Tens of thousands of children in the United States have been cut off from parents in the Trump administration’s aggressive detention and deportation campaign, according to a report by the Brookings Institution.
From January 2025 to April 2026, an estimated 175,000 children have had a parent detained by ICE, with up to 145,000 of those children being U.S.-born, Brookings researchers said in the report released last month.
“In our baseline scenario, we estimate around 22,000 citizen children are left without any parent in the home due to detention. We assume only 5%, or around 1,000, of these children have received services from the child welfare system,” the report states.
To infer the number of affected children, the study matched undocumented immigrants counted by the U.S. Census Bureau with demographic characteristics from the Detention Data Project, a public database of government immigration data. The approach was necessary, the report explains, because the Department of Homeland Security released “a substantial undercount” of detained parents (18,277) for fiscal year 2025, and because Immigration and Customs Enforcement is not consistently following requirements to ask detainees about their children.
“We also use this method to assess whether individuals are in one- or two-parent families, the likely status of the detainee’s co-parent, and the average number of children per parent in each demographic group.”
About 60,000 people were in ICE detention during the 15-month period covered by the report — a figure expected to increase because $45 billion has been allocated to expanding detention facilities by the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” Brookings added.
Immigration advocacy groups condemned the administration for carrying out a detention program even more cruel than President Donald Trump implemented in his first term.
“For comparison, the Trump administration’s 2018 ‘zero tolerance’ policy resulted in approximately 5,500 children being separated from their families immediately after crossing the southern border. Today, we are talking about nearly 20 times that number,” Dallas-based FaithWorks said in its overview of the Brookings report.
Still, hundreds of social justice organizations nationwide are advocating for the children and families devastated by Trump’s federal immigration policies.
The FaithWorks analysis bluntly states: “At this point, there should be little doubt about this administration’s position regarding immigrants. They are not welcome — whether they possess legal status or not. Adults, children, old and young, male and female, it makes no difference. Immigration policy appears increasingly focused on closing every legal pathway that would allow immigrants to remain in the country, detaining them, incarcerating them for an uncertain period of time, and deporting them regardless of the family separations that result.”
The Brookings study also focuses on the emotional damage inflicted on children in the administration’s immigration enforcement programs, noting, “Even brief stays in detention are likely traumatic for children of detainees.”
Brookings references a ProPublica report that found more than 60% of detained mothers have been deported and 17% remain in custody, while anecdotal evidence indicates detainees are not speaking up for their children out of concern for their safety.
“ICE does not directly involve itself in safeguarding the well-being of a detainee’s children.”
“The bottom line is that there is no systematic approach to protecting the children of those detained by ICE. ICE does not directly involve itself in safeguarding the well-being of a detainee’s children and only refers to child protection if children are present at an arrest and no alternative care is immediately available.”
For their part, child protection agencies generally avoid engaging with immigrant families except in cases of maltreatment, and many lack the capability to identify and track the children of detainees based solely on immigration enforcement actions, according to the report.
Federal immigration agents walk 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos to a vehicle in front of his Minneapolis home on Tuesday. (Photo: Columbia Heights Public Schools)
“We know surprisingly little about what happens to children of detainees. Children who are themselves unauthorized may face detention or deportation, but most children of detainees are U.S. citizens. In some cases, the child may travel to the parent’s origin country with a deported parent, but the government does not publish systematic data on its transportation of U.S. citizen children to foreign countries, and we do not know how commonly this happens.”
Emotional and spiritual chaos awaits children when a parent is detained or deported, according to another new study by the National Association of Evangelicals and World Relief.
“This report is not saying that all deportations are unjust or unwarranted. However, when in the course of enforcing immigration or border security policies, husbands are separated from wives and wives from husbands, or children from their mother, father or both parents, not only is the family unit violated, but the remaining U.S. citizen members often end up in orphan- or widow-like situations — at least temporarily and sometimes permanently — creating the very objects of mercy to which Scripture repeatedly calls the church to minister.”
NAE and World Relief report an estimated 910,000 American citizen children will be separated from their parents by 2029. They also warn that 272,000 U.S. citizen spouses will be cut off from partners and more than 1.3 million U.S. citizens could be separated from families by the end of the current administration.
Myal Greene
“When our laws or policies separate families, whether by design or by neglect, we cannot remain silent,” World Relief President Myal Greene said. “As Christians, we have a dual responsibility: to honor the law and to petition for the institution of better laws. Whom God has placed in families, let no one tear apart.”
The report urges churches to meet the spiritual and human needs of the victims of immigration enforcement and to contact legislators and the administration directly. “At times of great crisis, the church is often the first to respond. In this crisis of family separation, the church is also the most affected.”
Walter Kim
NAE President Walter Kim said the integrity of the family is a sacred biblical value: “Jesus reaffirms this when he teaches that what God has joined together, no one should separate. When public policies result in the separation of spouses and children, they undermine something sacred and call for careful moral reflection.”
According to a report in The Hill, all this bears the marks of Stephen Miller, chief architect of Trump’s deportation agenda.
“The design of this system — making family separation functionally inevitable while making reunification nearly impossible — bears Miller’s unmistakable fingerprints. Miller, the infamous architect of the 2018 family separation policy that removed some 5,500 children from their parents, was candid then about his reasoning when he said the separations would ‘prove to be a migration deterrent.’”
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