It gives him a mandate to govern as he campaigned, to deliver on the promises that he made, which include, on Day 1, launching the largest mass deportation operation of illegal immigrants that Kamala Harris has allowed into this country," Leavitt said.
"We have a simple message for President-elect Trump or his deputies if they decide to make good on their despicable plans: We will see you in court."
Trump has pledged to conduct the largest deportation in U.S. history, with running mate and now Vice President-elect JD Vance promising 1 million deportations each year. The plan would likely rely on mobilizing federal agencies, the military, diplomats, and Republican-led states while using federal funds to pressure uncooperative states and cities into complying.
The stocks of private prison companies like GEOGroup and Core Civic rose significantly after Trump's win, and private contractors had already been discussing ahead of the election how to build enough detention space to accommodate Trump's plans.
A study released by the American Immigration Council in October found that a massive, one-time deportation program of the estimated 13.3 million migrants in the country without legal status would cost the government at least $315 billion while a 1-million-a-year approach would cost $88 billion a year for a total of $967.9 billion. It would also shrink the nation's gross domestic product by between 4.2 and 6.8%, not to mention the massive human cost to immigrant families, as around 5.1 million children who are U.S. citizens live with an undocumented family member.
The council also warned that such a program would likely threaten the well-being of all immigrants and increase vigilantism and hate crimes.
"As bad as the first Trump administration was for immigrants, we anticipate it will be much worse this time and are particularly concerned about the use of the military to round up immigrants," Lee Gelernt, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union who fought the first Trump administration on family separation and other policies, told The Washington Post. "As always, we will go to court to challenge illegal policies, but it is equally essential that the public push back, as it did with family separation."
Exit polls show that 56% of U.S. voters favor offering immigrants already in the U.S. a pathway to citizenship, while Data for Progress found that survey respondents did not favor deportation for 7 out of 9 categories of people who might be caught up in a mass deportation scheme.
The ACLU has urged cities and states to take steps to protect their undocumented residents ahead of January 20.
"They should prepare for mass deportations because those will wreak havoc on the communities," Noreen Shah, director of government affairs at the ACLU's equality division, told Newsweek. "It will mean kids who go to school and their parents are gone and not there to pick them up at the end of the day."
In particular, legal groups are gearing up for Trump to potentially evoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which authorizes the country to deport noncitizens of a hostile nation. It has only been used three times, most recently to detain Japanese Americans during World War II.
"Many fear that a second Trump administration would seek to use this law to justify indefinite detention and remove people from the country swiftly and without judicial review," Shah told Reuters.
The Brennan Center for Justice has called on Congress to repeal the act.
"This law was shameful and dangerous back when it was created 200 years ago," the center's Marcelo Agudo wrote in October. "It's even more so today. It must be repealed or overturned."
Several other organizations pledged to continue defending immigrants and refugees after Trump declared victory.
"We have a simple message for President-elect Trump or his deputies if they decide to make good on their despicable plans: We will see you in court," Karen Tumlin, founder and director of Justice Action Center, said in a statement. "And, we have a message of love to immigrant communities, we see you, we are you, and we will stand with you."
Calling Trump's win "one of the most dangerous moments in our country's history, National Immigration Law Center president Kica Matos said the organization had led a "movement-wide effort to plan for this moment."
"Trump and his allies told us what he plans to do: mass deportations, ending birthright citizenship, ending the right to public education for immigrant children, internment camps, and using the military to hunt down immigrants. We should take him at his word," Matos said.
She continued: "One thing is certain: we cannot and will not retreat. For more than 40 years, NILC has been steadfast in our fight to defend the rights of low-income immigrants and their loved ones. We successfully fought Donald Trump before, and we will do it again."
The American Immigrant Lawyers Association (AILA) pledged to continue working for its clients.
"If implemented, the anti-immigrant policies avowed by candidate Trump will inflict lasting damage to the American economy, communities, and character," AILA Executive Director Benjamin Johnson said in a statement. "AILA and its more than 16,000 members will continue to defend the Constitution and stand against laws and policies that violate due process, undermine civil rights, or denigrate the contributions of immigrants. Our future prosperity depends on not giving up. We must stand together and work towards a brighter future."
Refugees International also promised to continue with its "shared commitment to rights and refuge for people forced from their homes."
"Amid historic levels of global displacement, the incoming Trump administration plans to enact an anti-refugee, anti-asylum agenda that will endanger millions of people—both those threatened by crises overseas and those who have been welcomed as neighbors into communities across the United States," the group's president, Jeremy Konyndyk, said in a message to supporters. "Yet we hold on to hope, even as we are clear-eyed about the daunting struggles ahead."
Knowndyk added: "As we do under any presidential administration, we will work tirelessly with all of you to defend and advance the rights, protection, and well-being of all people forced to flee their homes."
United We Dream, the largest U.S. organization led by immigrant youth, committed to building the "largest pro-immigrant movement this country has ever seen."
"Immigrant young people of United We Dream declare ourselves hopeful and clear eyed about the fight ahead," said the group's executive director Greisa Martínez Rosas. "With Trump pledging to carry out the largest deportation effort in our country's history—ctivating the military to raid our communities, schools, hospitals, and more in order to round up our people into concentration camps—young, Black, brown, and queer leaders who have been at the vanguard of our movement and of creating meaningful change are ready move mountains to protect our communities."
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