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  "path": "/post/210572/donald-trump-families-separated-children",
  "publishedAt": "2026-05-18T16:46:15.000Z",
  "site": "https://newrepublic.com",
  "tags": [
    "Breaking News",
    "Politics",
    "Republican Party",
    "Donald Trump",
    "Immigration",
    "Deportation",
    "Mass Deportations",
    "Arrest",
    "Immigration Detention",
    "ICE",
    "Children",
    "Family",
    "Family Separation",
    "Birthright Citizenship",
    "Citizenship",
    "u.s. citizens",
    "Brookings Institution",
    "zero tolerance",
    "The New York Times",
    "ICE Detained Parent Directive",
    "official data",
    "has provided",
    "ProPublica study"
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  "textContent": "Tens of thousands of children have been separated from their families during the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, according to a new analysis by the Brookings Institution.\n\nThe report, released Monday, suggests that more than 145,000 children have been separated from their parents since Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025, an astronomical projection that far eclipses the estimated 5,500 separations that occurred during Trump’s wildly controversial “zero tolerance” policy in his first administration, reported The New York Times.\n\nThree-quarters of those children are likely U.S. citizens, a detail that could be contributing to the previously under-reported figures, since immigrant parents are not being asked about, nor disclosing, their American-born children, according to the report.\n\nFederal immigration agents are required to ask about the parental status of those taken into custody, as per the guidelines described in the ICE Detained Parent Directive. But anecdotal evidence obtained by the Brookings Institution suggests that they rarely do. Further still, other firsthand accounts reveal that some immigrants fear mentioning their children at all, for fear of adverse consequences for their families.\n\nThat’s caused a lack of reliable data regarding how many detainees or deportees actually have U.S. citizen children. It’s also caused a lack of reliable data regarding what happens to the children after their parents are taken into custody, according to the report.\n\nAround 60,000 people are currently in ICE detention, according to official data. The Trump administration has arrested some 400,000 immigrants over the last year and a half.\n\nThe Department of Homeland Security has provided statistics showing 18,277 detainees with U.S. citizen children in fiscal year 2025, but that number “is almost certainly a substantial undercount,” reads the Brookings report.\n\nTo determine their own numbers, the Brookings Institution used an alternative approach that inferred the number of children based on the known demographic data of adult detainees obtained from the Detention Data Project, matching the detainees’ country, age, sex, and marital status to likely undocumented immigrants that participated in a national survey.\n\n“This exercise implies that about 27 percent of detainees are the co-residential parent of a minor child, and 20 percent have citizen children in the home,” reads the report. “Using this method, coupled with an estimate of 400,000 detentions from interior arrests between January 20, 2025 and April 9, 2026, we estimate the total number of children affected by parental detention to be around 205,000 and the number of U.S. citizen children affected to be around 145,000.”\n\nThose numbers are expected to grow given the $45 billion that Congress allocated via Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill to expand the country’s detention capabilities.\n\nExactly where all those children have gone—or who is watching over them—is not as clear. Researchers estimated that just a small fraction of the separated children end up in the foster care system, or under similar arrangements.\n\n“We found that remarkably few end up in foster care—most children stay with friends and family who don’t have a legal obligation to care for these children,” Dr. Maria Cancian, a public policy professor at Georgetown University and one of the co-authors of the study, told the _Times_.\n\nThe vast majority of parent-child separations spurred by the federal government are rarely temporary—a ProPublica study that examined ICE arrests of mothers of U.S.-born children found that 60 percent had been removed from the country, while 17 percent remained in custody by the end of study itself.",
  "title": "Trump Has Separated Even More Families Than We Realized"
}